Hello Brian,
I've written the following on this incident in the Nachtjagd Combat Archive:
An (anonymous) staff officer of I./NJG1 reflects on the earliest, rather disappointing, Nachtjagd effort: “For their initial nighttime deployments, the crews of I./ZG1 were assigned to fly patrols in zones in the area lying between Mönchengladbach and Goch. It soon became evident that only on rare occasions was the weather good enough to allow the searchlights to penetrate the cloud cover with enough intensity to illuminate the target aircraft. The reasons for this lay in the particular conditions encountered in this region with its proximity to large industrial areas. With the wind from the east, smoke and smog tended to drift across the region in a thin shroud at around 200 metres altitude and when the wind direction was from the west conditions were mostly cloudy. Slightly more favourable conditions were usually encountered around Aachen, a city that had taken the lead in establishing batteries of rotating and directional searchlights. In both of these regions then I./ZG1 acquired their first important experiences in night fighting with the Bf110. The first cruel setback inflicted on the Gruppe was the loss of Feldwebel Thier who was shot down near Paderborn by a Bf110 flying a lone night fighting sortie. It appeared that Thier had suffered radio failure and as there was zero ground visibility at Rheine, he had elected correctly to divert to Paderborn. With his navigation lights illuminated he found himself easy prey for a pilot doing a little “moonlighting” in the air. An over-ambitious single-engine (sic; the Bf110 was twin-engined, author’s note) pilot from the field at Paderborn was also airborne on his own initiative on a “night-fighting” sortie; as ever in such cases his first and only victim proved to be the brave crew of one of our own aircraft in difficulty. (The official Verlustmeldung or ‘loss report’ states: ‘22 June 1940, 2./ZG1, Bf110, 1 km east of Paderborn airfield, crash due to gunfire of own fighter, damage 100%, pilot Fw. Thier, Martin and Bordfunker Fw Brutsche, Adolf, both killed’, author’s note).
https://www.wingleader.co.uk/series/...combat-archive
Cheers, Theo