He 111 crew murdered

[Chris Goss]

Bernard asked a question on this subject which then went off on a tangent and was quite rightly binned by John Beaman. However, of interest, whilst delving at the AHB a number of years ago, I came a cross a captured file concerning the murdering of a KG 54 crew by French civilians.Although the content was quite gruseome, there was a photo of the crash-landed aircraft. The details of this are 18 May 40, He 111 P coded B3+JT of 9/KG 54. Beleived shot down by 56 Sqn and crash-landed near Vimy on the Lens-Arras road. Uffz Otto Ellinghaus, Gefr Ernst Reczniczek, Ogefr Helmut Jentzmik, Gefr Josef Bradack

[Brian Bines]

Some time ago the ' After The Battle ' magazine featured an article 'Show Trial At Luchy ' concerning the shooting of Uffz. Ross pilot of a Bf 110 of 9/ZG 26 shot down on 20-5-40. The article covering the incident and subsequent investigation dy the Germans.

[Laurent Rizzotti]

Both incidents can't be related to the one seen by Hallahan, that should have taken place on 12 or 13 May between Maastricht and Northern France....

Maybe those of us with extensive loss databases (sadly, not me) can list the German bombers lost with all crew killed in this area, and then we may eliminate well-known cases to try to find a crashplace....

[Jim P.]

Ah Laurent, there is the rub - the actual loss reports for that timeframe, while they list numbers of casualties, hardly ever give any names beyond officers and in most cases do not list a specific location or cause of the loss. There are several publications out there that have made a great strides in filling in the holes, 'Twelve Days in May' and Gillet's 3-part series on French fighter actions in which I have just recently picked up, along with the works of Prien, Taghon and others, but there's still lots of work to be done. I know of at least 2 projects in the works to fill out this time period though I'm not sure that they've been publically announced as of yet.

[Brian Bines]

If the alleged event happened on 12th. May , from a list of He 111 losses kindly supplies by another researcher, a crew from I(F)/122 were reported Killed/missing. Hopefully someone may have more information that could clarify details on the loss of this crew.

[Peter Cornwell]

Brian,

The crew you requested was as follows: (Ff) Uffz Otto KARNAPP, (Beo) Hptmn Edgar CAESAR, (Bf) Uffz Hans-Joachim MUELLER, and (Bordwart) Uffz Georg ABLEITHER. All reported killed, the only problem being it was on a sortie over Narvik - Tromso.

Happy hunting guys.