Likely Prevalence of LW shooting Parachutist

[kaki3152]

While re-reading "The Enemy is Listening", the history of the Y service by Aileen Clayton, I came across the passage: "We had even heard on the intercepted R/T reference to British airmen being shot at as they hung helplessly from their parachutes, and this had hardened our hearts."

While all LW history I've read tend to disclaim that LW fighter pilots were wont to machine gun parachutists, it appears that the Y service knew of specific examples. I have read a report by a Spitfire pilot of 152 Sq who saw a fellow squadron mate who parachuted gunned down by a couple of Bf-109s. Currently,there is an article in the Daily Mail about historians Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer who have used the interrogations of 13,000 German military prisoners as the basis of "Soldiers: Diaries Of Fighting, Killing and Dying – or Soldaten in German."

The exchanges were covertly recorded by British intelligence at a Trent Park detention centre north of London in an attempt to find out whether they held strategic information useful to the Allies.Some of these POW were LW fighter pilots including one such who boasted: ‘In our squadron I was known as the “professional sadist”. I knocked off everything: buses, a civilian train in Folkestone. I gunned down every cyclist.’

From this, it stands to reason that British Intelligence knew of these German proclivities. Of course, this was common in the Far East where both sides did this without a second thought. One example was the crew of a shot down B-25 in Burma where 5 parachutist were machine gunned in air with one survivor. USAF fighter pilots did the same for Japanese fighter pilots.. Thougts?