The end of airfield Oberschleissheim in 1945

[Peter Spoden]

Dear friends,

maybe it is of interest how this old airfield ended 1945. To-day Oberschleissheim, an old Royal Bavarian airfield of 1912 rich with tradition, is a jewel of Aviation with the old stone-buildings and old aircraft of the "Deutsche Museum Muenchen", and a beautiful castle and small town nearby.

Peter Hinchlife the author of excellent Nachtjagd-books like "The Other Battle", Schnaufer "Ace of Diamonds" and Lent "The Lent-Papers" translated from my booklet which I wrote for my grandchildren:

"On 27 April 1945 I was summoned as a young Gruppen-Kommandeur to the Kommodore of the Geschwader. ‘Spoden, we have no petrol left. Blow up your aircraft and defend Oberschleissheim on the ground!’ ‘Jawohl, Herr Major!’ That was a nice surprise for me!
I called my men together. There were about two hundred of them, mostly much older than me – young men went to the Eastern Front – and I told them quite unequivocally that if the Americans attacked they were not to open fire recklessly but to wait for me to give the command. They had just as little experience of infantry fighting as I had as a night fighter. Although I was only just twenty-three years of age there was no indiscipline or desertion. Somehow they trusted me.
On 29 April l945, therefore, we took up our positions in trenches that we had swiftly dug on the approaches to Schleissheim, set up on the parapet the two-centimetre cannon from the Ju 88s that we had blown up, together with our few rifles, and waited for the ‘Amis’ to come. In the woods behind our positions Dr. Buschmann, the Medical Officer, had erected field-dressing tents for the injured and the wounded. If necessary he would also be able to carry out emergency operations there.
In the early morning through my binoculars I saw on the streets to the right and left hundreds of tanks rolling past in the direction of Munich. In the entire war we night fighters had never seen so many tanks. Above us were flying yellow American ‘Piper’ aircraft, spotters for the artillery, but so far they had not discovered us. Our camouflage was good - as fliers that was something we were familiar with..
At ten o’clock, just after the Americans’ breakfast break, seven field-grey buses drew up about two thousand metres away from us. Out of them came approximately five hundred US infantrymen, who began to advance on the Oberschleissheim airfield on a broad front. If I had I given the order to open fire at that point a large number of American soldiers would certainly have been killed by our two-centimetre cannons and our rifles. But I knew beyond any doubt that the enemy artillery and the American tanks would then have obliterated us in a frightful fashion.
I called out to my men, ‘Have any of you got a white cloth?’ Never before had I seen so many white cloths at one time. The men had cut up parachutes and made scarves out of them. I didn’t feel very happy as I clambered out of the trench and waved to the advancing Americans. Now I could be shot from in front or behind. But right away the boys from the USA waved back with their helmets. One of them came to me and held his machine pistol to my cheek. ‘You SS?’ – ‘No, no! Ich bin Luftwaffe!’ ‘Luftwaffe kaput,’ he said scornfully, and he went on his way. In the next few days we went via PoW camps at Nördlingen and Heilbronn to the infamous Rhine Meadows, where many of us were destined to die of hunger and disease. But that is another story.
When we met during my time as a prisoner of war, and after the war too, many old men from my former Gruppe, mostly from Swabia and the Allgäu, came up to me and shook my hand. ‘Herr Oberleutant, you did the right thing!’ Their thanks mean more to me than all the medals I was awarded in that crazy war."