Erich Hartmann - several questions

[Nick Beale]

My message to Diego would be to approach the whole business calmly, spend more time with primary sources and question every account that depends on a person's memory. Like other researchers I have heard stories from veterans that are impossible to reconcile exactly with the historical record — times and places become confused, loss or success is exaggerated and so on. Even so such memories can often be related to an actual event, even when the description is not accurate. A typical example would be something like "we lost a lot of people in landing accidents", when the record tells of one such accident. But if the man telling the story lost a good friend, that accident grows in significance in his memory.