Erich Hartmann: verifiable claims

[Andrew Arthy]

Bronc,

I've seen mention of Lipfert's 27 'unconfirmed' victories. His tally of 203 official victory claims is complete up to 16 April 1945, so it is certainly not a case of him being denied credit for late-war claims, which I think is what you are suggesting. All the official victory claims he made that were accepted by his Staffelkapitän and Kommandeur and submitted for confirmation by higher authorities are part of his tally of 203 – there are no missing official claims. I assume the 27 ‘unconfirmed’ were made by him earlier in the war and were either a) not approved by his Staffelkapitän or Kommandeur (e.g. due to lack of witnesses), and thus never passed up the chain, or b) they were passed up the chain and then rejected by the OKL.

No doubt Hartmann had some similar unconfirmed claims. To quote two examples for which I have evidence easily to hand, both Wolfrum (two on 8 April 1944, one on 10 April 1944) and Broch (23 August 1944) claimed victories without witnesses, and these were unconfirmed victories. These victories without witnesses were still official claims and were submitted to higher headquarters, appearing in situation reports as “o.Z.” (ohne Zeuge), but the pilots did not add them to their individual tallies. I assume this is the case for at least some of Lipfert’s 27 unconfirmed.

My understanding of the situation is that the victory tallies floating around the Internet and elsewhere associated with various high-scoring Luftwaffe pilots were those claims they officially submitted up to 8 May 1945, which were approved at Staffel and Gruppe level, and were then passed on to the OKL for final confirmation. Victory claims officially submitted from November 1944 onwards did not receive final confirmation from the OKL because the process took several months (and sometimes years), and of course the war ended. The vast majority of victory claims submitted to the OKL were confirmed, so the tally of initial claims usually matched with the claims officially confirmed later by the OKL. Basically, if a German pilot claimed a victory and it was accepted by his Staffelkapitän and Gruppenkommandeur and passed up the chain, it would later be confirmed by the OKL.

Thus I have no problem if the officially submitted post-November 1944 Luftwaffe claims are accepted as part of a pilot’s tally. If the German administration had kept functioning, basically all of the post-November 1944 claims would have been confirmed in due course. Instead, they remain as claims made in good faith by pilots and approved at Staffel and Gruppe level (and accepted at Fliegerkorps/Luftflotte level). So they are certainly official claims, just not confirmed at the very highest level.

So in summary, Hartmann is credited with 352 because that is how many victories he submitted official claims for. This is the same criteria used for all the other well-known tallies. Hartmann has not been attributed with any 'unofficial' victories - his tally of 352 is based on the same criteria as Lipfert's tally of 203, Wolfrum’s of 137, etc.

While I'm at it, I should point out that the Germans did have categories for enemy aircraft probably destroyed and damaged, and also shared victories (although I’ve only ever seen a couple of these), but these categories were used much less by the Germans than they were by the Western Allies.

Hope the above makes sense.

Cheers,
Andrew A.

[Alfred.MONZAT]

Perfectly said Andrew Arthy. I found dangerous to disregard claims because they did not proceed to all the confirmation steps. That was previously done to discredit the victories claimed by the Armée de l'Air during the Westfeldzug as most did not get time to be "confirmed" by the High Command before the surrender.

I also always wondered from where (Flugbuch ? Post-war interview ?) those "unconfirmed" claims mentioned in the bios of a dozen of Experten. They do not appears (as V.N.E. - A.S.M. or something else) in their tally or in Tony Wood transcription of the microfilms (as far as I know).

I also concur that the accurency of Hartmann should be put in context, either by comparing to the accurency of other Experten flying in similar conditions or to the other members of his unit.

[Johannes]

Hi Guys

Scrutinising the 200 club is revealing, only about half are found to be honest. Philipp seems to have a little less than 200 due to some being unconfirmed, Erhler's total is uncertain as JG 5's daily claims on the micro films finish in September 1944.

I would guess that the reason why the top official claimers are such, is that they were the least honest!

Günther Josten, and Peter Düttmann documented their claims rather well, so the question about confirmation, or lack-off due to the war ending is covered. Each have unconfirmed in their lists, these must be assumptions that some wouldn't be, and others would be confirmed. I suspect that some claims were never officially made due to technicalities i.e no witness, but should included in there totals met the regulations..........but even these were on occasion never confirmed. I do believe that Josten at least was honest, not sure about Düttmann.

If Hartmann is a fraud, then so were his wingmen, however doesn't mean to say that all for that Staffel were.......I believe Krupinski was honest, like Hartmann he flew for 7./JG 52.

Hartmann was late in receiving his decorations i.e 148 for Ritterkreuz, 202 for Eichenlaub e.t.c, perhaps some authority smelt a rat!

Regards

Johannes

[Juha]

We should not forget other air forces, the writer(s) of the Wiki article on Pattle has/have tried to compare his claims to Axis losses, which is made easier by books like Shores, Cull, Malizia Air War for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete: 1940–41, Shores, Massimello and Guest A History of the Mediterranean Air War, Håkan’s web site and Håkan’s and Ludovico’s books.

On the FiAF aces, I’d say that it seems that the claim accuracy of the “official” top aces varied greatly (from circa 75% downwards) and IIRC only some minor aces had claimed with 100% or nearly 100% accuracy. Another note is that of the FiAF aces the regular NCOs seems to be as a group the most accurate claimers (of course there were exceptions).


Juha

[Nick Hector]

Originally Posted by Jim Oxley

Another aspect that should be considered is that, if Hartman's score is placed under such scrutiny, then so to should all the other Luftwaffe aces in the 200+ bracket.

Is the goal to re-write the history books? Or to see who in fact was the highest scoring Luftwaffe ace? Surely not just a Hartman witch hunt.

It would be doing everyone a disservice if Barkhorn, Rall, Kittel, Nowotny, Batz, Rudorffer, Bar, Graf and other's claims were not also given the same intense analysis and match-up to Soviet losses.

Christer Bergstroem gave us a pretty good start with Graf in his book "A Pair of Aces" which deals with that pilot along with Alfred Grislawski

[HGabor]

Guys, the devil is always in the details. "His (Hartmann's) tally of 352 is based on the same criteria as Lipfert's tally of 203, Wolfrum’s of 137, etc." - great, but here, it is completely irrelevant. The title of this thread is "Erich Hartmann: verifiable claims". Not the methods, not the excuses, not the administration, not the corrupt offices, not ... whatever, - but the VERIFIABLE CLAIMS. We all know how many credits Hartmann and others got. It is not the question here. We just want to know the TRUTH, - maybe first time in history. Let’s leave the numbers behind and focus on the claims and the confirmed losses and see where we go... Because it is so disturbing to see that we talk about claims, methods, all kinds of excuses, while the huge difference between certain pilots’ reliability is hardly visible anywhere. Nobody said that this job is small. Nobody said that everybody will like it. Surely, it is huge and to be fair, this should be done for all aces/pilots, not just for Hartmann. But because it can be done just by one small step at a time, it doesn't mean that we should not even start it. 70+ years passed since the war and perhaps all of us will be long time dead by the time when future historians finish this job. (Frankly, I do not care.) I can offer my contribution to the 1944-45 battles in the Hungarian skies. Thanks for all who helps with his/her part.
Cheers,

Gabor

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Jim Oxley

Another aspect that should be considered is that, if Hartman's score is placed under such scrutiny, then so to should all the other Luftwaffe aces in the 200+ bracket.

Is the goal to re-write the history books? Or to see who in fact was the highest scoring Luftwaffe ace? Surely not just a Hartman witch hunt.

It would be doing everyone a disservice if Barkhorn, Rall, Kittel, Nowotny, Batz, Rudorffer, Bar, Graf and other's claims were not also given the same intense analysis and match-up to Soviet losses.

Jim, the goal as I see it is simply to establish, as far as research can after 70+ years, what really happened. Isn't that what history is supposed to do? Yes, that should apply to everyone but you have to start somewhere. I'm confident that Hartmann and the others would still emerge as remarkably successful fighter pilots at the end of the process.

[HGabor]

Yep, that's all.

[GMichalski]

hi,
great work all

seems the second part of this thread: http://forum.12oclockhigh.net/showthread.php?t=1262

hope you find more,

Do you believe that there is another case like W A Bishop of 1ww
in the 2ww in claims vs losses?

i think it interesting also look pilots with many multiple claims also
with the +200s

regards

[Boris Ciglic]

From my experience I'd say that accuracy of the claims varied both from individual to individual, from unit to unit, and from local theatre to another. Luftwaffe fighters were highly accurate against Royal Yugoslav AF in April 1941 with just a few overclaims. When they returned to Yugoslav skies in late 1943 it was another story. IV./JG 27 was notorious with its claims and Bartels more than anybody else. II./JG 51 kept a very high standard of accuracy throughout 1944.

Boris