MACR 3005 - German AA Reports

[Tony Kambic]

I am reviewing the missions of my wife's uncle from the 384th BG. In light of the recent post by Henofred concerning German Anti-Aircraft reports, I see in MACR 3005 about 25 pages of reports that appear to be from the Luftwaffe, all translated in English. About half of the pages are from KU 1190, but the others are witness statements from the Luftwaffe Flak batteries 662 and 307, subdivision of AA group Marienfelde.

This MACR is for B-17 42-37781 that came down near Berlin on the March 9, 1944 mission. In one of the statements, a Lt. Horst Schutz describes that the wreckage is clearly a Liberator. ( No B-24s were near Berlin that day.)

Also, these witness statements are claiming the downing of this B-17, when the 384th witnesses saw bombs falling from above knock the tail off the aircraft and it spun into a nose dive. My wife's uncle noted this in his diary.

My question is, how and when were these German Flak commentaries added to the MACR? Are the part of the KU? Certainly the witness statement was done in German, so when were they translated? (Certainly we were not intercepting this type of transmission, were we?)

Was any part of the KU or information somehow passed to the Allies to informing them of a downed aircraft and capture and/or burial of aircrew?

This link should get you to this MACR:

http://384thbombgroup.com/_content/_...SortieKey=2093


Thanks

Tony

[edwest]

This is very strange, in my view, since even flak batteries were burning their records at the end. This extra material may be from POW reports that were attached to the MACR. We hear much about ULTRA but I've heard very little about American monitoring of German radio traffic. On the other hand, the Germans did have buried and over-land lines to contact whoever they needed to.



Ed

[DB601E]

Hi Tony,
almost all files of german Luftwaffe units have been destroyed in the last days of the war.
But the US troops captured a few records, mainly from DULAG Wetzlar. These records have been used to add the information in the MACR files. So in some MACR reports you can find translations of the origin german reports. Sometimes they have taken some pages from the german file, sometimes they have added a translation to the MACR.
Some of these original german reports, (KU, ME, J ...) are still available in the Nara archive in Maryland.

Regards

Lino

[Larry deZeng]

Nearly all of the 22,070 folders of NARA RG 242/T-1033 Luftgau Downed Enemy Aircraft Reports (KU, ME, KSU, USA, J, AV, RUS, KE, KEA, KSE, etc.) contain typed German ground and air eyewitness reports, Flak battery claims, fighter pilot claims, etc., some translated into English but most not. The folders also contain U.S. aircrew personal items, e.g., dog tags, driver's licenses, family photos, girlfriend photos and what have you. Some of the folders are thick, some have only a few pages. The OPR for each report was the Fliegerhorstkommandantur charged with investigating the crash site. These folders were seized by the Allies after to war and not returned to Germany.

The above has been covered in detail a good 3 or 4 times here on TOCH! and several times over on Richard Egert's LWAG web site.

[John Beaman]

Larry, thank you for making clear that members should search TOCH archives before asking questions. There is so much there.........................