German overclaims in the East. Hartmann and others...

[Johannes]

Gentlemen

Regarding the Hartmann/Obleser statement, it does is not true Obleser did not question Hartmann's claims, probably never flew together either.
There was almost a mutiny with the rest of Hartmann's staffel as they seem not to have been happy with him, though this could be his avoidance of anything other than high altitude combat. It does seem that Hartmann was ambicious and had worked out that the best way to be the best is to survive the longest, so cut out all the risks. However that doesn't mean is was making fraudulant claims, though most frauds followed a set pattern of huge daily claims, Hartmann certainly falls into this catogory! But you must have others to help you, nowotny had his schwarm, Rudorffer had Tangermann, also it would seem to be the leaders of the largest total i.e Wick to 50 Gollob to 150, Graf to 200, Nowotny to 250, so why not Hartmann? With Gollob he was making huge daily claims in 1942, yet on a day he flew with Viktor Petermann from another unit he had add only one, so perhaps this suggests opportunity. Also you must look at whole Geschwader JG5 in the East and JG2 in the West seem to have been the worst for wholesale overclaiming, though even then some amongst these remained honest. Hans-Joachim Marseille's claims seem at first glance fraudulent, but any of his that didn't actually come down(and most did) he thought they had come down, so he wasn't dis-honest only mistakes. Egon Mayer had a problem with Josef Wurmheller, who was a massive overclaimer, and not only looked like Marseille, but had the same huge ego, one turmed out to be a fraud, one honest, I nthink that Egon Mayer suspected Wurmheller of fraud! As Hartmann seemed unpopular perhaps he also was a fraud, personally I suspect that he was, but I do not actually know, I suspect that Rall, Barkhorn, Hrabak, Gratz, Trenkel and Obleser were honest. In the West the Luftwaffe authorities counted up the wreck sites, in the East the front was fluid, most claims were behind enemy lines, JG5's front was stable, but like JG2 most of there claims were over the sea. Also in the West the night fighters were more accurate, I don't think we can say they were more honest, I would say that with there cannons they more often than not set the enemy on fire, therefore are less likely to think they have shot one down when they havn't. Kurt Welter was a notorious fraudster, but most of these were when he was flying the single-seater Me262. The single engined night-fighters had the greatest difficulty in confirmations as they flew alone, had no crew members as witnesses, and other flew over cities where the flak could also have been responsible!
One final observation.....fraudsters seem to have there big days at notable points in there totals i.e around the 100, 150, 200 e.t.c mark!
Sad thing is that they kept the honest guys away from more deserving decorations!

Regards

Johannes

[Nikita Egorov]

Johannes,

Could you please deliberate what is "almost mutiny' agaist Hartmann in his staffel? Any details will be interesting.

[Ruy Horta]

I think some people need to think more carefully about words like fraud.

In general over claiming increases proportionally to the intensity of combat and the distance from the own lines. A lot of fighting on the Eastern Front was close to the front line, and visible by eye witnesses from the ground.

Now many high score Jagdwaffe pilots in the West were proven to be near enough to the mark, or at least in tune to the overal over claiming for any particular campaign.

How does accusations of fraud stand in the light of Hartmann's long post war imprisonment by the Soviets.

Would a simple fraud and third reich glory seeker be given lead of the first Bundesluftwaffe fighter squadron?!

Does a character of fraud and medal hunting conform with said post war character of the professional soldier and his activities once retired?

I don't doubt that over claiming was part and parcel of the air war (but that doesn't include further blanket statements about the actual ratio of claims etc), but it takes far more convincing before you can call a particular claim fraudulent or even a clear over claim.

[thenelm]

I have to agree with Ruy. Trying attach motive to 'overclaiming' to anyone long passed away is an exercise in futility. We'll never know. We're talking about combat in the air with multiple pilots attacking the same targets from every direction in that environment, while trying to seek your next target and trying to be sure an enemy wasn't about to blow you away from above, below, either side or whatever. You didn't stare your target into the ground. If you did, you died. And the bottom line is, EVERYBODY OVERCLAIMED, the Lw, the RAF, the US, the Japanese, the Russians or whomever I left out. Get over it - expecting everything to match up exactly or for an individual's claims to be perfection when said individual was also trying not to be someone else's victory is inane. All that stuff transcribed by Tony or in any publication are CLAIMS, the fact that some governing body accepted them has as much to do with propaganda for the folks back home as their validity.

[Rob Romero]

The following may be speculative, but I find Hartmann’s 11 Victories on 24 Aug 44 to have be conducted under suspicious circumstances. The Third Reich had suffered its worst setbacks on both fronts. After two months of hard fighting, the Normandy front had collapsed with the Allies seizing a sizeable bag in the Falaise Pocket. Furthermore the East front had seriously and rapidly contracted during Operation Bagration, initiated by the Soviets shortly after D-day in June. This little known campaign resulted in the virtual destruction of the most formidable assemblage of German military might–Army Group Center. (The extent of the loss of territory as well (as some the encircled remnants of Wehrmacht units) is illustrated here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BagrationMap2.jpg ). Let us not also forget the failed assassination attempt on Hitler!
A distraction seemed called for and –so what do you know- a PK unit appeared on the scene to record Hartmann’s 290th -301st victories –and this was all too conveniently wrapped up in one day possibly so everyone could get it over with; Nazi Germany now had a new ‘Babe Ruth Luftsiege King’ or -better yet- a ‘Bubi next door Uberhero’ to distract some from the harsh realities of a disastrous and unsalvageable war.

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, all.

From time to time this issue 'spring to life' on this and other boards.

I like the approach Nikita has.

The discussion is however futile until ( if ever) it is possible to research the original documentation from all sides on a detailed level. The main reasons that this has not been done is two - a lot of RLM documentation on detailed level not selected for archiving and thus destroyed during the war, and the fact that availability to check in soviet records has been rather restricted.

We must also take into account that the regimes we are talking about are two of the largest propaganda machines of all time, .



Regards,
Andreas

[Juha]

Hello
not being Hartmann specialist I have no firm opinion of his claim accuracy, only that “Blond knight” would have been most appropriate material for Göbbels‘ propaganda machine. But more generally.

1) not all overclaimed, vast majority of pilots who claimed victories overclaimed but not all. And the extent of overclaiming varied greatly, even inside units. IMHO vast majority of overclaiming was made in good faith in the heat of high tempo very dangerous actions but on the other hand some had more realistic view of the effect of their actions than others. Just claiming that everybody overclaim we simply closed our eyes from realities of human nature and in fact advance boastfulness and do disservice to those who were careful in their claims and so were often more forgotten than some of their more boastful comrades. But I agree that we must be careful in our conclusions because it is very difficult to dig out the truth in many cases.

2) On the other hand. pilots being humans, IMHO there is no doubt that some because of glory seeking/career advancement/competition between pilots might well sometimes “forgot” to mention in their combat report that the plane they claimed was already clearly very badly damaged. A few even went to fraud for ex. the "Expertenschwarm" of 4./JG 27. The risk of being exposed was not very great and the official punishment not necessary harsh. We don’t know for sure why Sawallisch got killed in a/c accident shortly after their fraud was exposed but Bendert, besides being sent to train new pilots, which he might or might not got as a punishment, got his Ritterkreutz for his troubles. Harsh, isn’t it. But that goes to at least most of AFs, in all successes bought medal, career advancements, glory etc not only to the pilot but also to his unit and so also to its CO. So if the CO begun suspect that one of his “stars” was in fact overclaiming badly he might well try to solve the problem inside his unit and not report his suspicions to upper echelons.

3) Then there was the propaganda aspect. I have always been rather sceptical for “Bully” Lang’s world record on kills per day because it just happened to happen just before the day when one of the most humiliating defeat of WM happened and just in right place, namely in Kiev which Soviets retook/liberated almost without fight after Vatutin had completely outfoxed Mannstein. What a coincident, Göbbels could put on main pages the headline that a glorious LW pilot single handled shot down 18 “Red…..” planes and put somewhere else a small news that “by a brilliant tactical manoeuvre WM succeeded to disengage from Kiev”. I don’t doubt that Lang shot down a number of Soviet planes on that day but 18, timing is a bit too good for my liking. So I wasn’t surprised when Caldwell wrote in his JG 26 WD Vol 2 that while an excellent Kommandeur (of II/JG 26) he also had tendency to overclaim. So I’m not claiming that Lang was frauding his claims IMHO he was simply overclaiming but that when his 18 claims on 3 Nov 43 were accepted there might well being some propagandist element in it.

Juha

[yogybär]

Definitely, the mentioned 11 Hartmann claims were already "confirmed" by Propagandakomapnie and the GröFaZ himself. And looking at H.'s claimlist one can definitely say that he was not as heroic as many "Sturmovik- and Bomberkillers".

But who can judge on that? His advantage was: He survived.

Anyway, I would not say that the Bundeluftwaffe looked into Hartmann "frauding" or not, that was a different time then now, the whole democratic Germany was full of Ex-3rd-Reich people in high positions. They needed good people as well as "Aushängeschilder".

Overcaliming itself is definitely something personal (frauding also), as it also happens in todays world:
Some humans are selling themselves as "expensive" as they can, others do not want/need this. One more (very small) group even makes up some stories about their successes, but they are definitely a minority and I guess they were also back then.

==>
1) I think overclaiming is stronger in some pilots/persons then in others
2) I would not call them liars, but over-optimistic (also keep in mind their age: 90% = 20-25...)
3) I don't know what is the sense in identifying THE overclaimers in VVS, Lw, USAAF, ...
EDIT: Can anyone answer point 3 please?

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by yogybär

1) I think overclaiming is stronger in some pilots/persons then in others
2) I would not call them liars, but over-optimistic (also keep in mind their age: 90% = 20-25...)
3) I don't know what is the sense in identifying THE overclaimers in VVS, Lw, USAAF, ...
EDIT: Can anyone answer point 3 please?

1) Agreed.
2) Agreed but also they were people trying to make sense (in retrospect, full of adrenalin, amazed to still be alive) of a series of fleeting impressions. Our minds do try to put all these memory fragments together into a coherent story.
3) Only that historians try to establish what actually happened and a lot of the stories/reputations that became established do not stand up to examination. But frankly, if Hartmann only shot down 10% of his claims, he was still a highly successful fighter pilot.

There's also something about incentives to overclaim in different air forces' approaches to medals/promotions. Some may have made the problem worse.

P.S. A lot of my research makes me suspect that the Luftwaffe verification process wasn't always followed to the letter.

[Ruy Horta]

I see a lot of speculation, but hardly any foundation.

So certain that in response to defeat A, propaganda victory B was executed.

The simple fact that Nazi Germany thrived on propaganda means that all these claims must be seen in that light.

I disagree.

That doesn't mean that there is an element of wanting to create heroes, but there is a difference of intent. To what extend this wishful thinking differed from the other combattants, or was worse than the other combattants is arguable. Only the high claim numbers differ and that must be seen within a proper context.

There is a big difference between numbers fed to the public and those that are official. The Volkische Beobachter would have been the tool of propaganda, but not the regular claim's system.

Today we say that Marseille's claims are legit, but not long ago people like Johnny Johnson called it Nazi Propaganda. Marseille is not alone with having plus 100 claims that seem to be reasonably accurate.

In the east those figures seem to fall apart, but do we have access to all the Soviet figures?

We easily dismiss German claims, but also dismiss that not little part of the fighting was witnessed by friendly ground forces, since the Luftwaffe was playing fire fighter for most of the time in direct support of the troops.

So if the claim for type A isn't correct, we shouldn't dismiss that type D might have been shot up. That perhaps the damage to type D was reported a day later or whatever.

I find the claim that some of the Jagdwaffe claims to be directly related to some defeat to be pretty far fetched.