Stuka Pilot

The conditions in the new camp are very much the same as in England. Here also an operation is at first refused me. I cannot look forward to being released, if only because of my rank. One day I am taken to the aerodrome at Cherbourg, and at first I believe I am to be handed over to Ivan. That would be something for the Soviets, to have Field Marshal Schörner and myself as prizes from the war on the ground and in the air! The compass points to 300 degrees, so our course is set for England. Why? We land some twenty miles inland on the aerodrome at Tangmere, the R.A.F. formation leaders’ school. Here I learn that Group Captain Bader[1] has effected my removal. Bader is the most popular airman in the R.A.F. He was shot down during the war and flew with two artificial legs. He had learnt that I was interned in the camp at Carentan. He had himself been a prisoner of war in Germany and had made several attempts to escape. He can tell a different story from the inveterate agitators who seek by every means to brand us Germans as barbarians.

This time in England is a rest cure for me after the P.O.W. camps. Here I discover again for the first time that there is still a respect for the enemy’s achievement, a chivalry which should come naturally to every officer in the service of every country in the world.

Bader sends to London for the man who made his artificial limbs with an order to make one for me. I decline this generous offer because I cannot pay for it. I lost all I had in the East and I do not yet know what may happen in the future. At any rate it will not be possible to pay him back in sterling. Group Captain Bader is almost offended when I refuse to accept his kindness and am worried about payment. He brings the man down with him, and he makes a plaster of Paris cast. The man returns a few days later and tells me the stump must be swollen internally as it is thicker at the bottom than at the top; therefore an operation is necessary before he can complete the artificial leg.

Some days after this an enquiry comes from the Americans, saying that I have “only been lent” and must now be returned. My rest cure is nearly over.

On one of my last days at Tangmere I have an illuminating discussion with the R.A.F. boys attending a course at the school. One of them—not an Englishman—hoping no doubt to anger or intimidate me, asks me what I suppose the Russians would do with me if I had now to return to my home in Silesia where I belong.

“I think the Russians are clever enough,” I reply, “to make use of my experience. In the field of combating tanks alone, which must play a part in any future war, my instruction may prove disadvantageous for the enemy. I am credited with over five hundred tanks destroyed, and assuming that in the next few years I were to train five or six hundred pilots each of whom destroyed at least a hundred tanks, you can reckon out for yourself how many tanks the enemy’s armament industry would have to replace on my account.”

This answer provokes a general murmur of consternation and I am asked excitedly how I reconcile it with my former attitude towards Bolshevism. Hitherto I have not been allowed to say anything disparaging about Russia—their ally. But now I am told of the mass deportations to the East and tales of rape and atrocities, of the bloody terrorism with which the hordes from the steppes of Asia are martyring their subject peoples… This is something new to me, for previously they have been most careful to avoid these subjects; but now their views are an exact reflection of our own often enough proclaimed theses, and expressed in language which is frequently copied from us. Formation leaders of the R.A.F. who have flown Hurricanes on the Russian side at Murmansk tell their impressions; they are shattering. Of our crews which were shot down there hardly one was left alive.

^{Hawker Hurricane 2C}

“And then you want to work for the Russians?” they exclaim.

“I have been very interested to hear your opinion of your allies,” I reply. “Of course I have not said a word about what I think, I have only answered the question you put to me.”

The subject of Russia is never brought up in my presence.

I am flown back to the camp in France where I continue to be interned for a short time. The efforts of German doctors are finally successful in effecting a transfer to a hospital camp. Niermann has been released some days before in the British zone. He has several times wangled it so that he can stay with me, but he cannot put it over any longer. Within a week of leaving the French camp I am on an ambulance train which is supposed to be going to a hospital on the Starnbergersee. At Augsburg the engine turns round and steams into Fürth. Here in a military hospital in April 1946 I succeed in obtaining my release.