Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (57 page)

The Luftwaffe’s last offensive, Operation “Bodenplatte,” took place on January 1, 1945, when all available units attacked Allied airfields in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. They destroyed or seriously damaged 800 enemy airplanes, but lost 150 themselves, including some of their best surviving pilots. By now the Allies could absorb the blow, but the Luftwaffe could not.

Naturally, Goering continued to blame others for the failure of the Luftwaffe. In early October 1944, for example, he met with wing, group, and squadron commanders in the great hall of the Reichs Air Defense School at Gatow. Without preliminaries he launched directly into an attack on the fighter pilots. “I’ve spoiled you,” he roared at them. “I’ve given you too many decorations. They’ve made you fat and lazy. All that about the planes you’d shot down was just one big lie . . . A pack of lies, I tell you! . . . You didn’t make a fraction of the kills you reported.” He called the fighter pilots cowards, malingerers, and liars.
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Col. Johannes Steinhoff wrote later that “ . . . for sheer cynicism and arrogance he outdid himself.”
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As a result of these insults, a group of fighter pilots—led by Col. Guenther Luetzow and Colonel Steinhoff, plotted to appeal to Hitler to have Goering replaced. The Reichsmarschall got wind of the conspiracy, however, and responded as he always did. In January, 1945, he sacked Luetzow, the commander of the 4th Air Division; Steinhoff, the commander of the 7th Fighter Wing; Col. Hannes Trautloft, the commander of JG 54; and Col. Eduard Neumann, the fighter commander, Italy. Adolf Galland, who was openly sympathetic to the conspirators, was also sacked. He was replaced by Gordon M. Gollob, a former instructor pilot in the Austrian air force.

Gollob, born in Vienna in 1912 as Gordon McGollob, was an officer of Scottish descent who changed his name at the order of OKL in 1938. He flew Me-110s in Poland, Norway, and the Battle of Britain and became a ME-109 pilot in late 1940. He distinguished himself on the eastern front in 1941, where he once shot down nine enemy airplanes in a single day. After a tour of duty at the Luftwaffe research and testing base at Rechlin (December 1941 to May 1942), he returned to Russia as commander of JG 77 (May to October, 1942) and from then until April 1944, was on the staff of the Fighter Command 3 in Paris and was with Fighter Command 5 on the English Channel. Deeply involved in the new fighter projects, including the jet and rocket-propelled aircraft, he headed a special fighter staff under Galland during the Battle of the Bulge. In his career he personally shot down 150 enemy aircraft 144 of them in the East.
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Despite his great technical ability and skill as an aviator, he was, of course, unable to do anything to affect the outcome of the air war after his appointment as General der Jagdwaffe in January, 1945.

A month later, Speer told Hitler of the “mutiny of the fighter pilots” and the Fuehrer ordered Goering to give Galland a unit. Given no choice, Hermann turned over the 44th Fighter Unit (JV 44) to the general. This unit was a jet fighter squadron—a formation usually commanded by lieutenants or captains. Colonels Steinhoff and Luetzow joined the 44th as pilots, without commands of their own. Galland ended the war with 103 kills, while Steinhoff had 149. When Colonel Luetzow was killed in action in the last week of the war, he had 103 aerial victories. After the war, Steinhoff became commander of the West German Air Force, and many Americans saw him escorting President Reagan when he paid tribute to German World War II dead at the military cemetery at Bitburg. Galland moved to Argentina and helped Juan Peron organize the Argentine air force (1947–55). He was running his own aerospace consulting business in Bonn at last report.
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Like the fighter pilots, the rest of the Luftwaffe was also disillusioned with Goering, who was by now only a shell of his former self. Due to the collapse in the West, in which most of the Luftwaffe ground organization simply took to its heels, Goering ordered the arrest of three air administrative area commanders: General of Flak Artillery Dr. Eugen Weissmann, General of Flyers Wilhelm Wimmer, and General of Flyers Karl Drum. Hitler—and therefore Goering—demanded the death penalty. The evidence in the cases was inconclusive, however, and the judge, General Baron von Hammerstein, resisted the pressure of the Reichsmarschall to find them guilty and execute them. Goering did extract one death penalty, however: General of Flyers Bernhard Waber was shot for illicitly adding to his personal property. The Luftwaffe was outraged. Who was Goering, the greatest art thief in history, to execute
anyone
for looting? Air force morale fell even lower as a result of the incident.
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The Luftwaffe was driven from the sky in the last months of 1944, as Germany’s cities were reduced to rubble. With their newly won bases in France, the U.S. and Royal air forces had little trouble assuming absolute air supremacy. A good example of how they used it is seen in what happened to Dueren. On November 16, this little city between Aachen and the Rhine was struck by 2,703 tons of bombs in a single raid. Ninety-five percent of the town was destroyed. In the last three months of 1944, Bomber Command alone dropped 163,000 tons of bombs, compared with 40,000 tons in the same period the year before. Some 53 percent of the total bomb load fell on German cities, including Duisburg, Essen, Cologne, and Duesseldorf, all of which were struck with more than 38,000 tons of bombs each in fewer than 100 days. Other cities devastated in the same period included Ulm, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Heilbronn, Freiburg, Ludwigshaven, Saarbruecken, Nuremberg, Munich, Bonn, Kolbenz, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Brunswick, Osnabrueck, and Giessen. The Eighth U.S. Air Force, meanwhile, dropped an even greater tonnage of bombs, concentrating 39 percent of its effort against synthetic oil plants at Gelsenkirchen, Merseburg-Leuna, Castrop, Sterkrade, Hanover, Harburg, Hamburg, Bottrop, Misburg, Bohlen, Zeitz, Leutzkendorf, and others. The Fifteenth U.S. Air Force attacked the oil plants in the South, at Floridsdorf, Korneuberg, Vienna, and Linz.
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The loss of life was incredible. An estimated 500,000 to 600,000 Germans were killed by bombs in the 1940–45 period—about ten times the number of civilians killed in Britain during the war. Between February 1 and April 21, 1945, Berlin was subjected to eighty-three separate heavy bombings.
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By January, 1945, the Eighth U.S.A.F. alone was sending out 1,500 bombers a day. Magdeburg and Chemnitz were shattered on February 6, but Dresden got the worst of it. On February 13 it was fire-bombed with 650,000 incendiaries. The city burned for a week, and the firestorms could be seen for 200 miles. Since the city was packed with refugees from the East, the death total could only be guessed at, but it was estimated at 135,000—more than twice as many as were killed in England during the entire war—all dead in a single raid.
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Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe pilots and thinning ranks of veteran aces continued to do their duty, flying out day after day, despite overwhelming odds. A great many of the veteran flyers, old before their time, were lost in 1945. Lt. Otto Kittel of JG 54, a winner of 267 aerial victories, was shot down by a Soviet IL-2 on February 14, only a week before his twenty-eighth birthday; Rudi Linz, 70 kills, was shot down by a Spitfire, as was Wilhelm Mink (72 victories). Friedrich Haas of JG 52, 74 kills, was shot down by a MIG, while his wing mate, Franz Schall, 137 kills, died in a crash landing. Gerhard Hoff-mann, winner of 125 aerial combats, simply failed to return from a mission, and his fate is still unknown. Maj. Heinrich Ehrler, 204 kills, died on the eastern front on April 6, 1945. Colonel Luetzow, flying a jet, attacked a B-17 formation over Donauwoerth on April 23, 1945, and was never seen again. Col. Erich Leie, 118 victories, was commander of JG 77 on March 7, 1945, when he was killed by a YAK pilot. Nor were they the only casualties among the aces. Col. Kurt Buehligen, commander of JG 2 “Richthofen,” had 112 kills when he was shot down and captured on the eastern front in early 1945. Col. Gerhard Schoepfel, commander of JG 6 and winner of 40 victories, was captured in Czechoslovakia. Capt. Karl Schnoerrer, 46 kills, was shot down over Hamburg on March 30 and lost his left leg. Col. Johannes “Macki” Steinhoff attempted to take off on a hastily repaired runway on April 8, when his Me-262 hit a partially filled bomb crater and his landing gear was ripped off. Steinhoff was severely burned in the ensuing fire and spent months in a burn unit. His eyelids were completely burned away and he did not close his eyes until 1969, when an R.A.F. surgeon made new eyelids for him, from skin taken from Steinhoff’s arm.
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Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the leading Stuka pilot of the war, had his leg blown off during an attack on a Soviet tank in 1945. And there were many others.

As the Luftwaffe died and the Third Reich fell apart, Hermann Goering’s world crumbled also. His hunting lodge at Rominten had already been burned to prevent its falling into Russian hands. On January 31, 1945, with the Russians already near, Emmy Goering left Karinhall with the female servants and four trucks full of art treasures. Hermann stayed on, however, guarding his beloved home with a parachute division. He saw Hitler very seldom now, and when he did the Fuehrer screamed curses and insults at him. Albert Speer visited him at Karinhall in mid-February. He described Goering as one of the few persons in Hitler’s entourage who saw things “realistically and without illusions.” Speer tried to get Goering to join him, Guderian, and some others in confronting Hitler with an ultimatum to end the war. Goering replied that he understood Speer’s feelings, but he had been with Hitler too many years and had gone through too much with him to break loose now.
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