What Really Happened to the Luftwaffe’s Top Ace After WW2? JJ
On 8 May 1945, as Germany surrendered, the most successful fighter pilot in history gave himself up in Czechoslovakia. Erich Hartmann had shot down three hundred and fifty-two enemy aircraft, more than any pilot before or since. Within days he vanished into Soviet captivity, and he would not see home again for a decade. Then he did something almost no one expected.
He climbed back into a German fighter cockpit — this time for NATO, facing the Soviet Union that had held him for ten years. For Hartmann, and for others like him, the war did not really end in 1945. Hartmann had tried to reach the Western Allies. He surrendered near the Czech town of Pisek, along with the pilots and civilians who had gathered around his unit hoping for the protection of the Western powers. It did them no good.
Within days the Americans handed the whole group to the Soviet Union, and for the highest-scoring pilot of the war, a decade behind wire began. Hartmann had built his reputation on the Eastern Front, where German pilots met Soviet aircraft in enormous numbers. Soviet airmen came to know his markings and called him the Black Devil.
He flew more than a thousand combat missions and was never shot down by an enemy fighter. By 1945 his tally stood at three hundred and fifty-two, a figure no pilot in any air force has ever matched. In Soviet hands, that fame became a liability. Hartmann was accused of war crimes and pressed to confess to attacks he insisted he had never carried out. He refused.
He refused again when he was offered a senior post in the new East German air force in return for his cooperation. When conditions in one camp became unbearable, he joined a prisoners’ revolt, and for long stretches he was held in solitary confinement. In 1949 a Soviet court sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labour. The years dragged on long after the Western Allies had sent their own prisoners home.
The turning point came in September 1955, when West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer travelled to Moscow and negotiated the release of the last German prisoners of war — nearly ten thousand men still held a full decade after the fighting stopped. Hartmann was among them. He returned in October 1955 to a country split in two and already raising a new army.
In 1956 he put on a uniform again. Hartmann joined the new West German air force, the Bundesluftwaffe, and became the first commander of Jagdgeschwader 71 “Richthofen,” the country’s first all-jet fighter wing. The man who had shot down more Soviet aircraft than anyone alive now trained young German pilots to fly American Sabres, on the western side of the Cold War, facing east once more. His second career ended in frustration.
Hartmann judged the American F-104 Starfighter dangerous and poorly suited to the German air force, and he said so openly. His opposition put him at odds with his superiors, and he left the service early, in 1970. He died in 1993, still remembered as the highest-scoring fighter ace in history. His war had ended in a Soviet cell and begun again in a NATO cockpit.
Another ace never put on a German uniform again at all. He crossed an ocean instead. Galland Adolf Galland had outranked all of them. From 1941 he served as General der Jagdflieger — the General of the Fighter Arm — responsible for Germany’s entire fighter force. He clashed repeatedly with Hermann Göring, the head of the air force, over the collapsing air defence of Germany, and in early 1945 he was removed from his post.
Rather than accept a desk, he formed a small elite unit of jet fighters, Jagdverband 44, and flew the Me 262 in combat in the final weeks of the war, until he was wounded in April 1945. Galland was taken prisoner by the Americans in May 1945 and held for interrogation, because the Allies were eager to learn everything he knew about German jet development. He was released in 1947.
In a defeated Germany there was no air force for a man like him to join, no military aviation permitted, and no aircraft industry left to employ him. When an invitation came from the other side of the world, he took it. In 1948 Galland travelled to Argentina. President Juan Perón was racing to modernise his armed forces and build a home-grown aircraft industry, and he admired German military skill.
His government offered contracts and a welcome to German officers, engineers, and technicians; for some who were fleeing prosecution in Europe, it also became a refuge. Galland was one of many who found work there. For seven years he helped build the Argentine air force, developing its training and flying and testing modern aircraft again.
It was a strange second act for the man who had once led the Luftwaffe’s fighters against the Allies, now shaping a foreign air force half a world away. He returned to Germany in 1955, the same year West Germany joined NATO. But unlike Hartmann, Galland never joined the new Bundesluftwaffe.
He went into business instead, working as an aviation consultant and adviser to industry, and he built a second reputation as an elder statesman of German flying. His wartime memoir, The First and the Last, became one of the best-known accounts of the air war written from the German side. In his later years Galland did something that would once have been unthinkable.
He struck up warm friendships with the British and American pilots he had fought over the Channel, meeting them at reunions and treating the air war as a contest between professionals. He lived until February 1996. Galland had chosen a civilian life. But several of his former comrades went further still, rising to the highest ranks of West Germany’s new air force and of NATO itself.
One of the men who had flown the Me 262 in Galland’s jet unit almost did not survive the war at all. Johannes Steinhoff was already one of Germany’s most respected fighter leaders, with more than a hundred and seventy victories, when disaster struck on 18 April 1945.
Taking off on one of the last German jet missions, his fighter blew a tyre, slewed off the runway, and caught fire. He was pulled from the cockpit alive. The flames had taken his eyelids and left his face permanently disfigured. He spent the next two years in hospital, undergoing a long series of operations as surgeons slowly rebuilt what the fire had destroyed.
His face still bore the scars when he returned to uniform. He had been among the first officers to help build the new West German air force in the 1950s. He became its chief of staff from 1966 to 1970, and then took one of the highest posts in the Western alliance, as chairman of NATO’s Military Committee from 1971 to 1974. It was the highest post any of them would reach. He died in 1994.
Alongside him served the third-highest-scoring pilot in history. Günther Rall, with two hundred and seventy-five victories, rose through the new air force to become its Inspector — the senior officer of the West German air arm — and then the German representative to NATO’s military committee.
The man who had fought Soviet aircraft over the Eastern Front was now helping plan NATO’s defence against the Soviet Union. He lived until 2009, the last of the great German aces to die. Gerhard Barkhorn, the second-highest-scoring pilot of all time with three hundred and one victories, joined the new air force in 1956 and commanded one of its fighter-bomber wings. He rose to major general and finished his career as chief of staff of a NATO tactical air command, retiring in 1975.
He was killed in a car accident in 1983. One shared crisis marked their years in command. West Germany bought the American F-104 Starfighter, and Rall helped bring it into service; Hartmann had fought against the aircraft from the start. When crashes mounted and more than a hundred West German pilots had died, it was Steinhoff, as chief of staff, who grounded the fleet in 1966 until the faults were fixed.
The German press had already named the jet the Witwenmacher — the widow-maker. These men had risen to the upper ranks of the alliance they once fought, trusted with its aircraft and its command posts. Arguments over the legacy of the Third Reich, though, were far from over. Within a few years, they would end the careers of two more Luftwaffe generals.
In the spring of 1976, a West German air force wing held a reunion. The unit had taken its traditional name, “Immelmann,” from a wartime dive-bomber wing, and it invited that old wing’s last commander as its guest of honour. His name was Hans-Ulrich Rudel. He had been a Stuka pilot, the most decorated German serviceman of the war, and by the 1970s he was an outspoken and unrepentant supporter of the old regime. The Defence Ministry wanted nothing to do with him.
He came anyway, signing his books for a line of young airmen, and two serving Luftwaffe generals came to see him. One of them was Walter Krupinski. Krupinski was no minor figure. He had been one of the great Eastern Front aces, with one hundred and ninety-seven victories, and he had helped train Erich Hartmann in combat flying.
In the war’s last weeks he had flown the Me 262 in Galland’s elite squadron of aces, alongside Steinhoff himself. This was a small circle of men, and most of them had known one another for years. Like Hartmann, he had joined the Bundesluftwaffe after the war and risen to the rank of general.
His postwar career had followed the same path as many of the others — until that afternoon. Afterward, Krupinski and a second general, Karl-Heinz Franke, publicly defended Rudel, comparing his Nazi past to the Communist past of a leading Social Democrat politician. The comparison caused an uproar. The Defence Minister, Georg Leber, moved quickly and forced both men into early retirement.
Three decades after the war, one of Germany’s greatest fighter aces had ended his career defending an unrepentant supporter of the regime he had once served. Krupinski died in 2000. His dismissal had become a landmark in a long argument in West Germany over how much of the old Wehrmacht’s traditions its new military should carry. Thanks for watching.
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