Hitler's Commanders (37 page)

hans “fips” philipp
, the son of a Saxon physician, was born in Meissen on March 17, 1917. He first took an interest in flying as a member of the Hitler Youth, which offered its members glider training, with an eye toward sparking an interest in aviation among Germany’s young men. This idea was quite successful and certainly worked in the case of Hans Philipp, who grew up to be one of Germany’s most feared aces. He volunteered for the Luftwaffe as an officer candidate in 1936 and, as a lieutenant in the Polish campaign, scored the first of his 206 victories.

According to his commander, General Hannes Trautloft, “Fips” Philipp “took full part in all the joys of life”
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and certainly enjoyed his role as a hero of the Third Reich. In aerial combat he was often compared to a duelist because of his uncanny marksmanship and his ability to take advantage of the slightest opening to inflict a fatal wound. Rising rapidly, he was promoted to first lieutenant and squadron commander (in JG 54) during the Battle of Britain and to captain and group commander (I/JG 54) in early 1942. He was the fourth pilot in the Luftwaffe to shoot down 100 airplanes and the second to shoot down 200. The eighth recipient of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, he was also instrumental in training other high-scoring aces, including Walter Nowotny, who would eventually shoot down 258 enemy airplanes and would be the first commander of the first jet fighter wing in history.
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Philipp was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1943 and given command of the 1st Fighter Wing (JG 1) in Holland, where his mission was to defend the Reich against American heavy-bomber raids. Here he knew fear for perhaps the first time in his life. He once wrote that fighting 20 Soviet fighters or British Spitfires was a joy, but to attack a formation of Flying Fortresses “lets all the sins of one’s life pass before one’s eyes.”
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Colonel Philipp led his wing against these monsters for six months, with some success. Then, on October 8, 1943, as he was leading an attack against a U.S. bomber formation over Nordheim, he was jumped by its fighter escorts and was shot down by a Thunderbolt. He was 26 years old.

otto “bruni” kittel
was nothing like the extroverted Hans Philipp and certainly nothing like the propaganda version or public image of a German ace. He was a physically small, quiet, unselfish little man who spoke with a slight hesitation. Born in Kronsdorf (Komotau) in the Sudetenland on February 17, 1917, “Bruni” Kittel began his career as an enlisted man and, in the fall of 1941, joined I/JG 54 as an NCO (noncommissioned officer) pilot. A late bloomer, Sergeant Kittel displayed deplorable aerial marksmanship at first, so he was tutored by Hannes Trautloft (then the wing commander), Hans Philipp, Walter Nowotny, and other members of the
Gruenherz
(Green Heart) Wing. These men never gave up on him, and their patience was rewarded in 1943, when Kittel found his shooting eye and started blasting Soviet airplanes out of the sky with remarkable frequency. Awarded the Knight’s Cross in October 1943, Master Sergeant Kittel was given a battlefield commission and command of the 2nd Squadron of JG 54 in April 1944, and he led it with great success against overwhelming odds.

As the German armies in the East reeled under the sledgehammer-like blows of the Red Army, Lieutenant Kittel became a symbol and an inspiration for the air and ground forces alike. Once he was shot down and captured, but he managed to escape and make his way back to German lines after being missing in action for two weeks. He was later promoted to first lieutenant and decorated with the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords—one of Germany’s highest decorations, presented by the Fuehrer himself. Through all the excitement, however, success never went to his head; Bruni Kittel remained a modest, unassuming man to the end.

Kittel’s squadron was isolated in the Courland Pocket in western Latvia in late 1944. On February 14, 1945, while flying his 583rd combat mission, Otto Kittel attacked a formation of low-flying Shturmoviks. While engaged in this low-altitude battle he was shot down, apparently by a Soviet anti-aircraft gun. When he died, Otto Kittel had 267 confirmed aerial victories, ranking him fourth among the leading fighter aces in the history of the world.

prince heinrich zu sayn-wittgenstein
was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on August 14, 1916, the descendant of a Russian field marshal and the son of a German diplomat. Unlike Kittel, Prince Heinrich was an arrogant, highly intense, deeply patriotic, and extremely abrasive and ambitious young aristocrat. Military service was a tradition with his family, and he cared for very little other than personal glory and serving his country. His strong and humorless sense of self-discipline led him to demand the highest standards of himself and his men. He was respected, but certainly not loved, by his contemporaries. To his girlfriend, a White Russian émigrée, however, he showed an entirely different side of his personality. Initially an enthusiastic Hitler Youth, he was profoundly disappointed with Hitler and the Nazis. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was sensitive to what was happening to Germany and, in 1943, even discussed personally assassinating Hitler when he received his next decoration, because he had access to the Fuehrer and considered himself expendable. Unfortunately, he would receive that decoration posthumously.

Wittgenstein (as he called himself) entered the Luftwaffe about the time Hitler declared its existence in 1935. He began his combat career flying bombers in 1939 and took part in the Battle of Britain as a captain in 1940. After more than 150 missions as a bomber pilot, he transferred to the night fighters in August 1941. (Prince Heinrich flew the Ju-88 bomber, an aircraft that was being used extensively as a night fighter in 1941.) In his new role, the prince proved to be a courageous warrior and an excellent air-to-air marksman with a sixth sense for danger. By 1943, he was Germany’s leading night fighting ace. He also proved to be a highly competitive and envious young man; his wing commander, for example, had a difficult time making him take leave or go to Rastenburg to receive a decoration from the Fuehrer, because Captain Prince zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was afraid that Helmut Lent or Werner Streib might exceed his night kill total during his absence.
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Prince Heinrich was too concerned with his own personal victory totals to be a good junior commander; nevertheless, he was successively promoted to squadron leader (in the 2nd Night Fighter Wing [NJG 2]), group commander (I/NJG 100), and wing commander of NJG 2. In late 1942, he was sent to Russia to help devise tactics against Red Air Force night attacks. Here he commanded one of the first “Dark Trains”—self-contained air units that could be moved by rail to various sectors of the front and deployed rapidly on dirt fields, allowing the German pilots to surprise their Soviet counterparts on successive nights and to inflict heavy casualties on them. Sayn-Wittgenstein personally shot down 29 Soviet airplanes using these deployment tactics, including three in 15 minutes.

Sent back to the Western Front in 1943, he celebrated New Year’s Day 1944 by shooting down six RAF heavy bombers. On January 21, 1944, Prince Heinrich (now a major) attacked a large formation of British bombers over Schoenhausen and shot down five of them. As the last bomber exploded, a Mosquito fighter (flying escort for the bombers) spotted him in the flames of the dying bomber and shot him down. Two members of his crew managed to bail out, but not Sayn-Wittgenstein. At the time of his death, Prince Heinrich zu Sayn-Wittgenstein had 83 victories—all at night. Fifty-four of these were scored against the British, and most of these were four-engine bombers. On January 23 he was posthumously awarded the Swords to his Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. Initially buried in the cemetery at Deelen Air Base, he was later reinterred at the Prince Egmont zur Lippe-Weissenfeld Cemetery at Ysselsteyn, the Netherlands.

erich hartmann
, the greatest fighter ace of all time, was born in Weissach on April 19, 1922. He spent part of his childhood in China, where his father was a practicing physician. Erich, however, took after his mother, Elisabeth Machtholf, who was a pioneer airwoman and sports flyer. In 1936, she helped establish a glider club at Weil im Schoenbuch, near Stuttgart, where her son learned to fly gliders. By 1938—at age 16—he was a fully qualified glider instructor, and his mother was teaching him how to fly powered aircraft. Hartmann, who was nicknamed “Bubi” (“boy” or “lad”), grew into a ruggedly handsome young man with blond hair and Nordic features. He joined the Luftwaffe on October 15, 1940 (at age 18) and was assigned to the 10th Luftwaffe Military Training Regiment at Neukuhren, near Koenigsberg, East Prussia. After completing basic training he began pilot training at the Air Academy School at Berlin-Gatow and in early 1942 was posted to the 2nd Fighter Pilots School at Zerbst, Anhalt, where he underwent training in the Me-109. In August 1942, after a very thorough and excellent education for aerial combat, he was posted to the 52nd Fighter Wing, then serving on the Caucasus sector of the Eastern Front.

Lieutenant Hartmann was in trouble almost from the beginning. He first saw combat on his third mission, during which he did everything wrong: he failed to keep his position, he flew into his leader’s firing position (instead of protecting him), got separated from his leader, got lost, ran out of gas, and crashed into a sunflower field, destroying his airplane. Fortunately for him, he was only 20 miles from his base—and behind German lines. When he returned to his home airfield, Hartmann was given a severe reprimand and was grounded for three days as punishment. He resolved never to make the same mistakes again.

Back on flight status, Hartmann scored his first kill (an IL-2 fighter-bomber) on November 5, 1942. Apparently too excited by his victory to pay attention to his rear, he was promptly shot down himself a few minutes later, probably by a Lagg-3 fighter. He bailed out and his luck held: he was picked up by a German army vehicle. Hartmann did not score his second kill (a MIG fighter) until January 27, 1943.

The German fighter pilots said that slow starters had “buck fever.” Erich Hartmann cured his buck fever in April 1943, when he had the first of many multiple-kill days. On July 7, during the Battle of Kursk, he shot down seven Soviet fighters. His tactics were a throwback to the days of the Red Baron: he tried to get as close as possible to his opponent before opening fire. He recalled that he normally pulled the trigger “only when the whole windshield was black with the enemy [aircraft].” He emphasized that a fighter pilot had to learn not to fear a mid-air collision.
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Hartmann’s tactics were dangerous in the extreme. He was forced down 16 times—and at least three times his airplane was so badly damaged by flying debris from his victim that he had to crash-land. Remarkably, he was never wounded. His narrowest escape came in August 1943, when he was shot down behind Soviet lines and was captured. The quick-thinking Hartmann, however, faked an injury, so he would not be guarded too closely. He was thrown into the back of a truck with two guards but managed to escape four hours later, when the truck was buzzed by a Stuka dive-bomber. The driver ran the truck into a ditch and rapidly headed for cover, along with the guards. Hartmann also ran—in the opposite direction. Then he walked by night and hid by day until he reached German lines, where he was fired on by a nervous sentry. The bullet tore through his trouser leg but did not touch his body.

Meanwhile, Hartmann’s reputation grew on both sides of the line. To Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine, he was “the Blond Knight of Germany”—one of the Nordic supermen of the air. To the Soviets, and especially to the Red Air Force, he was “the Black Devil of the Ukraine.” Stalin went so far as to place a price on his head.

In early 1944, Erich Hartmann became commander of the 7th Squadron/JG 52, and a few weeks later he was named operations officer of the III Group, 52nd Fighter Wing. Meanwhile, his victory total mounted. During one four-week period in the summer of 1944, he shot down 78 Soviet airplanes—including 19 in two days (August 23 and 24).

Near the end of August 1944, Adolf Hitler decorated Bubi Hartmann with the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, in recognition of his unprecedented 301st victory—62 of which he had shot down in the previous six weeks. Then he went on leave and on September 10 married Ursula Paetsch, the only woman he ever loved. They had been steadies since he was 17 and she was 15. Hartmann then returned to the Eastern Front, where both the German Army and Luftwaffe were in danger of being overwhelmed. Hartmann received an accelerated promotion to major (he was only 22) and, in February 1945, was named commander of I Group/JG 52, which he led until the bitter end. Major Hartmann scored his 352nd and final victory over Bruenn, Germany (in Thuringia), on May 8, 1945—the last day of the war. When he landed from this, his 1,425th and final mission, his airfield was already under Soviet artillery fire; however, an American armored unit had been spotted 10 miles away. Hartmann gave the order to burn the remaining airplanes, and he and his group headed for American lines, accompanied by dozens of women and children who were fleeing the Russians. Two hours later, at 1 p.m., they surrendered to the U.S. 90th Infantry Division at Pisek, Czechoslovakia. Their respite was short-lived, however. On May 16, the entire group was handed over to the Soviets, along with the women and children.

That night was the worst of Hartmann’s life. The men and boys were separated from the women and girls and forced to watch as the Soviets raped the females repeatedly—including grandmothers and girls who had not yet reached their teens. Many were carried off in Red Army vehicles and were never seen again. The rest were returned to their fathers and husbands. Several families committed suicide that night, but, for Erich Hartmann, the ordeal was just beginning. When the Soviets found out that they had the Black Devil, they decided to break his spirit. They tortured him repeatedly, frequently kept him in solitary confinement in total darkness, and periodically denied him his mail. His three-year-old son, Peter Erich, whom Hartmann never saw, died in 1948. Major Hartmann did not learn of this until two years later. Nevertheless, despite all their efforts, Hartmann refused to endorse Communism, refused to cooperate with his captors, sabotaged work projects, and deliberately provoked his guards, possibly in hopes that they would kill him. When he was finally released in 1955, after ten and a half years in prison, both of his parents were dead, but Ursula was still waiting for him. Perhaps surprisingly, Erich Hartmann never hated the Russians. The emaciated ex-officer quickly regained his health and rebuilt his life with the help of his loyal wife. Their second child, a daughter named Ursula (and called “Little Usch” or “Boots”), was born in 1958.