Herman Graf - 212 victories - newsletter list need adaption

[sevenless]

I just came across a little oddity which you might want to look into. The german ace Herman Graf (first one to score 200 kills in 1942) is listed with some 130ish kills in the newspapers, even in 1944???

 

His list of victories on a day by day base can be found here:

 

https://www.luftwaffe.cz/graf.html

Edited November 9, 2019 by sevenless

[DocDocbruno]

That's probably because he went to the dark side when in Soviet captivity!  ?

[CUJO_1970]

47 minutes ago, DocDocbruno said:

That's probably because he went to the dark side when in Soviet captivity!  ?

 

What we do know is like Hartmann, he refused to abandon his ground crew (he could have easily got in his plane and flew away) and instead walk on foot with them to American zone with them where he was promptly betrayed back to the Soviets. In Soviet captivity he was actually put on war crimes trial for not cooperating with them.

 

He was not put in a forced labor camp (something completely out of his control) due to being high-ranking officer and for joining an anti-Nazi group of other German prisoners to avoid "psychological deprivation" during captivity.

Edited December 27, 2019 by CUJO_1970

[DocDocbruno]

I see some revisionist history here.  If I recall correctly,  he tried to get Hartmann to go to the dark side after their incarceration by the soviets.  Unlike Graf, Hartmann refused to cooperate with Antifa (the soviet anti-Nazi group) under all circumstances, and Graf, who received better treatment after that, was shunned by Hartmann.  Now, was Graf a bad person because of that?   No, but they broke him.  Conditions were horrible and the soviets were brutal.  I suspect all of us here would have capitulated as did Graf.  

 

Cujo, I'm not lookin for an argument but there are a lot of guys here who don't know anything, and I mean nuthin, about the past.  Maybe we'll get them to read for themselves.

Anybody here ever read "Honest John" by Walker Mahurin? 

 

Doc

[CUJO_1970]

I'll refrain from judging either Hermann Graf or Bud Mahurin. Doing so is neither arguing nor revisionist history:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Graf

 

In 1971 Graf made his own statement to the newspaper, "Bild am Sonntag", saying that he, along with others including Hartmann, had briefly joined the BDO (an anti-Nazi group of German ex-officer prisoners) as a way to survive the psychological deprivation of the imprisonment. Bergström et al say this is borne out by the Russian RGVA archive of Graf's POW file which makes no mention of extended co-operation with pro-Soviet groups. The BDO was disbanded after only a few months.^[135]

 

Reference is from:

 

Graf & Grislawski—A Pair of Aces. Hamilton MT: Eagle Editions. ISBN 978-0-9721060-4-7.

Bergström, Christer; Antipov, Vlad; Sundin, Claes (2003).