Aircrew lynchings

I've been told that German civilians sometimes lynched downed allied aircrew.

How common was this?

How the German authorities react?

Was anyone prosecuted for such a lynching after the war?

aircrew.

Yes, the aircrews were advised to surrender to personnel of the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht to avoid lynching by civilians, if they couldn't make their escape.

It was fairly common. The Luftwaffe or Wehrmacht guards sometimes had to brandish their personal weapons at the civilian mobs to keep them from lynching the Allied airmen. Not too long ago I read an online account by a veteran about his witnessing the murder of his wounded crewmate by a farmer using a pitchfork.

The NSDAP (NAZI) party authorities were responsible for actively promoting and encouraging the lynchings and murders of Allied aircrews. The Luftwaffe and some of the other military authorities generally disapproved and sometimes actively opposed the atrocities. When Hitler proposed the murder of all Allied prisoners of war as a means of encouraging German servicemen to avoid capture by the Allies, the horrified opposition of the military persuaded Hitler to scale the murders down to only those who had recently escaped their POW camps (e.g. the movie the Great Escape).

In a few isolated instances there were some prosecutions and punishments.

Every pilot who flies enemy territory has to be prepared for bad treatment on the part of the folks whom he has just 'de-housed' and whose relatives he may have killed. Lynchings probably happened more often in Japan, though in this case the perps most likely were military police, the kempetai.

In China, captured Japanese airmen were sometimes put in bamboo cages and paraded from town to town until they died. I have even heard stories that Russian pilots (flying for China) were murdered on the ground by people who believed them to be Japanese. I was skeptical of these stories until one day I was walking around Kunming as a blue-eyed honky and was asked if I were Japanese.

Probably like police anywhere they could get away with it: very slowly.

I doubt it. There were bigger fish to fry, as it were. Certainly none were tried in the Japanese war-crimes proceedings.

all the best

In article <cbcasq$ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it >, Dad was shot down near the end of 1943, and he told me he was almost lynched in Hamburg. He considered himself very fortunate that his guards were Luftwaffe, and they pointed their weapons at the crowd. Dad didn't know if they'd fire at the crowd, but he wasn't lynched.

It would be interesting to know the motivation of the Luftwaffe or Wehrmacht people who intervened to save the downed Allied aircrews. Was it some sort of military respect for fellow warriors or rather was it enlightened self-interest, i.e. they didn't want to set a precedent so that if their people were shot down over the other side, they wouldn't by lynched by the local population there. I ask this because, as was pointed out, the Germans were not scrupulous about following the rules of war (to say the least).

I believe that the Luftwaffe was the service most likely to recognize the Allied aircrew as fellow airmen, doing their duty. Some of them may have been involved in the blitz of England only a few years earlier.

That depends who you mean by 'the Luftwaffe'. The order issued by Goering on 3 September 1943 requiring Luftwaffe officers and men not to intervene in any 'spontaneous' attacks on Allied aircrew was transmitted through the military command structure. There seems to be rather fewer cases of Luftwaffe personnel intervening to save prisoners than the opposite.

This is confusing two separate incidents. It was in March 1944 that Hitler, on the application of Himmler, ordered Keitel as head of OKW to ensure that all the escapers from Stalag Luft III were shot. Keitel passed this order to the head of the OKW department responsible for POWs, who in turn ordered that no attempt was to be made by the German armed forces to retrieve any Sagan escapee from police, SD or Gestapo custody. The SS RHSA under Kaltenbrunner took control of the actual killings.

It was much later - March 1945 IIRC - that Hitler as part of one of his wild tirades ordered the killing of all Allied POWs. While the ever-watchful Bormann took note of this Fuhrer-decree, Himmler was by then negotiating with the Allies and it was the SS, not the military or Party, which had control over Allied POW camp administration by that time. So Hitler's talk came to nothing.

There were a large number of trials, many of prominent Nazi leaders, in Allied and UN tribunals until 1948 when the West German authorities took over prosecution of war criminals and largely dropped the cases entirely.

The Luftwaffe were especially meticulous in this regard. There are documented instances where German air force personnel went into the concentration camps and demanded the release of American airmen sent there by the Gestapo. In the circumstances, this was remarkable. It would have been much easier to let the issue drop.

Factors presumably were: a hangover from the chivalric notions of WWI aerial combat, the Prussian code of honor seen at high levels in the German military, and no doubt a disdain for mere civilians as compared to fellow soldiers.

all the best

That's quite surprising! Do you mean that most Chinese had never seen a Japanese, not even in photographs or propaganda posters? Didn't they know that the Japanese resembled them much more than they did you?

Also, I'm curious about Russians that were flying for China. Were these Soviet citizens that were attempting to aid their Communist comrades in China? Or expatriates who had fled Russia after Lenin's takeover? I would be suprised to hear of Stalin detaching men from the fight to save the Soviet Union from Hitler to save China, even the Communist forces of China. Or are you talking about Russians helping the Chinese after the war with Hitler was won?

Actually, I'm not aware of any proper research into how many times Luftwaffe personnel intervened to save Allied air crews from attack against the number of times they did nothing, or participated. I am aware that a few instances of chivalrous behaviour are constantly repeated and inflated into a general policy for which there is no objective evidence.

It's particularly relevant that the Luftwaffe, despite being the most heavily Nazified of all the armed services, was the one which from necessity was least de-nazified by the western Allies after WW2 . This sort of unpleasant expediency tends to give impetus to the creation of myths of 'we were all airmen together'.

In short, I'm not sure I give much credence to the 'good Luftwaffe save Allied airmen' stories without objective evidence beyond a few isolated incidents.

Are there? I'd be interested to read them up in detail: have you got any cites?