Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] At exactly 4 o'clock on June 22, 1941, German bombers did not bomb Kyiv. A formation of machines with white "Balkenkreuz" on their wings appeared over the city at the beginning of the eighth morning, dropping their bomb load on important objects (for example, the Bolshevik plant and Plant No. 43 on the Brest-Litovsk highway) and military airfields.
But already on this day the first enemy plane was shot down.
The I-16 fighter, which took off from the suburban airfield of Zhulyany, was piloted by Captain Ivan Krasnoyurchenko, a hero of Khalkhin-Gol and Hero of the Soviet Union. Since April 1941, he had held the position of inspector for the preparation of fighter aviation of the Air Force Directorate of the Kiev Special Military District and had arrived the day before for an inspection.
Having taken off, the experienced pilot caught up with the lagging Ju-88, which was taking photos of the results of the raid, and shot it with machine guns. Later, it was dragged to the center of Kyiv for the amusement of the people, and then the airfield duty shift immediately set off to the crash site to capture the pilots.
And this case was not the only one and not only in Kyiv. Only three anti-aircraft divisions covering Lutsk shot down 21 German aircraft in the first ten days of the war. And there were other cases, for example, on June 22, a Junkers landed due to a breakdown on Soviet territory near Tarnopol. The navigator shot himself, the rest of the crew surrendered.
On June 23, a German bomber, whose crew included Karl Fieg, Franz Hummel, Heinrich Menning and Paul Hofbauer, managed to drop 14 bombs on the Ovruch airfield, but was shot down by Soviet anti-aircraft guns. The pilots were captured.
“The most terrible morning,” according to the recollections of Kiev residents, did not come on the first day of the war, but on June 25, when anti-aircraft guns and machine guns were firing from all sides, shrapnel fell like rain, and houses shook as if during an earthquake.
Cadets guard the same Ju-88 that was shot down on June 25 near Brovary
But on that day, during a raid on an airfield near the left-bank town of Brovary, a Ju-88 from the second group of the 54th "Dead Head" squadron was shot down, and the entire crew was captured. But the most interesting thing is not that the Germans were shot down, but how the captured crews were later used in Soviet propaganda.
And what it really influenced.
"RUN, FOOLS"
The young men who had made a forced landing near Brovary (which was recorded in the report of the KG54 “Dead Head” squadron) soon appeared in the press with an “open letter”.
The newspapers Pravda and Krasnaya Zvezda informed their readers that the pilot, a native of Breslau, Hans-Julius Hermann, the pilot-observer from Frankfurt am Main, Hans Kratz, the Czech corporal Adolf Appel from Brno, and the radio operator from Regensburg, Wilhelm Schmidt, had deliberately decided to go over to the side of the Red Army.
And they landed the plane themselves.
"We often asked ourselves: Why is Hitler fighting against the whole world? Why does he bring death and ruin to all the peoples of Europe? " simple German guys invisibly wave their hands on the pages of Pravda on June 29. " We were often worried by the thought that because of the bloody dog Hitler, many innocent women and children were dying from our bombs. That is why this time we dropped our bombs in such a way that they did no harm. We had long harbored the idea of escaping from Hitler and starting a peaceful life, but we were afraid. Now that Hitler has declared war on Russia, in which he will certainly lose his head, we have decided to make an escape."
In short, they dropped bombs into the Dnieper and landed near Kiev, where they were taken prisoner by local peasants, which “once again convinced us that the Soviet people are united, prepared to fight and will win.”
The talkative flight gunner-mechanic Hoffbauer also made his mark in the press; he was the only one from his crew who was willing to communicate, and therefore was presented as the one who had “flown over” in the singular.
On June 30, 1941, the same Pravda published “A Conversation with a German Pilot.” The newspaper’s special correspondent Grigory Pevzner (writing under the pseudonym P. Grinev) reported:
"Paul Hofbauer is 23 years old. He is a frail man of medium height. He holds the rank of corporal. He is wearing a German pilot's suit made of poor-quality steel-colored cloth. The yellow shoulder straps are decorated with pilot's insignia. The left side of his jacket is intercepted by a black, white, and red ribbon - the sign of being awarded the Iron Cross of the Second Class. In addition, he has been awarded the Iron Cross of the First Class...
Paul Hofbauer has been in the German army for two years. The Nazis sent him 17 times to bomb French and English cities and villages, and then ordered him to bomb peaceful Soviet cities.
Hofbauer did not return to his base. He flew to the Soviet side and landed."
In this story, the plane was also "instantly surrounded" by a crowd of ordinary villagers, in whom the war-weary upholsterer from Munich saw his brothers and sisters. In an interview with Pevzner, he said that he did not want to fight, because "it was clear to each of us that Soviet Russia was a huge force, that a war with it would not lead to anything good."
And only the threat of execution drives pilots and soldiers of other branches of the armed forces to war, while the German people do not want war, because “fascism and Hitler are hateful to every working German.”
The next day, July 1, Hofbauer’s appeal to German pilots and soldiers was published in Krasnaya Zvezda and other Soviet newspapers, which generally repeated the main set of ideas: the mad Hitler had begun a treacherous campaign against Soviet Russia and would lose, we were blind, brothers, we cannot fight against a country “where the working man feels like a true man, where everyone works for his own good and the good of his homeland.”
All German pilots, oppressed by the Hitlerite fascists, were offered not to drop bombs on peaceful Russian cities and to fly to Soviet Russia to help destroy bloody fascism.
However, all this had no visible effect, since Soviet propagandists preferred to work in the picture of the world that was in their heads. Without taking into account the realities of the other side and the life principles of the "oppressed pilots". Although the prisoners gave fairly detailed testimony during interrogations in the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR - these documents were preserved in the archive.
And at the same time they told how the bombing of Kyiv was organized.
So we have a great opportunity to find out what the real answers of the upholsterer Hofbauer were and what the members of Kratz's crew, who in the photo in the case do not look as inspired as in the newspaper, thought about what was happening.
AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE ENEMY
Despite his 24 years of age, Hans Georgievich Kratz (as he was called in the protocol by the NKGB officers) was, in the terminology of the newspaper Pravda, a seasoned Hitlerite ace. He volunteered for the army in 1936, and after graduating from the school for observer pilots, he flew a fair amount. In 1940–41, he took part in the bombing of London, Portsmouth, Plymouth, and sank ships in the Atlantic.
There is even a photo of its crew during service in Paris, where the 54th Bomber Squadron of the Luftwaffe "Totenkopf" was based, taking part in all campaigns and major battles in the European theater of war.
And in June the unit was transferred to Lublin, not far from which, near the village of Malkiew, there was a field airfield. It was from here that flights were carried out at the end of June 1941 to bomb Lutsk, Rivne, Rava-Ruska, Kovel, Zhitomir, Berdichev and Kyiv.
The "voluntarily flown" crew of the "Ju-88" on June 22 as part of a group carried out three raids on Lutsk (in the morning, at noon and in the evening) with the aim of bombing the airfield. On June 23 they worked to search for tank formations. On June 24 they bombed the Vladimir-Volynsky airfield twice and were hit, the plane caught fire.
From the beginning of the war until the plane was shot down, they carried out combat sorties over Soviet territory seven times, without experiencing any pangs of conscience at all.
"The mood of the soldiers of the German army is good. The soldiers are fed well, they receive food three times a day, for each flight the soldiers receive a separate ration. The soldiers go into battle with enthusiasm," Kratz reports to the head of the 3rd department of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR, state security captain Zavgorodniy.
At 4 a.m. on June 25, two dozen aircraft under the command of Major Kraft took off from the airfield near Lublin. They flew blindly above the clouds straight through Kovel, Sarny, Ovruch to the Dnieper, and then turned south in the direction of the Brovary airfield. The task was to drop the entire load of SC high-explosive bombs, and then take photographs of Kyiv.
This task was completed, but the plane was hit by anti-aircraft guns.
Later, during interrogations, all crew members behaved very reservedly, answered questions sparingly, and the investigators’ questions about the number and location of the paratroopers’ drop (since the Soviet command from top to bottom was simply obsessed with enemy landings) looked downright funny.
At the same time, pilot Herman briefly reports that the command announced to the personnel several hours before the raid: the USSR intends to seize new territories, and to prevent this, it is necessary to enter the war.
“After concluding a pact with Germany, the Soviet Union forcibly seized part of the territory of former Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and that Germany will no longer allow the USSR to expand its territory at the expense of other states,” in this quote from a non-commissioned officer one can easily recognize the source of inspiration for Viktor Suvorov-Rezun.
The concept of German propaganda throughout the war was built exclusively on defensive motives: enemies are all around, everyone wishes harm to the peaceful Reich, and it is literally forced to defend itself. And from some point on, it literally became a war "for the survival of the nation" - approximately the same thing is being done by Ukrainian propaganda today.
The talkative Hofbauer (in the protocol - Paul Georgievich) happily explains all geopolitics to the state security officers.
The Munich upholsterer was clearly interested in the issue, since he quite clearly gives an outline of the problems of international relations: after the friendship treaty of 1939, the USSR began to strengthen its positions in the western regions of Ukraine and to pull up large units of troops to the border. Then there were claims to control over the Dardanelles Strait, friction with Germany's allies - Bulgaria and Romania.
"With the help of the USSR, a government coup was carried out in Yugoslavia, and in the event of war with Germany, the Soviet Union was obliged to help Yugoslavia with military materials. In confirmation of this, Germany found the relevant documents in Yugoslavia. This aid to Yugoslavia was proof that the USSR was no longer helping Germany. Soon before the start of the war, Soviet troops invaded German territory, and Germany became convinced that the time had come to take up arms," says the knowledgeable Paul Georgievich.
And he adds that the German people were shocked by such betrayal: everyone thought that the Soviet country, a brotherly one, would help the Germans, who would transfer troops through the USSR to Asia to conquer the colonies of the hated English.
And here they had to take up arms. The soldiers were very confused, because they consider the USSR a powerful state that will be difficult to defeat. But the order must be carried out, how else?
By the way, Hoffbauer is the only one who talks about some discontent among the flight crew. Only it concerns the unexpected continuation of the war for everyone: his colleagues hoped to rest after England and go home. But the appeals through Pravda and Krasnaya Zvezda had nothing to do with demotivation and, of course, did not affect the readiness of the bombers to continue to rain bombs from the sky.
They clearly did not feel like "workers and farmers in soldiers' uniforms" fighting against the USSR under duress, as the Bureau of Military-Political Propaganda assured the Soviet audience. And they cooperated mainly to save their lives.
Of course, there were exceptions.
The pilot of the Ju-88, Eberhard Kazirius, who was captured near Tarnopol, forgot about his membership in the NSDAP, graduated from the school of the Anti-Fascist Front in the Comintern structure, actively worked in propaganda, and in the post-war GDR headed the People's Police.
But in general, ideological work in relation to the enemy turned out to be an absolute failure, and by the summer of 1942, another formula was put into use: “Kill the German!”
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