Fighter ace Col. Johannes Steinhoff commanded an elite group of
pilots trained to fly the first jet aircraft employed in combat,
the famous Messerschmitt Me-262, at a time when Reich Marshal
Hermann Gsring, by then out of favor with Hitler for his failure to
stop the Allied bombing raids, denounced his own pilots as cowards.
After Gsring refused to deploy the Me-262 as a fighter, the role
for which it was designed, and instead ordered its use as a bomber,
Steinhoff and other senior air leaders devised a plot to depose
Gsring from his command of the Luftwaffe in the futile hope of
staving off final defeat in the air. The pilots' long-standing
disgust with their Reich Marshal's military incompetence and
technical dilettantism led to their dangerous intrigue in the fall
of 1944. There was an added element of risk as their desperate
gamble came in the wake of the July 20 plot against Hitler, the
onrushing Allied onslaught, and the general disintegration of the
German military and its war effort. Steinhoff crashed while trying
to take off in a heavily laden Me-262. The explosion left him badly
burned and still in the hospital when the war ended. German soldier
the account that became The Final Hours. His memories are vivid,
painful, and gripping. Free from the years of recrimination and
reflection so common in similar works, his tale recounts the
pressure of fighting for a lost cause and the intrigue fostered by
an unstable command. His account reveals every facet of a
remarkable fighter pilot's struggle for survival and provides an
excellent case study of the plodding bureaucracy and scheming
obscurantism so characteristic of the Third Reich. I first
discovered Johannes Steinhoff as a graduate student, preparing a
field in World War II. His name kept appearing as one of the gifted
warriors who carried the Third Reich on their shoulders for six
years. Never did men fight better in a worse cause than did the
Germans from 1939 to 1945, and Steinhoff was a paladin. As a
fighter pilot he served on every major front and scored 176 aerial
victories. He was among the first to fly jets in combat, serving
with the famous Squadron of Experts in the war's final days. He had
been decorated with the Knight's Cross with Swords and Oak Leaves.
bravery they recognized were no less real for that. There was also
a certain karmic irony in someone often called the handsomest man
in the Luftwaffe having his face burned off in a crash just at the
end of the war, eventually emerging from years of restorative
surgery with a gargoyle mask that was mostly scar tissue. It
required little imagination to interpret Johannes Steinhoff as a
symbol of Germany itself: disfigured by its past, permanently
marked for everyone to see. I regularly suggested the trope to my
classes, and considered myself a clever young professor indeed. It
required no more research than reading German newspapers to
discover that Johannes Steinhoff was more than a symbol of a
vanished regime and a lost war. When the newly-established Federal
Republic of Germany began considering recreating its armed forces
as part of its reintegration into an emerging Western Alliance,
Steinhoff was among the first veterans consulted. challenge openly
what he considered the disastrously mistaken operational decisions
of Hitler and his lieutenant, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goring.
Initially reluctant, like many of his counterparts, to consider
putting on a uniform once more, Steinhoff finally decided that he
might after all be able to contribute directly to creating a new
Germany. It would not be a Germany of power and conquest like its
Imperial and National Socialist predecessors. Nor would it be the
Holy Germany, a beacon to the nations, of which resisters like
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had dreamed. This Germany would be a
state and a people among others, committed to a common European and
Atlantic enterprise. Resisting the ideological and military
challenges of the Soviet Union was merely a first step towards the
eventual construction of a community of free peoples, linked by
mutual interests and mutual respect. He saw German-American
relations as the cornerstone of that enterprise. whose officers and
men served a democracy in the context of the NATO Alliance. He
eventually rose to be its Inspector-General, then as Chairman of
the Military Commission of NATO, retiring as a four-star general.
Neither he nor his pilots ever fired a shot in anger. In his later
years, Steinhoff described that as the aspect of his career of
which he was most proud. I learned that during our collaboration on
a book titled Voices from the Third Reich. In 1985, President
Ronald Reagan made international headlines by standing alongside
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to commemorate German war dead at
Bitburg, in a cemetery including some graves of SS men. General
Steinhoff, by then retired, attended the ceremony, and was shaken
by the negative reactions it evoked in Europe and the United
States. Johannes had told his own wartime story, in The Straits of
Messina and this volume, The Final Hours. But he believed there was
a larger story to tell: the story of the German people, especially
the generation that had fought World War II in the front lines.
understand the complex web of circumstances and principles that
brought Adolf Hitler to power and held Germany in his thrall until
nothing remained. To tell the story, Johannes decided he needed an
American collaborator. By then I was teaching at Colorado College.
Johannes's son-in-law was also on the faculty, in a different
department, and the General and I had met casually a couple of
times. When his daughter suggested What about Dennis? he was
willing to consider it. We met, talked, and came to a quick
agreement. For me it was the start of an adventure. We'll be
working in each others' pockets for a long time, Johannes told me.
I want someone who can discuss more than today's newspaper. It
didn't take me long to discover that the general
General
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