Books: Nazi Bomber

I WAS A NAZI FLIER—Gottfried Leske—Dial ($2.50).

What is the Nazi airman like who, in a flash of TNT and the space of a second, without seeing you or being seen, blows to pieces your children, your home, your life? This week I Was a Nazi Flier claimed to tell. The book purported to be the diary of pseudonymous Gottfried Leske, flight sergeant in the Luftwaffe, who took part in the great Blitz on London, Birmingham, Coventry, is now a prisoner of war in Canada.

Smuggled out of Germany by ways & means which émigré Editor Curt Riess will not disclose, the diary has been deciphered (Leske sometimes wrote German shorthand); translated into rational language (Leske wrote a febrile Nazi slang); the entries dated, edited and rearranged. If, as Editor Riess (who knew Leske) believes, the diary is authentic, it is the first full-length self-portrait in English of the Nazi bomber’s mind.

Self-revealed, Leske is: 1) a mental twelve-year-old with a craving for speed and action; 2) a childless adolescent who had no sex experience until some time after he had been destroying other men’s children; 3) a pulp-paper brain which listens only to the war communiqués on the radio, hates music, has to make an effort even to read the recollections of German War Ace Fritz Udet; 4) a cultural blank registering only the slogans of the Nazi leaders; 5) a historical illiterate knowing nothing about the history of other countries or his own before the Nazis. But he is also a skilled technician and killer.

“Clear sky to the west,” wrote Leske as the Germans plunged through the Belgian lines. “Below we saw some burned-out French planes. Moranes, I think. On all the roads German troops. Then nothing at all. No sign of the enemy. It was as though the world had gone to bed,” he adds disgustedly. It was more fun later: “Bombed Brussels and Antwerp again. People were running out of the houses. Trying to escape. . . . Some of them have bicycles. Some are pushing baby carriages. When we get low enough we strafe them. Then they all throw themselves into the ditch on the side of the road. It doesn’t help them, though.”

Not all the German airmen feel quite as Wagnerian: “Franz Putzke was in one of his serious moods . . . he wasn’t so keen about shooting the people who ran. . . . Lederer said: ‘They are our enemies, aren’t they? One must kill his enemies, too!’ I said, ‘Who are we to decide what to do or what not to do? The Führer decides.’ Putzke wouldn’t agree, and Lederer called him a democratic coward. . . . Of course, Putzke isn’t a democratic coward. He’s just not interested. Originally he wanted to be an engineer.”

To Leske, retaliation by the enemy is a personal affront, an outrage and probably illegal. A journalist told him that the Dutch had fired on descending Nazi parachutists: “It’s a rotten, beastly business, shooting at defenseless parachutists. Typically Dutch. I think it isn’t according to international law, anyway.” Later, when the Nazi fliers again find “roads that are lousy with people”—”So they are civilians?” writes Leske, “Well, either it’s war or it isn’t.”

Early in the war, the Nazi fliers had a French flier in their mess: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man as tired as that fellow. His eyes were swollen nearly shut and all red with weariness. . . . He kept saying over and over again, ‘There are so many of you. So terribly many of you. . . .’ We couldn’t help laughing when he kept saying that. . . . The funny thing is that the Frenchman knows more about the figures than we do. I mean, he knows more about how superior we are than we know ourselves. . . . He seems to be very old and kind of above it all. . . as though he were talking about times long past. That’s the real difference between us. . . I think in a way we Germans are much younger than the French.”

A captured English pilot proved even more baffling. “When he sat down at our table, he didn’t seem worried. He even smiled . . . said, ‘Guess I had bad luck.’ He said it as though he had just lost a game of tennis. . . . Moeller said, well, after all, even though we’re enemies we are still all fliers, so we have something in common. . . . We have something the troops on the ground haven’t got. Mr. Tommy said he had never really thought about it . . . he didn’t think he was any better than the others. . . . After all, it was less monotonous and he didn’t have to walk much. ‘You see I hate walking,’ he said and laughed. They’re really queer people, the English.”

Leske shares his comrade’s feeling: “It’s really a marvelous thing to be a flier. . . . We do something that ordinary people can’t do. When you are pulling her up high above the clouds, you have the feeling that you can spit on everything down below. And you can, of course.”

Writing of “what we must have along when we take off,” Leske describes the “color bag” that spreads out to mark a forced landing on water, the life belt that “makes us sweat like pigs.” Knives are carried to cut tangled parachute cords. “Then there is the iron ration. Biscuits and chocolate bars wrapped in waterproof silk. . . . Everything else has to be left behind . . . letters, army theater tickets, or movie tickets. . . . They all might give clues to the enemy in case you are taken prisoner.”

Leske is geared to a tempo that makes everything else insipid. A visit home is dull. His first trip to Paris is “awfully disappointing. I’d always heard that Paris is the gayest city in the world, a city where you can have a wonderful time. But I must say I thought it was the gloomiest city in the world. All the people walk around with glum, unpleasant faces. After all, nothing happened to them. I mean, they weren’t even bombed.” There was not much to do: “Everybody knows that almost all French women have syphilis.” But it was some pleasure for Leske to find that he could speak French: “I feel marvelous about it. . . . I can understand almost everything if they don’t talk too fast. When they do, I just say a little threateningly, ‘Plus lentement, plus lentement.’ That’s enough to make them talk slower.”

But, like aircraft, airmen wear out. After some six months of bombing, Leske writes: “There really isn’t anything wrong with me. I’m just tired when we’re on the way back. . . . Sometimes I feel as though I won’t be able to last until I set her down.” He is worried about a commission which is retesting all Nazi fliers because so many planes have crashed on the way home. One of the pilots took drugs for that tired feeling. Leske would not: “I think those pills become a habit, and then you can’t stop. I once heard it.” Later he blacked out. How, when & where Leske’s plane was brought down the diary does not tell.

This book is no more pleasant to read than any pathological report. But for those who want to understand their enemies, it is required reading. Gottfried Leske is terrifying not only because he is a mindless but effective cog in a precision machine. Nor is he a purely German phenomenon. He is typical of a generation without traditions, knowledge, human experience, which looks for no higher meaning in life than physical violence (“It’s wonderful,” writes Leske, “to know that any moment your number may be up”). He is the raw stuff out of which Fascism is made. And he is most terrifying because he is everywhere.