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Luftwaffe airmen were confronted with different sorts of dangers in the various places and situations in which they were deployed. That emerges clearly from a conversation between two Luftwaffe lance corporals from October 1942. They discuss the toll that the enemy’s numerical superiority could take on soldiers’ nerves:

We had some crews back from STALINGRAD with “88’s.” We came back from STALINGRAD, too, to help a bit over ENGLAND…. Night raid on CAMBRIDGE. They had nothing more to say when they got back again. Two had been shot down. They didn’t say a word. They were glad to get away again.

WEBER: In RUSSIA the flying is—

BÜCHER: Easier, I tell you! We did some flying in RUSSIA! That was fine. But here it’s just suicide.³⁰¹

Those remarks echoed the confession of a German airman in October 1940:

Comrades whose planes had been shot down were one of the recurring topics in Luftwaffe POWs’ conversations. But the speakers usually tried to avoid explicitly referring to death. The airman cited above who confessed his fear of being burned alive was the exception to the rule.

Instead, POWs remained abstract when they talked about lost crews, omitting names and causes of death. Why? Talking about death was thought to bring bad luck, as a bomber pilot named Schumann revealed when relating the heavy losses suffered within his crew: “Our morale was… low. As we were climbing into the aircraft the W/T operator said: ‘Get ready to die.’ I’ve always said it’s wrong to talk like that.”³⁰³

When soldiers did discuss the psychological strain that resulted from extreme stress and fears for one’s life, they often used comrades as surrogates for expressing what were likely their own emotions:

These remarks were recorded in March 1943. That same month, a bomber observer named Johann Maschel reported about a comrade whose nerves were completely shot after flying seventy-five missions: