Terror Flyers examines the "lynch justice" (Lynchjustiz) committed against American airmen in Nazi Germany during World War II. Using engaging first-person accounts of downed pilots, as well as previously unused primary sources,Terror Flyers challenges the notion that such lynchings were exclusively the domain of Nazi party officials and soldiers. New evidence reveals ordinary German people executedLynchjustizas well.
Initially occurring as a spontaneous reaction to the devastation of the Allied air campaign against the cities of the Third Reich, Lynchjustiz offered the Nazi regime a unique propaganda opportunity to harness the outrage of the German population. Fueled by inspiration from America's own history of the lynching of African Americans, Nazi propaganda exploited the very same imagery found in US publications to escalate the anger of the German people.
Drawing heavily on the accounts of the downed airmen themselves, testimonies from the "flyer trials" held in Dachau during 194548, and rarely seen Nazi propaganda,Terror Flyers offers a new narrative of this previously overlooked aspect of the Allied campaign in Europe and suggests that at least 3,000 cases of lynch justice likely occurred between 1943 and 1945.
Kevin T Hall is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-Universtiät Bochum, Germany. He was a Fulbright grantee in Cologne in 20132014 and obtained his PhD from Central Michigan University in 2018. In 2019, he was a postdoctoral research historian at the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency (DPAA) in Honolulu, where he assisted the agency in accounting for US servicemen missing from past conflicts.
List of Figures
List of Charts
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Uninvited Guests: Experiences Of Downed Airmen
2. American "Terror Flyers" In German Propagandaiii
3. The History And Escalation OfLynchjustiz In Germany
4. Analysis Of The Flyer Trials
5.LynchjustizNarratives
6. Examining The Motives OfLynchjustiz
Conclusion
Appendix ALynchjustiz Documents
Appendix BNewspaper Examples
Appendix CIndex Of Flyer Trials
Appendix DUnsolved Cases
Appendix EList Of Known Airmen Held At St. Giles Prison
Appendix FList of Known Airmen held in Prisons
Bibliography
Index
