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 executed Lynchjustiz as 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 1945-48, 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.

About the Author

Kevin T Hall is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-Universtiat Bochum, Germany. He was a Fulbright grantee in Cologne in 2013-2014 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.

Reviews

In Terror Flyers , military historian Kevin Hall (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum) offers a well researched and detailed study of incidents of Lynchjustiz (lynch justice) against US airmen in Nazi Germany during World War II. Earlier literature long ago identified the violence against some US Air Corps crew members who were forced to bail out over Germany. Hall uses several new sources to prove the number of such cases was much larger than previously thought, with a focus on the culpability of both civilians and the National Socialist regime

* Michigan War Studies Review *

Terror Flyers brings to light a less-known history and integrates a psycho-social analysis of Germany's Nazis, both civilian and official, and the dastardly punishment they meted out to several downed Allied flyers by ignoring their injuries, physically assaulting them, and then simply killing them.

-- Sheldon Goldberg * H-TGS *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253050151
Author Kevin T Hall
Format Hardback
Page Count 400
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 703g