"...and is missing following aerial combat!" by Werner Girbig in Jägerblatt, March 1972
"... Hundreds of reports issued by military units after costly missions ended with this very sentence. One such was Hptm. Armin Köhler’s III./JG 77 which suffered losses on December 23, 1944: two pilots killed or missing and five wounded.
When Günter Schmitz drew my attention to the grave of an unknown German fighter pilot in Altenahr in the summer of 1970, neither of us knew that the man resting there belonged to that very same III. Gruppe of JG 77, or that a combination of unfortunate circumstances would delay the resolution of his fate for another 18 months. Above all, I had no idea at the time how much effort it would take to gather the material needed to prove that the fallen airman in the Altenahr cemetery grave could only be one specific individual.
But it is best to tell the story in order.
At least the date and approximate time of the unknown fighter pilot’s crash near Altenahr were known: December 23, 1944, around 3:30 p.m. This information came from the Altenahr gravedigger; long after the war ended, scrap collectors alerted him to wreckage and skeletal remains, prompting him to retrieve the pilot’s body from the woods and bury it in the municipal cemetery. According to his own account, he found and broke the Erkennungsmarke ID tag also found at the crash site, intending to place one half in the grave and hand the other over to the police for forwarding. Furthermore, the incident was officially recorded, and the identification tag number was noted down. Another resident of Altenahr reported finding a data plate inscribed "Messerschmitt AG" near the crash site, though he had subsequently discarded it carelessly.
Alongside the pilot's shattered body, a Polish coin and a St. Christopher amulet were found at the time—items that would prove invaluable for further research.
Twenty-six years after the tragic events over the "Western Combat Zone," I began tracing the unknown pilot's path using the scant information available. Günter Schmitz had meanwhile secured permission from the municipal authorities to open the grave, allowing us to search for the identification tag half—which we hoped to find there—using a detector on December 1, 1970.
Yet, we had no luck that day. Although even the tiniest screws from the aircraft were present and detectable in the grave—the pilot had been recovered from the crash site along with many small fragments of his machine and buried in Altenahr—not the slightest trace of an identification tag could be found.
The specific file folder containing the records was also missing. Shortly after the war ended, officials from some military authority had appeared to confiscate specific documents, and since that time, the file folder had vanished. The fate of the fallen airman could now only be determined through indirect means, so I immediately set to work reconstructing the combat events of December 23, 1944.
With the help of the WASt in Berlin, I eventually had a good dozen pilots on my list who had been missing since December 23. Naturally, a bit of luck is required in such matters, and Günter Schmitz managed to find several rounds of 30mm ammunition as well as a fragment of a control surface horn—a part specific to the Bf 109. The ammunition and various other distinctive aircraft components confirmed to us that the plane must have been a Bf 109 K-4.
Returning to the pilots missing from December 23: some could be ruled out immediately because they had flown Focke-Wulf aircraft that day; of the remaining six Messerschmitt pilots, three flew the G-14 model and the others the K-4. One of these K-4 pilots—a member of III./JG 77—hailed from Teschen in Upper Silesia, and I immediately thought of the Polish coin, given Teschen’s location in the German-Polish border region.
Both in terms of time and location, the evidence now pointed strongly toward the JG 77 non-commissioned officer, as the other pilots belonged to units deployed elsewhere on the morning of December 23. The unidentified fallen pilot, however, had crashed around 3:30 p.m.—precisely the time when the III. Gruppe of JG 77 was engaged in aerial combat over the Ahr Valley in their Bf 109 K-4s. Hptm. Köhler himself landed in Cologne at 3:15 p.m. following the mission. Uffz. Silwester was the only member of this unit still missing as of December 23, 1944.
I was able to compile enough information to hand it over to the WASt (German Federal Archives). It took weeks before I could submit all the documents. For me, it was already clear that the dead fighter pilot in Altenahr could only be Uffz. Walter Silwester of 12 Staffel of JG 77.
All the information converged at one point. Would the WASt also be able to close the case based on my "circumstantial evidence"?
As the months passed, I learned from Josef Kleber, former Adjutant of III./JG 77, how the Gruppe was unexpectedly attacked by Allied fighters (P-47s) over the Ahr Mountains on December 23rd during their outbound flight and suffered the well-known losses. Since December 1944, losses among the German fighter forces had been rising rapidly. Leadership errors and inadequate training could not be compensated for by the self-sacrifice of the fighter pilots alone.
During the fierce and dramatic air battles in the West in the final days of 1944 (December 23-31), hundreds of aircraft were shot down. Even today, 83 German fighter pilots are considered effectively missing in action there, and the fact that the entire fighter force still lists well over 2,000 missing pilots can easily be seen, in part, from the existing loss lists.
The area of the so-called "Western Combat Zone" will be the immediate focus of my next investigations. Uffz. Silwester was one of those missing from the Ardennes Offensive, and the clarification of his fate, in which Günter Schmitz also played a significant role, will hopefully not be the last success..."
To conclude, here again is the loss report of III./JG 77 from December 23, 1944 including details of 11. and 12. Staffel Bf 109 K-4s..
Uffz. Hasso Fröhlich 11. Staffel verw.
'yellow 16' WNr. 330200
Lt. Martin Ludwig 12. Staffel
verw.
'blue 8' WNr. 330205
Uffz. Willi Meyer
12. Staffel
verw.
'blue 6' WNr. 330217
Uffz. Karl Reinberg
12. Staffel
verw.
'blue 13' WNr. 330197
Fw. Hans Rössner
12. Staffel, gefallen (zunächst vermißt)
'blue 3' WNr. 330177
Uffz. Walter Silwester 12. Staffel, gefallen (zunächst vermißt)
'blue 11' WNr. 330164
Lt. W. Wildenauer 11. Staffel verw.
'yellow 13' WNr. 330144
