Joachim Helbig

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the German historian and postal history researcher, see Joachim Helbig (Historiker) .

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Joachim Helbig (born September 10, 1915 in Börln , Saxony , † October 5, 1985 in Malente ) was a German Air Force officer and fighter pilot in the Air Force during World War II . At the end of the war , he was a colonel , along with Werner Baumbach , Dietrich Peltz and Hermann Hogeback, as the “most successful” fighter pilot in the Air Force who were awarded the Knight's Cross.

Military career

education

Helbig was the son of a farmer, graduated from high school and joined the army in 1935 . There he was deployed in Artillery Regiment 4 in Dresden until the end of 1936 . After attending the Army War School there, he was transferred to the fighter pilot school in Lechfeld , where he trained as an observer. After its completion, Helbig came to III in April 1937 as a combat observer. Group of Kampfgeschwader 152 to Schwerin . In 1938 the squadron was renamed Lehrgeschwader 1 (LG 1), where Helbig was assigned to Group II. There Helbig completed an aircraft pilot training course . He qualified for the C2 certificate as well as the certificate for blind flight II.

Second World War

During the attack on Poland , Helbig was an observer in a He 111 fighter aircraft . On September 3, 1939, he shot down his first enemy in the air, a Polish army reconnaissance aircraft. On September 4, 1939, Helbig was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. After his recovery, Helbig flew missions against the British Home Fleet in October 1939 .

In February 1940, the retraining and conversion from He 111 to Ju 88 took place . During the German attack on Norway ( Operation Weser Exercise ) in April 1940, Helbig still flew an He 111 during operations in the Narvik - Trondheim area . During a deep attack, his on-board mechanic was badly wounded by Norwegian fire and the left engine of his machine was shot to pieces; Helbig was able to land the machine, but the machine broke. The ensuing confusion on the tarmac was used by several Norwegian prisoners of war to flee. Helbig only escaped a threatened trial before the court-martial when the squadron was relocated to northern Germany.

In the following campaign in the west , Helbig flew as squadron captain of the 4th squadron in LG 1 in the Netherlands , Belgium and northern France and was involved in the bombing of the British expeditionary force in Dunkirk . Here he was wounded for the second time in a dogfight with three Supermarine Spitfires . After the French campaign, Helbig was promoted to captain on July 19, 1940. Then he was stationed with the LG 1 in Orléans , from where the squadron flew from August 13, 1940 against Great Britain missions; On that day Helbig returned as the only one of his squadron in a badly damaged machine from the operation against the naval airport Worthy Down.

By November 1940 Helbig flew about 80 sorties against England. After 75 enemy flights, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on October 24, 1940. By then, apart from ground targets, he had sunk around 22,000 GRT of ship space and damaged a further 11,000 GRT.

Between December 24 and 31, 1940, LG 1 was moved from the canal front to Sicily in the Mediterranean region . There Helbig flew missions in Libya , Tobruk and in the battle for Malta . Helbig sank a troop transport with 10,000 GRT in the port of Piraeus . Subsequently, his squadron took part in the airborne battle for Crete . In June 1941 Helbig reached his 150th mission with an attack on Haifa . Until November 1941 he flew missions against the Suez Canal and against various sea targets. In August 1941, his gunner Franz Schlund was awarded the Knight's Cross as the first gunner in the Air Force. In November 1941 Helbig became group commander of the I. Group of LG 1. On January 16, 1942, after 210 "enemy flights", he was awarded the Knight's Cross Oak Leaves.

Until July 1942 Helbig and his group flew further missions to Tobruk , Suez , the Suez Canal, Port Said and Alexandria . From May to July 1942 they supported Rommel's battle for El-Alamein . On September 28, 1942, after 500 "enemy flights" and after the sinking of 200,000 GRT, Helbig was awarded the Knight's Cross as the second fighter pilot of the Air Force and the 20th soldier of the Wehrmacht. The Helbig squadron was called The Helbig Flyers by the British due to its continued success at the time .

From November to December 1942 Helbig flew attacks against the American-British landing fleet on the Algerian coast. In January 1943 he was appointed stage manager with the general of the fighter pilots . In March of the same year he was promoted to mdWdGb as general of the fighter pilots and to lieutenant colonel. However, conflicts soon arose, similar to Adolf Galland's , with superiors such as Wolfram von Richthofen and Albert Kesselring . He then asked to return to the front line.

This was granted and Helbig returned to LG 1 as a commodore in August 1943 . Later, his squadron and Kampfgeschwader 76 , known as the Helbig Battle Group , flew missions in the western Mediterranean. In February 1944 his squadron was transferred from Greece to Italy, where until May 1944 u. a. Operations in the context of the Anzio and Nettuno bridgehead followed.

After the Allied landing in Normandy , his squadron was moved to Belgium to fly missions in the invasion area there. In the run-up to this, Helbig refused to relocate his squadron during the day due to the Allied air sovereignty, which in turn brought him a trial before the court martial. However, the initiated proceedings have been closed. In September 1944, Helbig's squadrons, together with a Stuka group and a reconnaissance squadron, supported the ground units of the Wehrmacht at the German border with a command post in Cologne . There Helbig was seriously wounded in his car during a troop visit to the Vogelsang airfield in an enemy low-flying attack. After several months of hospitalization, Helbig did not return to the troops until April 1945 and formed a new battle group consisting of LG 1 and Kampfgeschwader 200 with a command post in Schwerin - Zippendorf .

On April 30, 1945, Helbig was informed by Major General Franz Reuss that the plan was to use Fieseler Storch to fly important personalities of the Reich government from Berlin-Wannsee, which was enclosed by the Red Army . Helbig took over the command of operations without a higher order. The take-off took place on the night of April 30th to May 1st, 1945 with nine aircraft. After two hours of circling over the burning Berlin, Helbig decided to abort the operation due to the Russian air defense and returned to Schwerin. On May 1, 1945, he flew from there to his LG 1, which has since been relocated, in Flensburg. On May 4, 1945 he was commissioned by the Dönitz government to fly as a courier plane to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner in Czechoslovakia . On May 8, 1945, he received an order from his staff to fly low to the west. There he was captured by the US and taken to Sennelager .

post war period

On June 9, 1945, Helbig fled and hid in West Germany for years without being recognized. He later acted as managing director of the Schultheiss brewery in Berlin (West). Helbig had an accident with a car on October 3, 1985 while on vacation in Spain and succumbed to his injuries there two days later.

Awards

• Mentioned in the Wehrmacht report on May 13, 1942 and May 28, 1944
• Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves and swords

literature

• Georg Brütting: Those were the German fighter aces 1939-1945 , Motorbuch-Verlag Stuttgart, 4th edition 1981, ISBN 3-87943-345-3 , pp. 81-100
• Jochen Kaiser: The knight's cross bearers of the combat pilots , Volume 1, Luftfahrtverlag-Start, 1st edition 2011, ISBN 978-3941437074
• Gordon Williamson and Ramiro Bujeiro: Knight's Cross and Oak-Leaves Recipients 1939-40- Volume 114 of Elite Series. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2004, ISBN 1-84176-641-0 , pp. 45-47.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Kösliner Zeitung, party official newspaper of the NSDAP , Gau Pommern from September 29, 1942: Helbig-Flyers - the horror of the English
2. ↑ Gordon Williamson and Ramiro Bujeiro: Knight's Cross and Oak-Leaves Recipients 1939-40 - Volume 114 of Elite Series. 2004, p. 46.
3. ^ The Wehrmacht reports 1939-1945 Society for Literature and Education Cologne, AISN B0028NXZA4, p. 127 Volume II), p. 112 (Volume III)
4. ↑ Veit Scherzer : The owners of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross 1939–1945 from the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents in the Federal Archives. Scherzer Militaer-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 348