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By Root 1701 0

could have reclaimed the skies over Germany’.40 The speed of this jet-powered fighter, along with its relative stability in flight, suggests that it offered the best possibility ‘of Germany driving the Allied bombers out of the sky’. Hitler saw the Me-262 for the first time at Insterburg airfield after the Berlin raids of late November 1943, in the company of Göring, Milch, Speer, the warplane designer and manufacturer Willy Messerschmitt, Galland and others, and his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below. (Below was a devout Nazi until his death in 1983, and his recollections of working beside Hitler between 1937 and 1945 provide an invaluable and reliable source for historians.41 He was a Christian Prussian from an old Junker soldiering family, thus personifying an entire menagerie of Hitler’s bêtes noires, but he and his wife Maria loved the Führer, and Maria was also close to his girlfriend Eva Braun.) At the Insterburg meeting, Below recorded, Hitler ‘called Messerschmitt over and asked him pointedly if the aircraft could be built as a bomber. The designer agreed, and said that it would be capable of carrying two 250kg bombs.’ Hitler replied, ‘That is the fast bomber,’ and insisted on its being developed as such exclusively, rather than as a fighter. He saw it as part of the campaign against London and the southern English invasion ports, rather than as a fighter that could protect Germany from the Allied bombing offensive. Yet the conversion and the development of new bombing mechanisms took up valuable production time, while the acquisition of bomb-loads drastically slowed down the plane’s top speeds. Hitler saw it as a new Stuka, rather than an entirely new kind of warplane, which potentially it was.

As a result of German air production being dispersed into smaller units, and the alterations Hitler had ordered, the Me-262 did not arrive until March 1944, and even then in numbers that were far too small to make a difference. With the Americans’ destruction of oil facilities and Luftwaffe targets, the Reich did not have the fuel to train the pilots, and many brand-new models were destroyed on the ground anyway. A similarly promising warplane project, the Arado 234, which could reach speeds of 500mph, saw only 200 produced before the Red Army captured the factory where its production had been moved to in the east, for fear of bombing from the west.42

After the big raids of late 1943, Albert Speer drove around the factory districts of Berlin. Buildings were still burning and a cloud of smoke 20,000 feet high hung above the city, which ‘made the macabre scene as dark as night’. When he tried to describe this to Hitler, he was interrupted every time, almost as soon as he began, with questions about, for example, the next month’s tank production figures.43 By the end of that year the Allies had dropped 200,000 tons of bombs on Germany.44 Their effect in at least blunting the rate of increase in aircraft production can be seen in Figure 2.

The word Nuremberg meant many things in the relatively short period covered by the Nazi experiment. Originally it denoted the vast rallies held there in the late 1930s, then the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, then a city that was devastated by Allied bombing, and finally the place where the International Military Tribunal brought the worst of the surviving Nazis to justice.45 On the night of 30 March 1944, some 795 Allied aircraft devastated the city centre, but at very serious loss – mainly of Canadian air crew – with ninety-five aircraft shot down and seventy-one damaged. After this reversal, the policy of heavy night-time raids on Germany was suspended, which was due to happen anyway in order to help prepare for the invasion of Normandy.

Although the Germans did manage to jam the Allies’ Gee radio-based navigational device after its introduction in March 1942, improved technologies such as Oboe, by which a control station in Britain could broadcast a radar beam that would lead Pathfinder bombers to the target, were operational from November 1942, and by the end of 1943 airborne H2X