Quoted Text
many of the veterans died before they could see it and some were not very happy that Jean-Yves had their material for years without result ...
Besides this some were driven to a certain person (that J-Y. named) who maybe has good intensions but is a "special" character ....
best wishes
Steffen
..I've known the two authors for a number of years now ..so thats not quite the way I see it... yes, the research effort by Lorant was on-going for a very long time - in fact it never really stopped. Only a matter of weeks before everything went to the publisher in 2005 the authors finally hunted down the the family of a previously unknown veteran of II.(Sturm) /JG 300, Uffz. Heinz Aengenvoort ,who had served with 7./JG 300 since September 1944 and who had been shot down and killed on 9 April 1945 - the pictures from this family's album are one of the highlights of the book ....yes the authors could have published sooner perhaps but then the books would be missing large parts of the story - btw many veterans have copies of the very nice French edition which appeared two years ago..
As you know the two books published a few years ago by Henning and Bethke are worthless. The problem with Burkhard Otto (JG300.de) is not quite as it seems ..when Lorant searched out the veterans and finally located them he would borrow their albums, make copies, return the albums and then as a thank you to them he would make them copies of the other veterans pictures for them and was thus able to put former comrades back in touch with each other, as he explains in the interview (link above). He also explains how difficult of course it was to find individual pilots to tell the story ..BO would then come along, months, years later - not obviously with every veteran as there are many he has yet to discover - and take these pictures that had been located & copied by Lorant and given back to the veterans as a thank you. These pictures would then appear on BO's web site JG300.de - with a copyright mark on them. Nothing wrong with that perhaps - unless you happen to have done all the detective work yourself. So you can see why, when Lorant realised what was going on, he stopped circulating material and kept all his contacts and pictures back for his own work, apart from those that have appeared elsewhere, eg Prien, Barbas etc - this is why BO has no material on his site on the late war Gruppen, III./JG 300 or IV./JG 300, and why he is unable to correctly identify many pictures & personalities on his site - he didn't discover those pictures or meet the veterans or the families who they belonged too in many cases - did you see the picture of 'Red 5' (taken in March 1945) with the personal emblem 'Timoschenko' under the cockpit that appeared on a recent JG300.de update - fantastic, rare photo from JG300's time on the Eastern Front in 1945, yet BO couldn't identify the pilot, didn't know anything about the picture! ...in fact we think it is quite amusing that there is a JG 300 pilot flying sorties in 1945 who lives only 500 metres from BO's front door in Berlin who he still doesn't know..
hope this explanation helps with understanding a bit of the background to the history of the history !
all the best
Neil
