Books: Nazi Bomber

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I WAS A NAZI FLIER—Gottfried Leske—Dial ($2.50).

What is the Nazi airman like who, in a flash of TNT and the space of a second, without seeing you or being seen, blows to pieces your children, your home, your life? This week I Was a Nazi Flier claimed to tell. The book purported to be the diary of pseudonymous Gottfried Leske, flight sergeant in the Luftwaffe, who took part in the great Blitz on London, Birmingham, Coventry, is now a prisoner of war in Canada.

Smuggled out of Germany by ways & means which émigré Editor Curt Riess will not disclose, the diary has been deciphered (Leske sometimes wrote German shorthand); translated into rational language (Leske wrote a febrile Nazi slang); the entries dated, edited and rearranged. If, as Editor Riess (who knew Leske) believes, the diary is authentic, it is the first full-length self-portrait in English of the Nazi bomber's mind.

Self-revealed, Leske is: 1) a mental twelve-year-old with a craving for speed and action; 2) a childless adolescent who had no sex experience until some time after he had been destroying other men's children; 3) a pulp-paper brain which listens only to the war communiqués on the radio, hates music, has to make an effort even to read the recollections of German War Ace Fritz Udet; 4) a cultural blank registering only the slogans of the Nazi leaders; 5) a historical illiterate knowing nothing about the history of other countries or his own before the Nazis. But he is also a skilled technician and killer.

"Clear sky to the west," wrote Leske as the Germans plunged through the Belgian lines. "Below we saw some burned-out French planes. Moranes, I think. On all the roads German troops. Then nothing at all. No sign of the enemy. It was as though the world had gone to bed," he adds disgustedly. It was more fun later: "Bombed Brussels and Antwerp again. People were running out of the houses. Trying to escape. . . . Some of them have bicycles. Some are pushing baby carriages. When we get low enough we strafe them. Then they all throw themselves into the ditch on the side of the road. It doesn't help them, though."

Not all the German airmen feel quite as Wagnerian: "Franz Putzke was in one of his serious moods . . . he wasn't so keen about shooting the people who ran. . . . Lederer said: 'They are our enemies, aren't they? One must kill his enemies, too!' I said, 'Who are we to decide what to do or what not to do? The Führer decides.' Putzke wouldn't agree, and Lederer called him a democratic coward. . . . Of course, Putzke isn't a democratic coward. He's just not interested. Originally he wanted to be an engineer."

To Leske, retaliation by the enemy is a personal affront, an outrage and probably illegal. A journalist told him that the Dutch had fired on descending Nazi parachutists: "It's a rotten, beastly business, shooting at defenseless parachutists. Typically Dutch. I think it isn't according to international law, anyway." Later, when the Nazi fliers again find "roads that are lousy with people"—"So they are civilians?" writes Leske, "Well, either it's war or it isn't."