Editorial Note: Led by our Editor Dr Mike Hankins, From Balloons to Drones produces a monthly podcast that provides an outlet for the presentation and evaluation of air power scholarship, the exploration of historical topics and ideas, and provides a way to reach out to both new scholars and the general public. You can find our Soundcloud channel here. You can also find our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
During the Second World War, many allied air crews were shot down over Europe. Some escaped, some were captured, but many others became victims of Lynchjustiz (lynch justice) by Germans. These lynchings were committed not just by Nazi officials, but civilians as well, as Nazi propaganda emphasized the air war. Dr Kevin Hall, the author of of recent book on the subject, Terror Flyers: The Lynching of American Airmen in Nazi Germany (2021), joins us for a look at this difficult topic.
Dr Kevin T. Hall is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-Universtiät Bochum, Germany. He was a Fulbright grantee in Cologne in 2013–2014 and obtained his PhD from Central Michigan University in 2018. In 2019, he was a postdoctoral research historian at the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency (DPAA) in Honolulu, where he assisted the agency in accounting for US servicemen missing from past conflicts.
Header image: An image of Stalag Luft 1 outside Barth, Western Pomerania, Germany. The camp held Allied airmen, mainly Americans. The image shows blocks of huts and other buildings in the camp area. Sections of barbed wire and a guard tower are visible. In the distance, the Barth church tower. (Source: IBCC Digital Archive)
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