My favorite hero is Erich Hartmann. From Wikipedia:
Erich Alfred Hartmann . . . was a German World War II fighter pilot and is the highest-scoring fighter ace in the history of aerial warfare. He claimed 352 aerial victories (of which 345 were won against the Soviet Air Force, and 260 of which were fighters) in 1,404 combat missions. . . . During the course of his career, Hartmann was forced to crash-land his damaged fighter 14 times. This was due to damage received from parts of enemy aircraft he had just shot down or mechanical failure. Hartmann was never shot down or forced to land due to fire from enemy aircraft.[1] . . .
Hartmann shot down two enemy aircraft before his fighter was hit by debris and he was forced to make an emergency landing. He then, in accordance with Luftwaffe regulations, attempted to recover the precision board clock. As he was doing so, Soviet ground troops approached. Realising that capture was unavoidable, he faked internal injuries. Hartmann’s acting so convinced the Soviets that they put him on a stretcher and placed him on a truck. . . .
Hartmann patiently waited for the right moment to escape, then, using the distraction of the Stukas attack, he attacked the single guard. Hartmann jumped out of the back of the truck and ran into a large field of giant sunflowers. Evading the pursuing soldiers, Hartmann hid and waited for nightfall. In the dark, Hartmann followed a Russian patrol heading west to the front. As he approached the German position, he was challenged by a sentry who fired a shot which passed through his trousers.[17] . . .
At the end of the war, Erich Hartmann disobeyed General Hans Seidemann’s order to Hartmann and Hermann Graf to fly to the British sector to avoid capture by Soviet forces. Hartmann later explained:
I must say that during the war I never disobeyed an order, but when General Seidemann ordered Graf and
me to fly to the British sector and surrender to avoid the Russians, with the rest of the wing to surrender to
the Soviets. I could not leave my men. That would have been bad leadership.[38]
Hartmann’s last kill occurred over Brno, Czechoslovakia, on 8 May, the last day of the war in Europe. . . .
As Gruppenkommandeur of I./JG 52, Hartmann chose to surrender his unit to members of the US 90th Infantry Division.[40]
After his capture, the U.S. Army handed Hartmann, his pilots, and ground crew over to the Soviet Union on 24 May, where he was imprisoned in accordance with the Yalta Agreements, which stated that airmen and soldiers fighting Soviet forces had to surrender directly to them.
Initially, the Russians tried to convince Erich to cooperate with them. He was asked to spy on fellow officers and become a stukatch, or “stool pigeon”. He refused and was given 10 days’ solitary confinement in a four-by-nine-by-six-foot chamber. He slept on a concrete floor and was given only bread and water. On another occasion, the Soviets threatened to kidnap and murder his wife (the death of his son was kept from Hartmann). During similar interrogations about his knowledge of the Me 262, Hartmann was struck by a Soviet officer using a cane, prompting Hartmann to slam his chair down on the head of the Russian, knocking him out. Expecting to be shot, Erich was transferred back to the small bunker.[42]
Hartmann, not ashamed of his war service, opted to go on hunger strike and starve rather than fold to “Soviet will”, as he called it.[43] The Russians allowed the hunger strike to go on for four days before force-feeding him. More subtle efforts by the Soviet authorities to convert Hartmann to communism also failed. He was offered a post in the Luftstreitkräfte der Nationalen Volksarmee (East German Air Force), which he refused. . . .
Hartmann . . . was falsely charged with war crimes, specifically the deliberate shooting of 780 Soviet civilians in the village of Briansk, attacking a “bread factory” on 23 May 1943, and destroying 345 “expensive” Soviet aircraft.[44] He refused to confess to these charges and conducted his own defence, which was a waste of time, according to the judge.[44] Sentenced to 25 years of hard labour, Hartmann refused to work. He was eventually put into solitary confinement, which enraged his fellow prisoners. They began a revolt, overpowered the guards, and freed him. . . .
In 1955, Hartmann’s mother wrote to the new West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to whom she appealed to secure his freedom. A trade agreement between West Germany and the Soviet Union was reached, and Hartmann was released along with 16,000 German military personnel. After spending ten and a half years in Soviet POW camps, he was among the last batch of prisoners to be turned over. Returning to West Germany, he was reunited with his wife Ursula, to whom he had written every day of the war.[46]
In January 1997, the Russian government, as a legal successor to the Soviet Union, exonerated Hartmann by admitting that his conviction for war crimes was unlawful.[2]
When he returned to West Germany, Hartmann reentered military service in the Bundeswehr and became an officer in the West German Air Force (Bundesluftwaffe), where he commanded West Germany’s first all-jet unit, Jagdgeschwader 71 “Richthofen”, which was equipped initially with Canadair Sabres and later with Lockheed F-104 Starfighters. . . .
Hartmann considered the F-104 a fundamentally flawed and unsafe aircraft and strongly opposed its adoption by the Bundesluftwaffe. Although events subsequently validated his low opinion of the aircraft (282 crashes and 115 German pilots killed on the F-104 in non-combat missions, along with allegations of bribes culminating in the Lockheed scandal), Hartmann’s outspoken criticism proved unpopular with his superiors. General Werner Panitzki, successor to General Josef Kammhuber as Inspekteur der Luftwaffe, said, “Erich is a good pilot, but not a good officer.” Hartmann was forced into early retirement in 1970.[48]
During his long imprisonment, Hartmann’s son, Erich-Peter, was born in 1945 and died as a three-year-old in 1948, without his father ever having seen him. (Hartmann later had a daughter, Ursula Isabel, born on 23 February 1957).[49] . . .
It is often said that [Hartmann] was more proud of the fact that he had never lost a wingman in combat than he was about his rate of kills.
Hartmann’s 352 aerial victories are particularly impressive considering that the top non-German ace of all time, Ilmari Juutilainen of Finland, had 94 victories. The Allied fighter pilot with the most victories was Ivan Kozhedub of the Soviet Union with 62 victories. The most victorious American pilot of all time was Richard Bong with 40 victories.
Unfortunately, the quoted Wikipedia article does not explain why Hartmann’s son died at the age of three. One possible reason for his death may be the malnutrition imposed by the Morgenthau Plan.
Conditions in Germany reached their lowest point in 1947. Living conditions were considered worse in 1947 than in 1945 or 1946. At an average ration of 1040 calories a day, malnutrition was at its worst stage in post-war Germany. Herbert Hoover asserted that this amount of rations was hardly more than the amount which caused thousands in the Nazi concentration camps to die from starvation.[53] . . .
In early October 1945 the UK government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that, German civilian adult death rates had risen to four times the pre-war levels and death rates amongst the German children had risen by 10 times the pre-war levels.[61] In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman finally bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were finally permitted to help starving German children.[60]
As a baby and a toddler during this period of postwar starvation, Hartmann’s son would have been especially vulnerable to death from hunger and hunger-related causes.
