I was used to losing men; that was war. But Marseille was special, like a small boy playing war. He never took it too seriously, and his smile, which was less evident as time progressed, was infectious when present.” Oberst Eduard Neumann’s recollection of his former wartime mentee, Hans-Joachim Marseille, epitomises how the fallen ‘Star of Africa’ never lost his lustre with the Luftwaffe. Credited with 158 aerial victories overall against Allied airmen during the Second World War, Marseille was the most successful German fighter pilot in North Africa.
On paper and in newsreels, he was Nazi Germany’s perfect knight of the air: young, handsome, chivalrous yet deadly. To his superiors, he was a loose cannon, an ideological renegade and a flamboyant playboy who strained their patience to the limit. In both spheres, however, he was among the Luftwaffe’s most highly regarded fighter pilots.
The decorated Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland described Marseille as “the unrivalled virtuoso [whose] achievements had previously been regarded as impossible and they were never excelled by anyone after his death”. It is important to recognise, though, that Marseille’s lionisation originated within Nazi propaganda, which seized at the chance to amplify the legend and heroics of the real man.
The first biography of Marseille’s life was written in 1944 by Oberleutnant Fritz Dettmann, a war correspondent in the Luftwaffe’s Propagandakompanie. Dettmann, as Markus Renner writes, was “one of the Luftwaffe’s best-rated and most capable war correspondents. His reports were groundbreaking for the instrumentalisation and iconisation of Marseille and [were] known beyond the borders of Germany.” However, Renner concludes that such publications “[manipulated] the reader in line with the Nazi system, and that factual, objective reporting or documentation of reality was hardly intended”. Robert Tate – a biographer of Marseille – estimates that only
