Well, actually, I was not including enemy crews in my original thinking. Not to say that I don't respect them on a professional level - I do - but the fact is that they were fighting to expand a vile, evil empire that happily enslaved, tortured and butchered even its own ethnic German citizens who so much as whispered opposition, let alone Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others who happened to be in, or crossed its path.
I often wonder what I would have done, what decisions, I would have made had I been born somewhere in the German-speaking lands c 1918. Would I have been so brainwashed as to fight for or, worse still, support Hitler? Would I have just sat in the middle, keeping quiet, hoping to survive, or would I have had the moral sense, integrity and most of all, courage, to oppose Nazi rule - even in the smallest of ways?
(As an eg, my father-in-law was in an Austrian concentration camp 1944-45. He said in the mornings sometimes a local woman would cycle along the road in front of the column of prisoners going to work. She would drop apples on the road. Prisoners could pick apples off the ground to eat. Picking apples from the trees was a death offence. He always remembered this woman.)
On a professional level, yes, I respect those Luftwaffe crews who flew with great courage and bravery - especially on the eastern front under the most appalling conditions.
But I respect more those (very few) Luftwaffe crews who flew their planes to the UK and defected. That took enormous courage, since their families back in Germany would surely be punished as a result of their defections.
