6. Abteilung des Generalstabes der Luftwaffe (Generalquartiermeister) - part IV b

I just realized that I wrote the part a of this post in 2013 - time really flies! But finally I am back on track an continuing my paper trail journey into the archives of the 6. Abteilung des Generalstabes der Luftwaffe (Generalquartiermeister).

Last post presented the records as they were presented after evaluation and preparation - both as detailed loss records and as statistical information. I stated that I would split the part IV into two blog posts - after further consideration - and more records showing up - there might be more than two!

An intriguing question would be - how did these records get to the Generalquartiermeister 6. Abteilung? 

The answer is rather simple - under ordinary circumstances when the lines where open - these were transferred from the commanding units - the units at Luftflotte level - to the address O.K.L. Gen.Qu.6.Abt. (Kurfürst) using Fernschreibern - teletypewriters.

Kurfürst was the code name for the Reichsluftfahrtministerium - the building complex housing the RLM and presented in detail in part I of this blog series.

So - what did such a message look like and contain? I have been fortunate enough to locate a few from the Luftflotte 6 quite late in the war, and below you see an example of the first part of the message as it was prepared to be transferred

All the information necessary for the preparation of the loss records are contained in the documents - but the messages received at the Generalquartiermeister took another form. The document above was the one delivered to the people operating the Fernschreibern, the teletypewriters or TTYs as they are called in english. One of the examples of a TTY device was the infamous Enigma machine - which in addition to transferring the information also encoded it.

At the receiving end - after decoding - a message would look like this - and even if I have not been able to locate a genuine 6. Abteilung loss record - this is how the message would look - with the teletypewriter paper strips glued to a backing paper.

Entry 2., 3. and 4. of the above mentioned document ended up in the loss record of February 7th 1945, with lfd.Nr. 29, 59 and 28 respectively. And the records as they have been transcribed from the Gen.Qu.6.Abt. loss record into my database is shown below. Note that some abbreviations has been made with regards to the information - and that the aircraft codes have been omitted since none of these aircraft were considered as missing.

Entry #2 Loss record for 5.(F)/122 on January 18th 1945

Entry #3 Loss record for 2./N.S.G.4 on January 18th 1945

Entry #4 Loss record for 3.(F)/22 on January 20th 1945

For some reason record 1. is not present in the Gen.Qu.6.Abt. loss list - something I will have to investigate further.

Stay tuned for more instalments in this series - I promise that the waiting time for the next one will not be 4 years!