I Once Met… A Red Baron’s Flying Circus pilot
In 1977 when I was ten and he was 81, I met a First World War fighter ace who flew in Baron von Richthofen’s Flying Circus.
It was the holidays and I was staying with my grandmother in rural Ayrshire. She lived in one half of her big house, with the other half let out to an AngloGerman family. One evening they invited our lot over for a drink, to meet a special guest. My grandmother got wind of this guest’s identity and refused on principle to come. She was of that generation who found it hard to forgive or forget. The rest of us shrugged and went anyway.
Hans-georg von der Osten was a charming man, elegant and aristocratic, interested in and kind to children. His nickname was Stoffel, which I realised much later was a comic misaptronym: the word means ‘lout’.
I was obsessed in those days with model aeroplanes, and it so happened that I had just completed a kit made by the US firm Revell called ‘The Baron and his Funfdecker Fokker’ (pictured). It had five wings instead of the usual three, and came piloted by a caricature of a wicked Hun, complete with duelling scar, pickelhaube and monocle.
I felt a little shy showing this plane to a man who had flown with the actual Richthofen. Stoffel, after all, was the holder of the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. But he was amused, which emboldened me to ask for his autograph. He wrote me a postcard, which I still have. ‘When I was asked to join Baron von Richthofen’s fighter wing 60 years ago,’ it reads, in a tight German script, ‘I little thought that I would one day enjoy such hospitality in a house such as this.’
Stoffel led two of the four squadrons that made up Jagdgeschwader 1, the world’s first mobile fighter wing, aka the Flying Circus. He flew a brightly coloured fighter called a Pfalz D.III, and he was good at it. Between August and December 1917, he shot down five British planes over Flanders: two Sopwiths, two De Havilands and a Bristol. He was eventually shot down himself, and severely wounded, in March 1918.
Later, Stoffel faced a different challenge when he was drawn into the circle of Hermann Goering, who kept ‘inviting’ him to join the Nazi Party. Goering was another decorated fighter ace who commanded the Flying Circus at the end of the war, although his arrogance made him unpopular. Stoffel, according to our AngloGerman friends, was in a bind: he wanted nothing to do with the Nazis, but repudiating them could be fatal.
One day, Goering invited Stoffel hunting. The party was instructed to shoot what they liked, except for an unusual white hind of which Goering was exaggeratedly fond. The hind appeared. Stoffel shot it. There were no more invitations to join the club. Stoffel spent the next war as a rear echelon staff officer in charge of the Luftwaffe’s airfields.
He died in 1987, aged 91. Not long ago I lent the postcard he wrote me to my daughter, who used it in a school presentation on the First World War. Meeting Stoffel taught me at an early age that not every ‘Hun’ was a bad ’un – and I think that is a good lesson to pass on. James Fergusson