Testimony from Captain Erich von Salzmann
Event ID: 569
12 December 1917
Source ID: 55
“On one of those beautiful spring days in northern France, we were standing on the street in Douai when a small, rickety car came speeding along. My friend Hoffmann raised his hand: “Here comes Richthofen. Stop!” The car stopped. Two young officers got out; one of them was wearing a short, open fur coat, his hair sticking out, medium height, stocky, and introduced himself to me briefly and militarily: ‘Richthofen.’ So this was him, the pilot who was beginning to become so famous. That was the first time I saw him. I have met an unusually large number of people in my life, many of whom have remained in my memory, while many others I have forgotten. At that time, Richthofen was only at the beginning of his brilliant rise to fame, perhaps just one of many. Nevertheless, he immediately captivated me. There was something about his demeanour that was particularly appealing. Richthofen possessed to a high degree that typical, amiable naturalness and confidence that must be innate and can never be learned. His face showed a calm, firm yet friendly masculinity, without that pronounced, determined trait that has developed in some of our young heroes who are constantly fighting for life and death. At that time, he was still a lieutenant in the Militscher Uhlans. However, he had already been mentioned several times in the army report. His name was beginning to become known to wider sections of the German people. There was no sign of this in his demeanour. He was still the modest officer from a good family who had grown up in a prestigious regiment. At that time, I was still the captain, the older comrade. As we walked across the courtyard, he stepped to my left and asked me to go ahead at the entrance. I saw him again many times later, visited him at his workplace, and he was my guest in Berlin. One of the most beautiful memories of my life is connected with Richthofen: I was able to fly with him. And yet. It was always the same, the manners in which the young noble officer had been brought up clung to him as firmly as his own skin. You could tell he was a cadet, not in that somewhat exaggerated strictness, in that short, choppy language that waits for the older person to speak. No! It was in that indefinable, impeccable posture, in his gestures, in his speech, in his entire demeanour. There was always something controlled about him. He always had a friendly smile on his lips. We sat at the banquet listening to excellent music. At that time, drinks were still available. In accordance with the good old Silesian custom, we had raised our tankards and become merry. Richthofen remained the same. It would never have been possible for Richthofen to
do or say anything that was not impeccable. Nevertheless, no one could have said that he was affected or pretentious. No one was more natural than Manfred Richthofen. Later, I saw Richthofen here in Berlin at my house several times with ladies. There, too, it was his impeccable form and naturalness that the women found so appealing. He was not a ladies’ man in the usual sense of the word. He was anything but that. He was almost the embodiment of modern masculinity, but the ladies liked him, even though he never courted them in the way that many famous young gentlemen like to do. We were once together at the races in Grunewald – for a while he remained unrecognised. He had been in Johannistal that morning, trying out new aeroplanes, and his ‘outfit’ was not really very racecourse-elegant. Richthofen generally cared little about appearances, although he did not seek to look neglected. Suddenly people recognised him. The photographers came. I have seen other young celebrities in such moments, preening and posing. None of that with Richthofen. The complete naturalness of his demeanour was striking. The young girls rushed towards him. They wanted him to write his name on the programme as a souvenir. Richthofen shrugged his shoulders and said to me, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Someone else would have walked away.
Richthofen wrote calmly, patiently, always with the same friendly smile. The man was certainly harder on himself than almost anyone else, he controlled himself, which is why he ruled over others. And yet! His disposition was gentle, he was good-natured and always friendly. That was how he was. That is how he remained during his brilliant rise. That is how he went to his death. We need people like that. They are the best type of Prussian officer. They are the role models for future generations of officers. They are the bearers of old, beautiful traditions – traditions of which we must be proud, and of which our children and grandchildren will be even prouder than we and our fathers, who fought the great war against France, ever were. Richthofen embodied all of this. He was a typical descendant of the East Elbian nobility with all its good qualities. His stocky, hard-built body embodied the same hard, almost cold sense of duty that led tens of thousands of descendants of our Prussian nobility to all the battlefields of Europe in the service of their lord, where they bled. Richthofen was a simple man, both inside and out, with an upright, noble nature. Any ostentatious behaviour, anything artificial, was completely foreign to him. He could never have told a lie. Everything he did and said bore the stamp of naturalness. And yet it was not only the traditional heritage of the circles from which he came that he embodied in his manner. It was more than that. Every time I saw him again, I had to admit: only Richthofen could be like this, a unique individual. From his ancestors on his father’s and mother’s side, men who lived on their own land in the beautiful Silesian countryside, he had inherited a love of hunting. It was not an unbridled passion for killing animals that drove him. I have often encountered representatives of this type of person in foreign countries, especially in the tropics, men who knew only their hunting log and the record with which they wanted to beat some other famous hunter. Richthofen was not like that. This feeling, the feeling of the record, was completely foreign to him, even though he certainly had a burning ambition, but not the ambition of envy. The fear that someone else might have done better than him was completely foreign to him. He had held a rifle in his hands from a young age. He had become a marksman who never missed his target. About a year ago, when I asked him what he considered to be his superiority over his enemies, he replied that
it was mainly his cold-blooded shooting. I remember very well that he once told me in May 1917: “When I face the enemy, I approach him ruthlessly, and when I see the white of his eyes, I shoot. Then he must fall, I am sure of that.” Later, with the improvement of the equipment, he changed his tactics and mainly tried to catch the enemy from behind by skilful manoeuvring, in order to shoot him down. He felt no hatred towards his enemy. He did not see red, as some may do in the excitement of battle. He would never have allowed himself to be carried away into doing something unwise; he was too cool-tempered for that. He thought carefully about everything he did. And yet, his decisions must have been rock-solid in the fractions of a second in which he had to make them. There was no wavering or hesitation for him. He had the firm will that the enemy over there must fall, and that stronger will forced the enemy into Richthofen’s suggestion. He once told me about his younger brother, who was learning from him: “He’s already quite good. I’ll let him go soon. But I’m worried that he’s too aggressive; when he has the enemy in front of him, he almost sees red. He mustn’t do that.” Richthofen was very careful in his treatment of his machines. He checked everything meticulously before taking off. He was well aware that you have to master your tools if you want to achieve something. He would not take off until everything was in perfect order. He was not familiar with the recklessness that drove many young pilots to their premature deaths.
It was certainly not a fault in his aircraft that caused him to crash so badly on his last flight. Richthofen was extremely lucky. He seemed almost blessed. I saw Richthofen return twice from Arras with what must have been more than a dozen hits in his aircraft. When another pilot gets a shot through the engine, he can usually say his last prayer to heaven, for God must be merciful to him, because the hour of his fiery death has come. Richthofen had more than once been hit by an infantry shell in the engine. Richthofen quickly recognised the damage and shut down the engine. Anyone else in his position would certainly have seen their plane go up in flames. So he really seemed
invulnerable. He grew with time. He was no longer just a brilliant fighter, no longer the ruler of the skies, the terror of all enemies with his red plane, who, when reported, soon found the field clear; for despite the high bounty placed on his head by the enemy, people fled from Richthofen and his superior skill. He became a leader. His squadron soon distinguished itself from others. He led it from victory to victory. Like the individual man, those around him became the terror of their enemies. Then people sensed what they had not known before: there was more to this man than just skillful shooting, cool, calm deliberation and lightning-fast decisions. This man was a leader, one of those officers who are born with the gift of leadership. So he became a teacher to many others, without wanting to be, simply through his example, through his commands. In this way, he eventually led an entire squadron of several combined flights. Richthofen knew exactly what was going on in aviation. Although he may not have been a
perfect technician, he was fully aware of the mistakes that were made in the principles of aircraft construction and gave his calm, sober judgement. He knew that nothing on earth could be perfect. He learned from comparison. He never underestimated his opponent and always treated him fairly. He recognised the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent when he spotted him in the air with his eagle eyes, which saw further and more sharply than those of ordinary mortals. He assessed his opponent correctly, which gave him
much of his superiority. He became more and more interested in aviation in general, in aerial combat on a large scale. When I saw him at home last August, he told me that we were heading for difficult times, that the enemy was hot on our heels with their designs and already superior in some respects. He knew exactly how to assess the situation. Nevertheless, he always approached his duty with the greatest joy, and the time he spent at home was only an interruption of the activity he had grown so fond of against the enemy. He, a Richthofen, belonged at the forefront, where the Richthofens had always stood when it came to defending the fatherland, directly in the face of the enemy! At home, hundreds of thousands of people certainly followed this man’s path with concern, thinking: if only he could be in a safe place! He couldn’t. He told me often enough: ‘I have to be out there, I can’t stay behind.’ So he died, a role model for hundreds, thousands who will come after him and fly through the air in aeroplanes. An embodiment of the finest Prussian spirit, a nobleman full of patriotism and loyalty to duty, a young hero as the people imagine the ideal officer to be, whom our youth will one day emulate. But he will remain the one and only, almost inimitable. When this world war is over, people will say of this young man, who saw only a quarter of a century of summer: ‘There was only one Richthofen!’
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