The Memorial

As the story unfolded, Walter began to realize that this battle — of which he himself had witnessed a small portion — might be unparalleled in German history. The 445th Bomb Group had been decimated in no more than six minutes. The resulting crashes — 22 Liberators — occurred within a very small area — a 16-mile radius near his home. Another 29 German planes had also crashed. Over 200 airplanes had been concentrated in a small area of sky.

Perceiving the magnitude of the event, Walter felt that he must record this story in full and without bias. To do so, he must contact every involved German and American possible.

He began with the lead 445th crew. The Missing Air Crew Report listed the crew home addresses in 1945. Walter sent off letters to the eight survivors and heard back from three who also sent their stories. He visited the places they described, interviewed corroborating witnesses, and mapped their attempted escapes, documenting everything.

Then he ordered all the mission reports as well as the other 24 MACRs. He created a huge aerial map and marked the site where each Kassel Mission plane went down with a red or blue pin and a label.

Once he contacted the lead crew, Walter's quest to find every possible survivor began with the man topmost in his mind: the lieutenant he had discovered the day after the battle. What happened to him? Was he still alive?

He wrote the 2nd Air Division Association asking for any information about this mission. It took months for Walter's letter to wend its way to the 445th BG vice president, who suggested that Hassenpflug write the author of an article by a Kassel Mission veteran — Frank Bertram.

In the Fall of 1985, Walter sent a packet of material to Bertram.

Bertram was shocked. He sat down and went through everything in the packet, which included Walter's story of being a boy of twelve, seeing parachutes and a B-24 go down, then finding the man with the injured ankle by the creek the next day. One letter in the packet said, "All I remember is that he was a first lieutenant from San Francisco."

He sat down immediately and wrote Walter.

Bertram and Hassenpflug had been seeking answers from opposite sides to a lifelong mystery they had in common. Each had reached across the ocean looking for answers and found them in one another.

Walter looked at the enclosed POW picture and recognized the lieutenant he had discovered forty-one years before.

That August, Bertram and his family flew to meet Walter, who welcomed them into his home. Over his couch hung a giant map covered with red and blue pinheads. Through a translator, Walter told the story of each American plane.

Hassenpflug reconnected Frank to places that, for four decades, existed only in his mind. He took him to the creek where he had found Frank. They followed the route into Bad Hersfeld they had walked after his capture. They even walked to the train station from which Frank embarked for Stalag Luft I.

They drove to the gravesite where Frank's best friend and copilot, Virgil Chima, had been buried during the war. Bertram became emotional as Hassenpflug explained that women gathering beech nuts had discovered Chima's body, badly decomposed and curled in the fetal position. His chute shrouds had been cut; the silk gone.

Walter introduced Frank to Sturmgruppen pilot Ernst Schroeder, who had been in the second wave of Luftwaffe Focke Wulf 190s. Of the P-51 Mustang, Schroeder said, "That plane won the war."

These meetings set the precedent for a much larger delegation. The growing number of KM veterans organized and, with the Germans, created a memorial they dedicated to the men on both sides who died. At the dedication ceremony, a German speaker asked:

Since 1990, Walter Hassenpflug has taken many more American airmen and the families of those who died to their crash and landing sites. He faithfully organized the commemoration of the Kassel Mission at the memorial every September 27 since the dedication.

Pioneered by Frank Bertram and Walter Hassenpflug, the legacy of the Kassel Mission has transformed tragedy into triumph. The healing that transpired transformed hundreds of enemy combatants into friends whose relationships last for lifetimes.