Vermisst by Jonathan Nicholas is the best book I’ve read for a long time. Vermisst (Missing) is the fictionalised account of  Paul Goetz, a WW2 Luftwaffe fighter pilot who left school to become an air force mechanic, trained on the French coast as a pilot and was transferred to the Russian front where he fought with the Luftwaffe until a crash-landing led to his capture.

The second phase of Goetz’ story is his survival in the Russian POW and political prisoner system until his release in the 1950s.

It is a detailed account of Goetz’s time in the Hitler Youth before the outbreak of WW2 with interesting perspectives on the news and propaganda of the time. His time as a mechanic is described in detail as his perception of the heroic pilots. The accounts of his pilot training are both scary and fun in equal measures as are his early flights as a wingman out over the Channel, including the first of several crash-landings.

The accounts of both the planes and the relationships with his fellow pilots are fascinating in their complexity and at times their luxury which is soon seen in grim contrast to his life after being captured. One has to suspect the descriptions of his imprisonment, although not lacking in adversity, deprivation and deaths is somewhat less well-described even though he seemed to spend more years in this situation than on active duty in the Luftwaffe. The most poignant moment for me, in this rather long book, was when Goetz read a letter from his childhood friend’s mother informing him of his parents’ death in an air raid; he only received the letter many years later and just before his release.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was a refreshingly new voice ad perspective on a well-told story.