MORE than 100 retired military officers protested furiously yesterday against plans to disown the name of one of Germany’s most famous wartime fighter aces.

They have signed an open letter to German newspapers seeking to restore the reputation of Werner Mölders, who shot down 115 aircraft, including many flown by RAF pilots during the Battle of Britain.

Despite being treated as a hero by the Nazi propaganda machine, Colonel Mölders was regarded as a suitable model for young West German soldiers after the war and his name — along with that of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel — was attached to navy destroyers, an airbase in Neuburg and an army barracks in Lower Saxony.

Now Peter Struck, the Defence Minister, is to enforce a 1998 law that bans any honour being bestowed on the German volunteers who served in the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, including Colonel Mölders. German pilots, wearing the uniform of the Spanish Fascists, bombed the Basque city of Guernica, killing thousands.

Colonel Mölders did not take part in the bombing — he was a fighter not a bomber pilot. However, he did shoot down 14 aircraft during the civil war and, according to recent research, took part in a battle on the River Ebro that claimed many civilian casualties.

The protesting officers, including many generals, are aghast at Herr Struck’s decision. Under the guise of a birthday commemoration, the officers published a glowing tribute yesterday to a “model soldier and fighter pilot”.

The tribute was a statement of their “sympathy for the members of the Fighter Squadron 74 after it has been stripped of the traditional name Werner Mölders”.

It is not only veterans who are furious; the whole conservative Establishment is grumbling at the way history is, in their view, being made politically correct. The dispute cuts to the heart of the 60th anniversary celebrations of the end of the war: who counts as a war hero for modern Germans?

Günter Fromm, a retired admiral, fumed in the letters column of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper yesterday about “the new idea of tradition that is being prepared for our army”.

There is little doubt that the retired officers are speaking for disgruntled serving officers. The airmen are required now to cut off their armbands marked with the name Mölders. For a unit with a half-century of tradition, this represents a big humiliation.The law against the Condor Legion slipped through parliament on the eve of a holiday weekend, with only 25 deputies present in the chamber. It did not spring out of a popular revulsion at German actions in the Spanish Civil War.

Despite being decorated with the Iron Cross by Hitler and enjoying the admiration of Hermann Goering, the air force chief, Colonel Mölders did not seem to be a politically controversial figure, but a recent television programme looking at the life of Colonel Mölders nudged the Defence Minister into action and has opened a new debate about war heroism.

The key question is how close Colonel Mölders came to the Nazis. His defenders point to the fact that he celebrated a Roman Catholic wedding in 1941, an unusual act for someone intending to make a career in the higher echelons of Hitler’s army.

During the Second World War, the British tried to exploit this ambiguity towards the regime and forged a letter from Colonel Mölders appearing to protest against the Nazi suppression of the Catholic Church.

The letter was dropped, in leaflet form, over the Catholic city of Münster in the hope of strengthening religious-based resistance to Hitler. The leaflet claimed that the colonel had been murdered by the SS who had staged his fatal air crash.

The truth seems less prosaic. Colonel Mölders was a dedicated pilot who enjoyed shooting down aircraft. His own crashed, not because of an SS conspiracy, but because it was flying through fog and smashed into a factory chimney.

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