Career
Born on December 27, 1916 in Cloppenburg, Baumbach entered the Luftwaffe in 1936 and was trained as a bomber pilot. He was one of the first pilots to fly the Junkers Ju 88 bomber and flew various bombing missions with Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG 30). On 19 April 1940 he bombed and damaged the French cruiser Émile Bertin for which he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. In 1942, Baumbach was removed from active pilot duty and started working on new bomber designs; among others, he helped design the composite bomber system Mistel. In 1944, he was placed in command of the newly formed KG 200 and was in charge of all Luftwaffe special missions. Baumbach was promoted to Oberstleutnant on 15 November 1944 and was tasked with leading the affairs of the General der Kampfflieger.
After the war, Baumbach spent three years as a prisoner of war before he moved to Argentina where he worked as a test pilot. He died in a plane crash on 20 October 1953 while evaluating a British Lancaster bomber. He was interred in his hometown Cloppenburg.
Baumbach released his memoirs, Zu spät: Aufstieg und Untergang der deutschen Luftwaffe (English title: "Broken Swastika"), in the late 1940s. The book demonstrates that even after Germany's defeat, Baumbach still believed to a very large extent in the National Socialist ideology. The fact that Baumbach's time as commander of KG 200 is not mentioned with a single word highlights the extreme secrecy of Germany's special missions program.
Read more about this topic: Werner Baumbach
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)