Information on Hans Joachim Marseille (Star of Africa)?

Patrick said:

You are right, what a understand from the photo is that she lived with Marseille his mother after his death and that she trained and worked as a opera singer during and after the war.

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yes I mean i don't know much about german culture in terms of like social relations to other people and things like that but allowing someone who your deceased son was engaged to for about seven months to move into your house and live there for 2 years until they get married is a bit weird
but times were different back then i guess maybe that was just the right thing to do at the time?

Acrimony45 said:

yes I mean i don't know much about german culture in terms of like social relations to other people and things like that but allowing someone who your deceased son was engaged to for about seven months to move into your house and live there for 2 years until they get married is a bit weird
but times were different back then i guess maybe that was just the right thing to do at the time?

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Times were definitely different back then, but maybe she and Marseille's mother liked each other and after Marseille's mother lost her son 1942 and her daughter was murderd in 1941 she liked having someone around. And in 1943 she became a German citizen again, so maybe that has also something to do with it? I always found it strange that she married a SS officer, because Marseille was a anti Nazi.

I will look if I can find more about her, she was opera singer married to the president of a music university, so there must be more information, I guess.

Patrick said:

Times were definitely different back then, but maybe she and Marseille's mother liked each other and after Marseille's mother lost her son 1942 and her daughter was murderd in 1941 she liked having someone around. And in 1943 she became a German citizen again, so maybe that has also something to do with it? I always found it strange that she married a SS officer, because Marseille was a anti Nazi.

I will look if I can find more about her, she was opera singer married to the president of a music university, so there must be more information, I guess.

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I was just in touch with the person who sent me the picture of their book; they said that in the book it says that Martin Stephani and Hanne-Lies Kupper filed for divorce in 1947

Patrick said:

Times were definitely different back then, but maybe she and Marseille's mother liked each other and after Marseille's mother lost her son 1942 and her daughter was murderd in 1941 she liked having someone around. And in 1943 she became a German citizen again, so maybe that has also something to do with it? I always found it strange that she married a SS officer, because Marseille was a anti Nazi.

I will look if I can find more about her, she was opera singer married to the president of a music university, so there must be more information, I guess.

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I think maybe it was more about getting married in general than whether he was an SS officer or not...according to the book, Martin Stephani was in the music department of the SS so he was not directly involved in genocide and other things as much as the average SS man was...additionally he too was 1 year younger than Hanne-Lies at the time (he was 29 in 1944 and she was 30, so she was according to 1940s society supposed to have been married a long time ago).
However, it did state that she was neither part of the NSDAP nor was she a strong believer in national socialism.
at the time I believe it was considered a good thing to be the wife of an SS person and whatnot so maybe she was willing to ignore that aspect of his life if it meant that she would be marrying someone socially acceptable.

I would however appreciate any new info you could find about her; the sources I was able to access are sort of limited so--

I found these two pictures in an interview done by Marseille's half brother Hans Rudolf Marseille
They are apparently from the Marseille family album...
It's too bad that the interview had no sound, otherwise it would have been interesting to hear what he had to say about them.

Hannaliese images from:
HJM and JG27 Resource and Research Group

Facebook

Chris Simmonds said:

Hannaliese images from:
HJM and JG27 Resource and Research Group

Facebook

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Thank you so much for this resource!

Are all these details of personal life of long dead people nessecary? Let them rest in peace

dedalos said:

Are all these details of personal life of long dead people nessecary? Let them rest in peace

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I see nothing wrong with it!!!!! If you don't like the thread, move on!!!

FLYBOYJ said:

I see nothing wrong with it!!!!! If you don't like the thread, move on!!!

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It s just my opinion , and i put it politely according to yhe forum rules
Why your violent reaction?

FLYBOYJ said:

I see nothing wrong with it!!!!! If you don't like the thread, move on!!!

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Agreed

dedalos said:

It s just my opinion , and i put it politely according to yhe forum rules
Why your violent reaction?

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First, my reaction wasn't "violent" but your comment was rude and uncalled for. This is a great thread. So let me tell you MY opinion - I think you over stretched YOUR opinion. The Mods will determine the appropriateness for the content. Now go back and read the forum rules especially about dealing with Mods and admins. I will not address this again.

Yeah, what so bad about this discussion?

Most of the Luftwaffe high scoring aces have had their 'private' lives dissected. With regard to Hartmann, Graf and Marseilles in life they courted publicity and acclaim so after their deaths should we not continue and build the 'whole' picture?

I also found some interesting information regarding HJM's older sister.
So in his biographies it's stated that he had a sister named Ingeborg who was 2 years older than him (born in 1917) and that they were really close.
However, in Walter Wubbe's book, instead of referring to her as Ingeborg Marseille, the author refers to her as Ingeborg Freifrau von Ledebur.
So I did some research into the name and I found out that Ingeborg had married someone named Oberst Leopold Freiherr von Ledebur on 8/31/1939, who was related to another noble family in Germany called von Lattorf.
Leopold was born in 1899 which would make him eighteen years older than Inge when they got married. (personally i thought this age discrepancy was kind of strange seeing as people in the 1930s married for love and that arranged marriages and things like that were outdated).

The strange thing is that in the books I have read about Marseille, they all say that his sister was "murdered in Vienna by a jealous lover".

However, using a free trial on Ancestry.com I was able to locate Ingeborg Marseille's death certificate and it states that she was "found dead in her apartment in Berlin" and that the reason for death was "unknown". This made me remember a book I had read a while ago called "Behind Enemy Lines" by James Dean Sanderson that had a section about Marseille, and it stated that Inge had been killed in a car accident while she was out for an excursion with a high-ranking Nazi officer named Krefft. Apparently what had happened was that Krefft had had too much to drink and had rolled the Mercedes over on the autobahn, and Inge bled to death while he fled the scene. When Krefft was brought to trial about it, he said that it was Inge's fault that they had gotten into the accident, but official records stated she didn't know how to drive at that time. Krefft was sent to a penal unit in Russia to fight, but when he tried to flee the country he was captured at the Swiss border and beheaded. According to the book, Marseille was crushed and he felt betrayed, because he had always put Inge up on a pedestal of virtue and to see her with another man while her husband was away fighting in Russia at the border made him very upset.

I did try to find out who this man Krefft was, but I couldn't find anything about him.

The strange thing is, if she had truly been killed in an automobile accident, why would her death certificate have stated that she was found dead in her apartment? My only theory is that maybe her husband's family didn't want a scandal seeing as she had died while on an outing with a man who wasn't her husband, and so they covered it up by stating that she was found dead in her apartment and that the cause of death was 'unknown'.

This book (Behind Enemy Lines) also talks about Marseille's engagement to Hanne-Lies. It states that he met her in "Augsburg" while he was on an inspection tour at an airplane factory. However, according to Walter Wubbe Marseille met Hanne-Lies in March 1942, when he was on convalescent leave from getting dysentery and jaundice in Africa. According to Wubbe, the only accolades Marseille was given during that time was the Italian Bravery Medal in Silver, and that took place sometime in February. Furthermore, Marseille never went to any inspection tours of aircraft until much later in 1942, when he was asked to go on a propaganda tour, and by that time he was already engaged.

The book states that "although it is unfair to assume that Marseille was looking for a replacement for Inge in Hanne-Lies, he accorded to her the same devotion and admiration he had given to Inge when she was alive." It also states that Marseille wrote of Hanne-Lies: "She was like a star that lit up the bright night." However, I am still unsure as to where he got that quote from (perhaps maybe a letter to someone? In the interview with Hans-Rudolf Marseille many letters that were written by Marseille were shown; however since they are in the cursive writing of those times I can't read them...it would have been interesting to see what else he had to say about Hanne-Lies, if anything else at all).

This is all just really interesting, especially the part about his sister and how that relates itself to his engagement.

This is the snippet of the von Lattorf family tree where Leopold von Ledebur's name shows up, as well as that of Inge Marseille.

I also found an article about Leopold von Ledebur on the Axis History Forum where it states in detail his time of service and whatnot, and it does show that he was indeed fighting in Russia during the war.

Oberst Leopold Freiherr von Ledebur (1899-1976) - Axis History Forum



Here is also a screenshot from the interview with Hans-Rudolf Marseille where a letter from Marseille to his father Siegfried is shown. This letter was particularly interesting to me because it was the first one of Marseille's letters that he typed up and did not write it by hand.
In this letter, he refers to his brother in law as "Leo" (which maybe implies some familiarity?) and states that Inge has written to him a lot about life in a place called Franzensbad (which is now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic) and comments about how she is spending a lot of money and truly living the life of a "Baroness."

Another piece of information I wanted to share from my recent research: I found a youtube version of the documentary done in the late 90s about Hans Joachim Marseille:


However, the documentary is dubbed over in Russian so I was unable to understand it. So I forwarded the video to someone I know who is a fluent Russian speaker and asked them to please translate the sections of the video for me in which Hans-Rudolf Marseille is speaking.
The translation is below.

I was going through the Hans-Rudolf Marseille interview footage (i seriously wish there was a sound version available!!) and I found a picture of Charlotte Marseille with another woman, probably taken later on in life after the end of WWII.
Could this be HanneLies? (she would have been 53 in 1967, at the time of the Furstenfeldbruck meeting held in honor of Marseille, at which she and Marseille's mother were both guests of honor).

I find this fascinating as we are getting a very intimate view of one of the greatest fighter pilots of all time. Anyone who read about Marseille was made immediately aware of his "playboy" lifestyle and sometimes resistance to authority. I think this research paints a different picture of the man. Great work!!!

I really think that someone ought to do another biography of Marseille that not only focuses on the biographical aspects of his life but the psychological ones as well...the way I see it there are two distinct sides to Marseille: the person he was before his sister died and the person he became as a result of that tragedy. I feel like a lot of his biographers overlook that part of his life. I know that Robert Tate did try to look into certain psychological aspects of his life (his relationship with his South African Batman Mathew Letulu; his defiance of Nazism).

This may seem a bit forward of me to say but I don't believe he would have gotten engaged to HanneLies if not for the death of his sister.
From the information I was able to gather about HanneLies, I believe that the main thing that may have drawn Marseille to her was her familiarity with loss of loved ones.

She was an only child, and her father died when she was very young. Instead of keeping her close her mother sent her to a variety of boarding schools, and she only came home to her stepfather's house when her mother remarried, which was around her high school years.
Her marriage to her first husband in 1939 fell apart in 1940 after she had a miscarriage, and even during the divorce proceedings the court ruled that it was her fault ("mitschuldig")

I think that since Marseille was going through such a big loss at the time he needed someone who could understand his psychological/emotional state at the time and help him weather all of that, and he found that person in HanneLies.
What I find strange is why he continued to sleep with and have affairs with other women even after getting engaged, and it is that aspect of his life that I am trying to find more information about...