On August 28, 1942, Ernest Magruder’s spitfire was shot down over Malta, killing the 29-year-old flight lieutenant tasked with defending the island at the height of the war.

His name remains etched on the Commonwealth air force war memorial in Floriana, where he will be forever remembered as a martyr.

But little is known about the young Austrian who downed him, similarly hailed as a hero by relatives and friends in Germany during the war.

The Austrian pilot was escorting Italian planes bombing Malta, when he engaged Magruder’s aircraft as it formed part of the legendary Royal Air Force Spitfire Squadron 227.

According to researcher Robert Attard, Austrian Iring E had been assigned to the Mediterranean front, operating from Sicily and Tripoli.

“In August 1942 Iring registered a remarkable kill… (he) successfully fought off many allied aircraft that had intercepted the Italian bombers he was tasked to protect, shooting down a Spitfire in the process,” Attard says in his book Befallen: The War Letters of Fräulein M.

“Shooting down a Spitfire on enemy territory on low fuel must have been the highlight of Iring’s career,” Attard believes.

Iring is one of four members of the German military who fought in the World War II “on the wrong side of history” whose biographies were reconstructed by Attard with information he found in a collection of letters addressed to Fräulein, a woman from Wiesbaden, between 1941 and 1945.

The Commonwealth air force war memorial in Floriana.

Letters were of a personal nature

Attard, who refrained from publishing the full names to retain confidentiality considering the letters were of a personal nature, told Times of Malta the information cast light on the frame of mind of regular wartime Germans and Austrians following instructions from their superiors.

Fraulein herself was a German patriot loyal to her fatherland – a young woman who tried to contribute to the war effort by keeping the morale of relatives and friends high. Her working-class family did well under the Nazi regime and had a comparatively high standard of living.

“The family’s loyalty to the Nazi war efforts and commitment to the defence of the ‘sacred confines’ of the Reich was unwavering. The family was very closely knit and played an active role in its community. The letters combine expressions of genuine kindness and altruism with a blind belief in the lies disseminated by the Nazi propaganda regime,” Attard explained.

Attard stumbled upon the letters by accident in 2019. He was looking to expand his collection of helmets when he came across an interesting listing: a British militaria dealer had listed an Afrika Korps silver spoon, a photo of a Luftwaffe pilot and a pack of colourful envelopes with German stamps.

Attard lost relatives in the war because of German bombings and admits that elements of the letters verge on hateful xenophobia. However, he told Times of Malta that even the most radicalised protagonists of the war were also victims of Nazism as they lost several members of their families and friends.