page_title: Josef Kammhuber
section_title: Postwar
hierarchical_section_title: Josef Kammhuber / Postwar
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Luftwaffe General Josef Kammhuber and Royal Air Force Air Marshal Sir Thomas Pike. The caption from the source (see below) states that the photograph was taken in October 1956.
context_page_description: Josef Kammhuber was a career officer in the Luftwaffe and post-World War II German Air Force. During World War II, he was the first general of night fighters in the Luftwaffe.
  Kammhuber created the night fighter defense system, the so-called Kammhuber Line, but the detailed knowledge of the system provided to the Royal Air Force by British military intelligence allowed them to render it ineffective. Personal battles between him and Erhard Milch, director of the Reich Air Ministry, led to his dismissal in 1943. After the war, he joined the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of West Germany.
context_section_description: After Germany's capitulation in May 1945, Kammhuber was held by the United States, but he was released in April 1948 without charges being brought against him. He wrote a series of monographs for the US Department of Defense on the conduct of the German defenses against the RAF and USAAF. These were later collected into book form (listed under References). In 1953 he published a definitive work on what he learned during the war as Problems in the Conduct of a Day and Night Defensive Air War. He later spent time in Argentina, helping to train the air force under Juan Perón.
  Josef Kammhuber returned to Germany and joined the German Air Force while it was being formed. He was promoted to Inspekteur der Luftwaffe, serving in that role between 1956 and 1962. After the 1961 F-84 Thunderstreak incident, when two West German Republic F-84F Thunderstreaks strayed into East German airspace and flew to West Berlin, Kammhuber and his superior, the West German Minister of Defence, Franz-Josef Strauß, removed Oberstleutnant Siegfried Barth, commander of the pilots' unit, from his command. After protests, three official investigations and a formal complaint by Barth against Strauß, the former was reinstated in his position.
  Kammhuber died on January 25, 1986, aged 89 in Munich and is buried there.
caption: Meeting between Kammhuber and Air Marshal Sir Thomas Pike in 1956. Pike had previously served as an RAF night fighter pilot.
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