Red Moth

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A thousand feet above the Russian front, a German scout plane weaved among the clouds, searching for a place to land. The aircraft was a Fiesler 156, whose broad wings and spindly looking wheel struts had earned it the nickname of ‘Stork’. The pilot, Hanno Kosch, was a captain in the Luftwaffe. Beside him, nervously clutching a briefcase, sat a lieutenant of the Waffen SS named Karl Hagen.

One hour before, the Stork had taken off from a forward operations base of Army Group North, just outside the town of Luga, bound for a grass strip runway near the village of Vyrista, a short distance by air to the north-east.

Kosch tilted the plane and squinted down at the ground below, searching for some contour of the earth which corresponded to the flight-plan chart clipped to a map board on his knee. ‘I don’t see it,’ he said.

‘Maybe we should turn back,’ replied Hagen, shouting to make his voice heard over the engine.

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