PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE XXXVIII
Paul Bäumer
Paul Wilhelm Bäumer was born on May 11, 1896 in Duisburg, Germany. He was a dental assistant before the Great War and earned a private pilot’s license by the summer of 1914.
At the start of the First World War, Bäumer joined the 70th Infantry Regiment. He served in both France and Russia (suffering an arm wound in the latter). Bäumer then transferred to the air service as a dental assistant before being accepted for military pilot training.
By October 1916, Bäumer was serving as a ferry pilot and instructor at Armee Flugpark 1. On February 19, 1917, he was promoted to Gefreiter (corporal). One month later, he was assigned to Flieger Abteilung 7. Three days later (March 29th), Bäumer was promoted to Unteroffizier (sergeant).
Bäumer was also awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class on May 15, 1917. He subsequently received training on single-seaters, consequently being posted to fighter duty. Bäumer joined Jagdstaffel 5 by mid year, scoring three victories as a balloon buster in mid-July before going to the elite Jasta Boelcke.
Quickly accumulating kills, Bäumer scored eighteen victories by the end of 1917. He was commissioned three months later. However, on May 29, 1918, Bäumer was injured in a crash, breaking his jaw. But he returned to the Jasta later that September.
With the arrival of the Fokker D.VII, Bäumer claimed even more success, with sixteen kills in September alone. Nicknamed “Der Eiserne Adler” (“The Iron Eagle”), he flew with a personal emblem of a huge Edelweiss mountain flower on his aircraft. Bäumer was also one of the few pilots in World War I whose lives were saved by parachute deployment (he was shot down in flames in September 1918).
Bäumer received the coveted “Blue Max” (the Pour le Mérite) on November 2, 1918, a little over a week before the signing of the armistice. His final air tally was forty-three victories, ninth among all German aces in the First World War.
With the conflict officially over in June 1919, Bäumer worked briefly in the dockyards before he became a dentist. Reportedly, one of his patients, Erich Maria Remarque, used Bäumer’s name for the protagonist of his anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Continuing his interest in flying, Bäumer founded his own aircraft company in Hamburg. Sadly on July 15, 1927, he died in an air crash at Copenhagen while test flying a Rohrbach Ro IX fighter.
Paul Bäumer was only thirty-one years old.