Lauterbach exits.
Presiding Judge Now, Counsel, is your client prepared to answer further questions from the court?
Defence Counsel Yes.
Presiding Judge Mr Koch?
Defendant I’ll try.
Presiding Judge Good, then please step forward and take the witness’s chair. It will be easier to hear you that way.
The Defendant walks up to the witness’s chair and sits down.
Of course you may pause in your answers at any point to speak to your Defence Counsel.
Defendant Fine.
Presiding Judge We will start with some biographical details, Mr Koch. You are your parents’ first child?
Defendant Yes, I have one sister who is three years younger.
Presiding Judge What were your parents’ professions?
Defendant My father was also in the Air Force. After reunification he became a staff officer in the press department at the Ministry of Defence. My mother is a bookseller. After I was born, she stayed at home. She was a housewife and mother.
Presiding Judge You were born in Freiburg and attended school there?
Defendant Yes, kindergarten, primary school and grammar school, all in Freiburg.
Presiding Judge I have your school-leaving certificate here. You attained the top grade in every subject. Your class teacher adds that in Mathematics you even got the highest mark in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
Defendant That is correct.
Presiding Judge What were your interests outside of school?
Defendant Physics. Every year I used to enter ‘Young Scientist of the Year’.
Presiding Judge And one time you even won second prize.
Defendant Yes. Apart from that I did a lot of sport, especially football and athletics.
Presiding Judge Would it be fair to say that school and learning came easily to you?
Defendant Yes.
Presiding Judge Your childhood and youth were untroubled?
Defendant I would say they were happy. Yes.
Presiding Judge Let us come to your choice of profession. Was it actually your own wish to become a soldier? Or was it your father’s?
Defendant It’s true that my father did also want to be a fighter pilot.
Presiding Judge And?
Defendant He didn’t make it.
Presiding Judge I see.
Defendant I always wanted to join the Air Force. When I was a child I wanted to be a fighter pilot. It was all I was interested in. I used to have posters of aeroplanes on my bedroom wall.
Presiding Judge What made you interested in them?
Defendant I found it fascinating. The dream of flying, the speed, the precision of the planes.
Presiding Judge As soon as you left school, when you were eighteen, you applied for a position as an officer trainee…
Defendant I was invited to attend the Officer Candidate Assessment Centre in Cologne and took an aptitude test. That lasted two days. Afterwards I was examined to check that I was medically and psychologically fit and had the psychomotor skills necessary for the service. In October I entered the service at Fürstenfeldbruck.
Presiding Judge What did that consist of?
Defendant In the first year I completed officer training and was commissioned with the rank of Ensign. Then over the next two years I went through basic and advanced training as a pilot.
Presiding Judge Where did you do that?
Defendant In the United States, to be precise in Goodyear, Arizona. Then I trained as a jet pilot at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. Fifteen months.
Presiding Judge What does one learn there?
Defendant Essentially: flying.
There is theoretical and simulator-based training for about three hundred flying hours. Once that section of the training is completed, you are licensed to fly military aircraft.
Presiding Judge And then?
Defendant Then I had to familiarise myself with flying conditions in Germany.
Presiding Judge Are they so very different?
Defendant The topography and weather conditions are different. And it’s much more complicated moving around within European airspace – if you think of how many borders there are and the number of flights here.
Presiding Judge I see. Did you sign up for sixteen years as a regular soldier right at the start?
Defendant The term of duty is not fixed straight away. One signs up in stages according to one’s level of training.
Presiding Judge I have your Air Force personnel file here. You have consistently received the best appraisals and on each occasion you were, and I quote: ‘unreservedly recommended for promotion’.
Defendant What you need to bear in mind is: the proportion of people that apply to join the Air Force who end up in the cockpit of a fighter jet is one in ten thousand. Even out of the trained pilots only one in ten is ever going to fly the Eurofighter.
Presiding Judge So it’s a rigorous selection process.
Defendant In this country there are more chairmen of public companies and more heart surgeons than there are fighter pilots.
Presiding Judge Let us come to the events of 26th May. Did you follow the statement made here in the court by the witness Lt Col Lauterbach?
Defendant Yes.
Presiding Judge And in your view, did the witness represent the sequence of events accurately?
Defendant Yes.
Presiding Judge They match your recollections?
Defendant Completely.
Presiding Judge Good. Would you describe for us the minutes before the Lufthansa aeroplane was shot down once again please, from your own personal point of view.
Defendant The diversion and the warning shots produced no reaction from the captain of the Lufthansa aircraft, as you have heard. A couple of minutes later we received the order from the DC not to shoot.
Presiding Judge From the witness, Lt Col Lauterbach?
Defendant Yes, that’s right. So there was nothing else we could do other than fly alongside the plane. We repeatedly attempted to make contact. By radio and visually. But without success.
Presiding Judge The witness Lt Col Lauterbach told us that you had questioned the order not to shoot.
Defendant That is correct. I checked twice with the command centre to see whether the order to shoot had not been given after all. I knew that the Lufthansa aircraft was only a few minutes away from the stadium.
Presiding Judge What did you think in that moment?
Defendant That’s hard to explain.
Presiding Judge We have time. Please, try.
Defendant You have to understand that our entire training, the complicated selection procedures, the courses, the years of physical conditioning, the appraisals by our superiors and so forth, all of that has just one objective: in the most difficult and testing circumstances we have to hold our nerve. Our job is to assess danger quickly and precisely. That is what we’re trained to do.