As he wrote the story of his great uncle, a bomber pilot killed over Germany during World War 2, Stephen Harris stumbled upon the airman's best enemy. He talks to LAURA MCQUILLAN of NZPA.

Wellington, Nov 29 NZPA - In a quest to find out about his great uncle, a New Zealand air force bomber pilot killed in a raid over Berlin in 1944, Stephen Harris uncovered more than he expected.

He was working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Germany when he began to research his great uncle, Flight Lieutenant Colwyn "Col" Jones.

When the opportunity arose for Harris' wife to take over his diplomat role for a year, enabling him to spend that time researching and writing the book, Harris jumped.

"When I was working at the embassy and I had no prospect of having enough time to consider it seriously, my objective was really just to find out more about how my great uncle lived and died -- where, the circumstances around it, that sort of thing -- just so I could tell my family a bit more about what had happened to him."

Harris' family knew little of Col's experiences living in Britain while flying bombing raids, he says.

But Col had written letters home, kept hidden in a suitcase since the war, and diaries, which helped Harris piece together the story.

"We didn't know what happened to him the night that he died because the family had a very short paragraph saying roughly when it happened and where, and so I really went to a lot of effort to find out more and to get in touch with people who remembered the event."

Harris stumbled upon one very important witness -- Otto Heinrich-Fries, the German airman who shot Col down.

"I'd been to the town where the plane came down, I went there with my kids in 2006, and found out nothing, and so having followed up on that we found out about this experimental airfield which they said had been set up as a museum," Harris recalls.

"The people there were quite helpful and put me onto a guy who coordinates all these returned services clubs for old airmen, and I went along to one of their meetings one Tuesday night and met some of these old characters."

It was through them that Harris met Fries, who recounted for him what happened the night he duelled in the skies with Col.

"The way he defines his cause now is defending civilians and their homes from a relentless attack, so he says he was fighting a wholly defensive war," Harris says.

"Fries himself and his wife, I never sensed in them any regret during the war at what Germany was doing, and some of the more extreme elements, like the Holocaust, it paid to look the other way, so there was a deliberate attempt on the part of most people in Germany to say `this is none of my business'," Harris says.

"Most of the older people I've spoken to saw the Nazi period as one in which they started off feeling very proud of what the reborn Germany was achieving under Hitler.

"It took a very clear-minded person with a deep conscience to resist the lure of, on the one hand, ingenious propaganda, on another hand, early military successes, astonishing military successes, and then, against that, the mechanism of terror and repression that weeded out anyone who raised any voice of dissent, and most people went with the flow."

Along with the battle between Col and Fries, Harris looks at social and political change in Germany since 1945 -- including the difficulty of reconciling remembering and honouring those who fought for Germany with the "greater evil they helped to perpetrate".

Fries ended the war with his life and war medals, but little else to make a new start in communist East Germany.

"He doesn't feel that the political cause was right but he admits that at the time he did," Harris says.

"He actually says `in retrospect, I can see that if Germany won the war, it would have been a terrible thing for Germany and for Europe, but at the time, when we lost the war, I felt my world had ended'."