Major Otto Heidemann is an aristocratic officer whose belief in chivalry and the laws and customs of warconflict with Stachel's disregard for them. After Stachel's first mission, after he returned he was more interested in the kill he made than of the loss of his fellow wing man. In Stachel's defense, he points out to his fellow pilots that in his time in the trenches there were so many dead, no one had time to grieve over a single person.