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https://spectator.com/article/how-the-nazis-used-vanity-to-lure-pilots-to-their-deaths/

To earn a Knight’s Cross, a pilot needed to amass a certain tally of aerial “victories”. The quotas were officially discretionary but universally known. Pilots tracked their scores with the obsessive devotion of schoolboys swapping Pokemon. As they crept towards the magic number, something fascinating happened: they got dramatically better. […]

Then, inevitably, the slump. Medal pinned on, photographs taken, handshake from Hermann Goring or the Führer himself – and performance dropped like a stone. The prize was won. The hunger vanished. Until, that is, the next prize appeared.

A medal, like a Birkin bag, derives its power from scarcity. Once many officers wear a Knight’s Cross, it ceases to signal what it once did. You might as well be wearing last season’s Hermès. That is why the Knight’s Cross was not a single award. It was a ladder – and the Luftwaffe kept adding rungs. As the war dragged on and the basic decoration became less and less exclusive, the High Command unveiled successively grander variants: first Oak Leaves, then Swords, then Diamonds, and finally – with a magnificence that bordered on self-parody – Golden Oak Leaves with Swords and Diamonds. Each time the regime launched a new variant, the familiar pattern reasserted itself: sprint, medal, slump. Sprint, medal, slump. A hedonic treadmill at 15,000 feet.

https://archive.ph/nC4xT