As I write these words late Saturday night it is nearing Volkstrauertag, the German national day of mourning for all the men, women, and children who died in the world wars. In the spirit of Volkstrauertag I will relate a collecting-related experience I had this evening. I was able to spend some time in the room where my collection is stored and I noticed that I own relatively few items dated 1942 for some reason. A bayonet... a mess tin... maybe some other items, not much. I started poking around for more 1942 items and started rifling through my Feldpost letters, and found plenty of documents from Kriegsjahr 1942. One of those 1942 letters was from an Obergefreiter, Helmuth Rake. I also found some postcards from 1940, when Rake was just a mere Soldat in training, and a letter to Rake from a friend from November 1944- by then Rake was an Unteroffizier, and apparently on leave, as the letter is addressed to Helmuth at his family home on Hermann Goeringstrasse in Hamburg. Then I noticed another letter from that group, a letter to Helmuth from his parents that was mailed on March 12, 1945. This letter has an ominous looking black ink stamp on the front- ZURUCK AN DEN ABSENDER- "Return to Sender." For the first time in the years I have owned this letter, I opened it and read it. As soon as I started reading I began to feel a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. "We have heard nothing from you for a long time... 17 February was the last post from you... I have written and written but sadly no further mail from you... it is always such a strange feeling when we don't hear from you...we have had bad bomb attacks again these weeks..." I couldn't finish reading the letter and tucked it back into its envelope. It was as if I could feel sadness pouring off the paper. It must have been so terrible for these parents, nearly a month of enduring terrorist bomb raids without any news from their son. But Helmuth Rake must have been a veteran, he had gone through more than 4 years of war and had become an Unteroffizier, hopefully his luck had held out and he had become a prisoner. His parents had mentioned that he was on the Westfront, hopefuly he had been captured by the Americans and would have had a decent chance at winding up OK. But after I read that letter I couldn't stop thinking of Helmuth Rake and hoping that things had worked out for him and that he had a joyous reunion after the war with his family in Hamburg. I got on the computer and went to the Kriegsgraeberfuersorge web site, hoping not to find this Soldat whose letters sit amongst the artifacts in my room. But I was not surprised to see him among the lists... he was killed on February 23, 1945, less than a week after that last letter home. After four and a half years of service to the Wehrmacht, Helmuth Rake was killed less than three months before the end of the war. He was 25 years old. Today he lies with 33,084 other fallen German soldiers in the war cemetery in Andilly, France. Someday I will translate the letters he wrote and include them in my reenactment group's newsletter in the hopes that in this small way, his memory will live on. Today on Volkstrauertag I will think of this young man and hope that he rests in peace!
Chris
Photo of the cemetery in Andilly:
Chris
Photo of the cemetery in Andilly:
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