Der Spiess note book

[Nick Komiya]

The notebooks carried by the NCO in the roll of der Spiess had always been a mystery to me. There are quite a number of Spiess uniforms around, but I've never seen the pouch and a search of the forum produced no photos either. So here it is, the Spiess notebook. It still has the list of all company personnel inside it. But although the item itself is no mystery anymore, the actual manner of carrying this tucked in front of the tunic now has me perplexed. The book is as thick as a good sized pocket dictionary and weighs almost 400 grams, a lot more substantial than I imagined. Simply tucking this in at the second button will never keep it there. What was the trick to carrying them? Did they improvise a shallow pocket inside to support it?

[Nick Komiya]

This is how thick it is. The contents is mostly names that are crossed out.

[Jean-Loup]

I cant answer your question, but this would be a very interesting item to research, particularly the fate of all the crosses out names.

[Nick Komiya]

Sütterlin is enough of a challenge to read and when they write not for others to read but only for their personal reference, I don't think much can be extracted from the memos. The company list has a lot of Flieger, so it seems it belonged to a Luftwaffe NCO. I'll be happy if I could identify the company, not to mention the scribbles inside, but so far no breakthrough.

[CWP]

Awesome item!

[Simon O.]

What a great item to have!

[erichcraciun]

Very nice!

I would be happy to help with the Sütterlin.

Did you check to see if Hauptfeld Godze wski ist listed by the Volksbund as KIA or MIA?

(By the way, the name is listed just 3x in the phone book. Might be worth a call?)

[Nick Komiya]

Thank you for the offer to help me out with the writing. OK, let's see whether anyone can at least make sense of the last entry half way into the book. I can read the date only as Feb 15, 1945, but don't understand why it's not in the German order of 15.2.45.
Anyway, 90 % of the entries are cancelled with scribbles like you see here on the left page, as if it were a to-do list, but the last entry is meant to be read, although I can't.

[V1Oliver]

Aus der Wehrmacht entlassen
...
der Mann ist aus (?)

This is the best I can do, not sure of the last sentence
Very interesting document

[Nick Komiya]

Thanks, a befitting last entry. I'll see if I can find more full entries that might be worth reading and put them up.

[erichcraciun]

It reads Der Trauer ist aus! (The Sorrow is over!)

[knoffhoff]

It reads Der Trauer ist aus! (The Sorrow is over!)

That would be a grammatical totally incorrect sentence.

I'm not good at reading Sütterlin, but for me it is pretty obvious that the last sentence says.

"Der Traum ist aus" (The dream is over)

In Germany we use this expression if something we were looking forward to happen, is no longer possible to achieve. E.g. The German football team stated that they wanted to win (dreamed of winning) EURO 2012. Germany got beaten by Italy in semi finals, so for them, their dream was over.

So it seems that this Hauptfeldwebel Godzewski wasn't very happy that the war ended and still believed they could win and also was fighting for some sort of dream to come true.

[Nick Komiya]

Thank you all for helping with the reading. As it looks like a worthwhile exercise I will upload some more pages I have chosen that look to have full sentences. There are more than a 100 pages of entries, so I have chosen pages where the owner did not badly obscure the content and changed the contrast to bring out the faint writing for easier reading. It would be very nice if those who can read Sütterlin can give a simple transcript in printed German for anything they find interesting.

[Nick Komiya]

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[Nick Komiya]

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