ukraus

Recently I wrote that he was a distant relative, more exactly, the cousin of my grandmother. His father and my grandmothers father were brothers, out of a family of farmers in a German village of northern Bohemia. The oldest brother took a military career in the Austrian Army, where he was ennobled and changed his name from "Zahn" to "von Zahn, Edler von Lichtenhöhe". His son Victor went to an Austrian Diplomatic Academy which he finished after WWI. He worked as a diplomat for Ceko-Slovakia, probably until the German Annexion of 1938. During the war, he is said to have worked for the German War Administration in Belgium or the Netherlands. After WWII, he worked for the German Foreign Office as a negotiator of bi-laterial trade agreements. It seems that his main achievement was the first German-Soviet Trade Agreement. He had a wife, but no children, and died in 1973 near Munich. That's all our family knows about him, because there was not much contact between the brothers and there descendants. But hopefully I'll soon know more when I saw his personal file at the foreign office in Berlin. Unfortunately, our family has no pictures of him, and so I would be very glad if you could send my a copy or I high-quality scan of the photo you posted.

Hello Herr General, I think Dr. von Zahn-Stranik was a very distant relative of mine. I would be interested in exchanging information.