bob lembke

As in 1900 the entire army corps only had one Bavarian unit (2. Fuss=Artillerie=Regiment) and IR Nr. 130 would not be considered a Bavarian unit, it is reasonable that the series included other non-Bavarian units. Check the title page out, this sort of book would usually be published in a numbered series, if the volume is "Nr. 67", for example, one might expect other non-Bavarian units in the series. A good way to research this sort of question is to get into the on-line catalog of the National Library's Buecherei Leipzig, which should have the best collection of this sort of book in the world. I assume you might be able to borrow other books in the series through inter-library loan. Bob Lembke

Only vaguely related. My wife, the "super-librarian" brought me an interesting book from her library, entitled, I believe, The Nazi War on Cancer, about the nazi efforts to imrove health, suppress smoking, a more healthy diet, etc. A serious and interesting book; I generally don't study German history post 1926, when my father sailed for the US. In the book there is a really funny cartoon. I gather that Hermann, in some ways a serious animal lover, supposedly abolished vivasection in Germany. The cartoon shows dicke Hermann striding thru a medical labratory, and several dozen lab animals, rabbits, lab mice, etc. are standing on cages and lab benches giving good ol' Hermann the Nazi salute as he walks by. The above material was not posted in any attempt to rehabilitate or endear pudgy Hermann or his buddies, but I have always been amused on how eccentric and "New Wave" some of them were; vegitarians, astrology, etc., sort of like flower-power on steroids and bad acid. Bob

Chris; As he was a reservist, he could have been a skilled craftsman, perhaps a tool and die maker. That would have been a reason for the exceptional skills needed to make the piece. It also might be a reason for him being held so long, he may have been doing skilled work, even on a rail operation, and his "employers" might have been loath to let him go. Many of the German POWs in Russia after WW II were held for 10 or more years; they in general were very skilled workers and their work supposedly still is a topic of conversation in Russia. Bob Lembke Bob Lembke

Chris; Why Pistorius is called the regimental commander is a mystery to me. Note that he is not identified as the "acting regimental leader". If he was regimental CO while Reddemann was on an extended leave you would think that he would identify himself as "acting" (stellvertreiter) CO. I have some info on him. I understand that Reddemann was the CO from late 1914 (Detachment Reddemann) right through to the end of the war. But I also get the impression that Reddemann sometimes did not mention things that annoyed him in his writings. Bob Lembke

I think there was the tubed 76 mm weapon pictured just above, at least two types of spigot 76 mm mortars as discussed and pictured above (I think all three 76 mm weapons were called licht M. W., or "light mine thrower"), the 17 cm "medium" MW, and the 24.5 cm "heavy" mine thrower. The Pioniere I think served all three for a while and then the infantry (such as in the photo just above) got the light MW back, while the Pioniere continued to serve the two heavier calibers. I would also imagine that there were variants and some odd things like pneumatic mine throwers earlier in the war, but I think that they eventually settled on the devices listed above. Bob Lembke

I doubt if it is important, but the devices pictured are not at all like actual German Flammenwerfer of WW I. Bob Lembke

It was early in the war for such a high percentage of men to have the EK II. Perhaps it is a subset of the men, even possibly after an awards ceremony. The percentage of NCOs is very high. Not a random sample of the regiment. If you would zoom in with a scan on the text half of the reverse to greater magnification maybe someone (like myself) who can read Suetterlin but has weak eyes (probably related, I suspect) can read it; the answer might be there. Bob Lembke PS: Ulsterman posted while I scribbled.

I would think Bavarian rather than Prussian. But what were the colors and overall tone of the other kingly states? And were there sny other Kokardes? Bob

Christer; As you may already know, "I / 251" probably means the 1st Battalion of the 251st Regiment. Bob Lembke

The first mine thrower, in the first post of the thread, was the 76 mm spigot mortar. There also was a 76 mm tubed mortar. The "fuze" in the photo is actually a long lanyard to pull to fire the device. This model was called "the Priester" as it was supposedly designed by a priest! (A practical application of "Gott mit Uns", I guess!) The workshop of my father's flame regiment made a version that only weighed 20 kilos and could be worn on the back like a back-pack. (You put it on the ground to fire it, of course.) Bob Lembke PS: "Naxos", I finally burned a CD of the Gruss thesis and will mail it when I get some packing material.

The dogtags with the perforations (to be snapped when the guy was killed, one half with the remains, oner half to be turned in) was the last of the three major styles of German dog-tags; has more info. So it was more recent than the other, probably 1916 or later. He seemed to be in II. Ersatz Bataillon, 61. Landwehr Infanterie=Regiment, first in the Rekruiten Depot, then in the 4. Kompagnie. The 1880 date is his birth date, so he was about 36, which fits with serving in the Landwehr. The short numbers were his Kriegsstammrolle Nr., which seem to have been reset every year. (In peace-time the Nr. was called Stammrolle Nr., I believe, in wartime the name was changed. Don't understand this all well.) I have my father's, it has a Hamburg address on it, I knew that he never lived in Hamburg, but that his mother did (don't ask, funny business, my grandfather had two families, poisoning with Deadly Nightshade, the usual domestic excitement), and I made a cold "call" (actually e-mail) to the city archives, and a kindly archivist poked about and found a whole part of my family that I did not know about, a half uncle and aunt I had never heard of, etc., and even where my "family" name came from. The French one is hardly packed with information, would not give the enemy any info, and with a good data system the guy could be identified. But one wonders how it worked in practice. IMHO the French did not take great care of their men in a number of ways, like medical care. Bob Lembke

I remember reading a piecewritten by a former British spy, or perhaps a spy-master, and he said that the most inportant intellegence coup he ever scored was engineering the stealing of a book of the current German Feldpoststation numbers and where they were from on the various fronts from a postoffice in Belgium. Bob

RNLSGC; If this stuff is of interest you could actually learn German. (English is, after all, considered one of the German family of languages.) I found my family correspondence from the war (certainly not all of it), about 50 letters and cards, mostly to or from the front, and I taught myself to read German and the old scripts (yes, there are several) to be able to read them. About four years ago, over dinner, I met a literal "German brain scientist" over dinner in a street in Dubrovnik, and in the course of the conversation he said that learning a new language is absolutely the best way to keep your brain nimble as you age. (I am assuming that you are getting long in the teeth.) You mentioned "documents". A marvelous class of German WW I document is a little booklet called the Militaer=Pass, which contains a record of the soldier's entire military career. They have a little brother called the "Soldbuch", the pay book, with a lot less information, but still interesting. These are potentially a great source of military history. Unfortunately, the textual content of most Feldpost is mostly very bland stuff, of the "the socks are nice, the food crummy, greet Aunt Bertha for me" variety. Unless it is your own family. Bob Lembke

Yes, I don't seem to see a single Feldpoststation number, although at least one seems to have gone thru a Feldpoststation, but the station number is not in the station's stamp. I did want to point out that there are some people that have an interest in these numbers. (I have a PC from my father at the time he joined the German flame regiment in France, and my Feldpost collector e-friend confirmed that the Feldpost number confirmed that my father was in the vicinity of the HQ of the flame thrower regiment at that time. So they are useful, those numbers.) As none of the PCs posted had civilian postage stamps (the paper stamps, not the inked inscriptions printed with a rubber stamp and ink), some of those cards probably traveled without postage to soldiers. Would those be called "Feldpost"? Bob

Ihave a fair amount of German WW I Feldpost, both from my family and also other items. At one time I corresponded with a German serious Feldpost collector. I believe that there are tables that indicate where a Feldpoststation with a given number was, say, in France at a certain time. There is a Feldpost collector working group that is a division of the German stamp collecting society. Several years ago their yearly annual dues was about $25, which included a quarterly newsletter of exactly (being German) 50 pages each quarter, including postage for the newsletters. These guys are serious collectors. One of them was a Danish collector who collected postcards from Belgium post-marked with post marking machines made by a company in the US and modified by the Germans to post-mark Feldpost from Belgium. As of 5-6 years ago this guy had 10,000 postcards stamped with these machines. The other stamps on the postcards, especially the unit stamps, and something called the Absender Block, convey a lot of information about the sender, units, etc., usually more thaan the text of the cards themselves. Interesting stuff, but my interests have mostly moved on. Can you read German and the old handwriting? Bob Lembke

I just spoke with a very active member of the GMIC on the phone, and he told me that some members had been wondering what happened to me, and he asked me to post a note about my recent medical adventures. I am self-centered, but not enough to start a seperate thread on "me", so here is a note in this thread. This Spring I passed out an Easter dinner and damaged the block of concrete on my shoulders, hitting a very hard floor, and enjoying a nice brain bleed, and several high-tech studies showed that my aortic valve in the center of my heart was 90% blocked with calcium, and 4-5 coronary arteries were blocked up to 80%. So I was split like a chicken headed for the soup-pot and a big calf valve (at least I am Halal!) mounted in a massive titanium ring and Gortex ® put in, in addition about 8 stainless steel "figure 8" wire loops to hold my sawn-up ribs together, and a number of titanium staples; my chest looks like a junkyard on an X-ray. They were able to hi-jack a spare mammilary gland in my chest for one, but they did three other by-passes with veins harvested from my left leg, cut up from groin to ankle. The procedure was described by a member of the surgical team as three times the length and complexity as a heart transplant. So I was one sore puppy, and my brains were scrambled for months, as we were warned. I was mostly confined to my bedroom for a couple of months, and since my brain was mush I could not pursue my WW I studies, in which on average I read about 2-2 1/2 hours of German and 20-30 minutes of French a day. Could only read light stuff on dragons and the like fed to me by my wife. So a lot of time wasted. Now I am largely back, and even was just able to take a Danube cruise, and buy some delicious WW I books in Austria and Germany. I have started actually writing the text of my planned book on my father and grand-father in WW I, and am starting another major project that I will have to keep under wraps until my collaborator gives me the green light. So thanks for the kind thoughts which I understand were wafted in my direction in my ignorance. (Now if someone knows something about those 24 cm mortars .............. ?) Bob Lembke

The state cockade seems fairly light in overall color, so perhaps they are Bavarian. A view of the other caps would be helpful, to see if they are also generally lighter in color than the Prussian cockades. Not being too sharp, the several colors blend together to an overall tone. Bob Lembke

I am not sure where to post this, in the Club site, but I know that k.u.k. experts lurk here. (Glenn, are you listening?) The first Central Powers heavy battery able to get thru/past Serbija and reach Gallipoli was k.u.k. 24 cm Motor=Moerser=Batterie Nr. 9, which reached Turkey about November 14, 1915, and under Hauptmann Kodar von Thurnwerth reached the Gallipoli front and opened fire first on November 27, 1915. These A-H 24 cm mortars were a Motor=Moerser unit, like the better-known 30.5 cm Motor=Moerser used in Belgium in 1914, whose mobility equipment was designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche (yes, that Porsche). Does anyone know the model? I understand that there was a M 16 model, which reached the troops in late 1915. (I have this from a secondary source; I always prefer to be able to peek at a primary source. Language does not matter, unless it is Hungarian.) Were these guns the new M 16, or an earlier model? Anywhere to get reliable info on these guns? I have seen sources cite the war diaries of this battery, and the Austrian 15 cm howitzer battery which followed it closely. I assume that these are probably only found in Vienna, in the original? (I was there about a month ago, not going to help me now.) I gather that Peter Jung has material on this topic; I have to get hold of his book Der k.u.k. Wuestenkrieg --------- . My father served at Gallipoli with the Turks and told me many years ago that he saw these mortars in action at ANZAC. I am now writing this up. Any help gratefully received. Bob Lembke

Hi, "Naxos"; Just saw this. Yes, I would say that it was a replica of an Infanterie=Geschuetze, like the cut-down 77 mm guns used for that purpose, cut-down wheels, sometimes a bit off the barrel, etc. By 1918 most line infantry regiments had one or two batteries, either special infantry gun formations (50 batteries were formed), or 77 mm guns or occasionally 105 mm howitzer batteries detailed for this purpose from regular field artillery formations. Use as flier bait sounds as good as anything. Bob Lembke

I do not study the naval war, and WW II not at all, but I have come across several accounts of the Royal Navy sinking a German ship, in both WW I and WW II, and only picking up a few men, out of many more in the water. I remember one case where, from the British point of view, it was stated that there was a fear of lurking submarines, although in that case it was in mid-Atlantic at the end of a high-speed chase of over 1000 miles, and to my simple non-naval mind it would seem that the possibility of a U-boat there was remote indeed in that situation. This raises the suspicion that a few were picked up for intelligence purposes and the rest were left to die. There was also the case in WW I where a UK warship refused to pick up the crew of a downed Zeppelin in the North Sea who were clinging to the wreckage; the crew then had time to write farewell letters to their families and "post" them in bottles, one or more of them recovered on the Danish coast. The letter(s) identified the British ship; it was quite an affair at the time. Was this a standard British practice? (I hesitate to use the word "tradition".) Did other navies practice this? I do not recall reading of other navies doing this, but I don't read that many naval accounts. Bob Lembke

"Coldstream"; I just read the Wiki piece on these events that you linked, and they are a good example of how the history of the post-war civil war is told very differently depending on the politics of the writer. I am not (yet) an expert on these times (have not yet written the portion of a book about my father that covers these events), but it is clear that some of the "facts" cited are incorrect, and certainly the piece was written from a left perspective. Many of the words used in the article seem to be chosen to impart spin. Be aware that probably little written on these events is objective (whatever that is). Bob

Uniforms were a big deal in those events. My father was visiting his mother in Hamburg in December 1918 and he was stopped in the street at rifle-point by a patrol of Red sailors and stripped of his boots and great-coat. He was furious, he had been a storm-trooper for 2 1/2 years and was not used to being messed with like that, and he vowed to kill some sailors. He went to Berlin, where the Peoples' Naval Division (Reds) were raising hell, and he joined the Guards-based Freikorps Potsdam, and took part in the attack in the Vorwarts building, burning the way in the back door with his Flammenwerfer. There were 300 Spartakists in the building, but they did not have the stomach for fighting room-to-room against an opponent with Flammenwerfer. 26 were wearing sailor's uniforms, which were the "radical chic" of the day. Pop's unit had a legitimate sailor with them, and they set up a sort of sea-scout test for the guys in sailors' uniforms, parts of ships, etc. Some of the "sailors" were real sailors, and some were landlubber communists who were wearing the fashionable sailors' uniforms. The results of the tests were announced, and the real sailors were told that, as no ship was in sight, they were going to be shot as deserters, while the civilians were going to be shot for the unauthorized wearing of a military uniform. (Nothing like some humor at a moment like this.) They were put against a wall, and a Freikorps commander went down the line, shooting each in the forehead. As he had only one arm (and one eye), after every eighth sailor he had to hand his P 08 to someone to insert a new clip. Pop called the CO "Lieutenant Rocca", as I heard it 50 years ago. (I had little German at the time. Rokkow?) Pop said that he was a hero at Verdun, where Pop was wounded twice. Who says that fashion does not count? Anyone have an idea who this officer was? The Freikorps Potsdam was the only Guards-based Freikorps. Of course he did not have to be a Guards officer. The CO of the entire Freikorps was the Guards officer Major von Stephani, whose father was a Prussian general, and who interestingly, based on a statement from an authoritive source, was Jewish, and who later served in the Weimar and/or Reichstag as an Ehrenaryan, or an "honorary Aryan", and also was a top Stahlhelm leader. I find this very interesting. Anyone know more about this? Bob Lembke

I love the touch of the cooling Sekt or Champagne in Glenn's photo of what seems to be a staff meeting, post # 5. Guys who seemed to know how to live well! Bob

I am working on figuring out as much as I can about my paternal grandfather. I have tracked him thru the Prussian Ranglisten, and about four years ago several people, especially the redoubtable Glenn J, helped my put together more of his military career. Recently I heard that the Berliner Address=Buecher were on-line, and, using them, I made more progress, on the civilian/address line. In 1905 (when he was a Feuerwerk=Oberleutnant der Landwehr) he became director of the Berlin stockyard, the Magerviehhof (literally, "lean cattle stockyard" ??) on the Marzahner Chauffee in the Berlin-Friedrichsfelde section. (Were there other stockyards in Berlin? This jibes with my oral history.) I can not find another address for him in the directory, so I am assuming that he had an apartment at the stockyard. On 18 August 1906 he was promoted to Feuerwerk=Hauptmann. The Address=Buecher continue his listing at the Magerviehhof thru 1914. When the war started he was made the Id of the Generalkommando of III. Reservekorps and went off to Belgium and then Russia. For 1915 and 1916 there was no obvious listing for him, but in 1917 and 1918 a listing popped up for Hauptmann Heinrich Fuchs, Berlin W 30, Motz=Strasse 73. (In 1915 he contracted malaria on the Russian front, and for the rest of the war he was not fit for the front, and did staff work in the East, and bought a house in Berlin.) The listing disappeared in 1919 and 1920, but from 1921 on there appeared a listing for Major a. D. Heinrich Fuchs at the Motzstrasse address. In 1930 he moved to Schoeneberg and after 1932 he disappeared from the Addressbuch. I think he died somewhere between 1932 and more likely ca. 1935; he may have moved in with family. Anyone have any ideas on other references that I might track the civil side of his life, etc.? The last person who knew him died earlier this year. I also understand that the Poles sent a lot of German parish records from places where the Germans were expelled after 1945 to a Evangelical archive in Berlin. Anyone ever attempt to access these records? Any ideas/leads gratefully received. Bob Lembke

Rick; The Berlin address books are great. Have been tracking down my grand-father year by year post-war, and also verified his job (director of the stock-yards) in 1913. Thanks for the lead. Bob Lembke