New Light On "Day Jobs" for dR & dL Officers

[Guest Rick Research]

Paul C just sent me scans of the 1918 Reichs Handbuch, which shows GERMAN awards up to that date for ALL senior civil servants of Imperial branches of government. This will be part of his 4th set of Rank Lists CDs and the first CIVILIAN "Rank List" for the WW1 period.

I've had this group for years, and Glenn found his "day job" circa 1906 in a dR/dL directory then. But as far as I knew, 1917 was the last trace of Hauptmann dL Wihelm H?ne:

EK 2--

EK1--

[Guest Rick Research]

Prussian Reserve-Landwehr XX Years Service Cross("Pr LD1")--

I wonder what ever happened to that old General who signed this?

Hamburg Hanseatic Cross ("Hbg HK") --

[Guest Rick Research]

?M3K-- no foreign awards are shown in the 1918

[Guest Rick Research]

Day Job, 1918!!!!!

Note the array of FRONTLINE awards received by civil servants who were obviously dR/dL officers and who would otherwise have been completely "invisible" to us! Like the Navy Rank Lists of 1916 and 1918, only German awards are shown. But tuis adds THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of groups-- some quite spectacular-- to our eventual knowledge.

Unless somebody shared the same last name in the same governmenet agency, only last names are used.

So how do we know that THIS Berlin Ober Post Inspektor H?ne--whose German awards match "my" Hauptmann dL H?ne, was Wilhelm and not ... Corbinian Melchior Hjalmar or Some Entirely Different H?ne?

[Guest Rick Research]

Because he lived in Berlin, the city directories on line list him.

And here is Ober Post Inspektor Wilhelm H?ne in the last year he held that title, 1919--

[Guest Rick Research]

Hey! They named the street he lived on after his old General!

By the next edition in 1920

he had been advanced to Postrat, civil service "major." He is last listed in that job in 1922. Died 1922/23? Moved on to another city?

Somewhere out there are POST OFFICE "Rank lists!"

[Guest Rick Research]

Reserve officers didn't even have their commission dates shown in normal annual military Rank Lists.

1895 as Second Lieutenant of the Reserve, Infantry Regiment 25--

1912 (while His Supreme Nibs was vacationing on Corfu!) as Captain of Landwehr Infantry--

Glenn's discovery of pre-war reservists-only directories showed us for the first time what their "real" jobs were.

Now the 1918 Reichs (and soon, Prussian) State Handbooks will reveal wartime awards to "citizen soldiers" never even dreamed of before.

This is the dawn of the Golden Age of research references becoming available!

[Paul C]

Nice info and I am glad to see the German Reich Handbook 1918 being put to good use. It really is a goldmine of information in regards to stay at home invisible guys. One interesting determination I can make is about the EK2 K and NK. It seems to me that if a person was awarded the EK it is not matter what there current position was. What SEEMED to matter was if they were a civilian or service/prior service.