Wehrmacht Soldbuch  Issued June 1940, to Josef Niewiera. Frontline Units Stalag IIID Berlin – (1940 – 1942) The camp was established on 14 August 1940 on the corner of Landweg and Osdorfer Straße in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The commandant and camp administration offices (Kommandantur) were later located at Belle-Alliance-Straße 106-107, in Kreuzberg. With prisoners from Belgium, United Kingdom, France, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Poland, United States, Italy and Czechoslovakia, the camp’s maximum capacity was 58,000 men. Prisoners were mostly allocated to sub-camps (Zweiglager) and work details (Arbeitskommando) in and around the city. Grenadier (Festungs) Regiment 863 (1943 – 1944/45) The 348th Infantry Division was created on 14 September 1942 for the OB West during World War II. The unit was formed as a ground-based division. The officer corps and the majority of the non-commissioned officers had combat experience from other theaters of war and were transferred to the division either after recovering or from a deployment at home. The troops were mostly made up of older, poorly trained soldiers. The reinforcements and supply troops were only poorly trained and reliant on fixed installations. After its formation, the division was deployed from November 1942 onwards to protect the coast in the Dieppe area and to the northeast. At the time of the Allied landings at Dieppe in August 1942, the division was still training in the hinterland and did not directly intervene in the fighting on the beachhead. After the Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944, the division remained in the Dieppe area and was not transferred to Normandy until mid-August 1944. During the fighting there, the division was wiped out within a very short time and officially disbanded on September 29, 1944.   Equipment / Medals Personal D.W Pistol , War Merit Cross with Swords – 20.4.1943 It seems he was either captured or there are no records on him or his fate.

Interesting KIA Wehrpass to Heinz Füchtenkort. He initially volunteered for service with the Infanterie Regiment Grossdeutschland GD Although he served on the front in a Anti-Tank Company with Grenadier Regiment 110. Trained on the PaK 3,7 as the gunner. He was killed due to a grenade splinter in his left side of his back, according to his record card in the German Archive he died on board the plane to a Hospital.

An interesting unit! Max Haussler, born in Ulm in 1889. He served in the First World War.  He was enlisted into the German Army in January of 1941.  He spent some time in Trier on duty, interestingly the role of these units can be seen below: During the Polish campaign, the Wehrmacht had already shown a lack of discipline on an unexpected scale. The reason for this was certainly that the army, including the officer corps, had grown too quickly and still lacked internal strength. As early as October 1939, Brauchitsch (commander of the army) reprimanded the deficiencies in the officer corps that had arisen during the short war against Poland in a decree: “illegal collections, including theft, embezzlement of looted goods, mistreatment of subordinates while completely drunk, disobedience, rape”. He spoke of “lansquenet manners that cannot be condemned harshly enough”. (<>Decree of the Ob.d.H. of 25.10.1939, printed in: Messerschmitt, M./Gersdorff, U.v. (ed.): Officers in images of documents from 3 centuries. (= Contributions to military and war history, 6), Stuttgart 1964. p. 277). In addition, the Wehrmacht was forced to call 1.2 million combatants of the First World War back to the flag during mobilization in 1939. These family fathers, well over 40 years old, showed little enthusiasm for war. Many of these soldiers were deployed in state rifle units in the rear of the front or in the divisions of the 3rd wave on the Upper Rhine front, and during the phase of the “seat war” up to spring 1940 there were repeated contacts with the French on the opposite side. In the area of ​​the HGr. C, the first cases of soldiers carrying their rifles with the muzzle pointing downwards became known at the end of October 1939. When front-line troops were transferred from the east to the west after the Polish campaign, transport wagons were decorated with slogans that fatally equated party divisions with the staging of the World War. For example, they said: “The front-line pig is here, where is the SS, where is the SA?” Such incidents, which were harmless in themselves, immediately triggered memories of revolting troops in November 1918 and caused considerable unrest among the political leadership of the regime, but also among the army leadership. Brauchitsch and Halder both compared the internal state of large parts of the army in autumn 1939 with signs of decay towards the end of the First World War. For example, the Chief of the Army General Staff noted in his diary at the beginning of November 1939: “Pictures like 17-18 are emerging.” <>(Halder, Franz: War Diary. Daily notes of the Chief of the Army General Staff 1939 – 1942. Vol. 1, Stuttgart 1962, p. 116.) The field gendarmerie, which was primarily intended to monitor military order and discipline, was only able to monitor soldiers to a limited extent due to its ties to large units and commands. Large areas of the German sphere of influence were also not covered by local commands (home war zone, parts of the occupied territories under civil administration), so that there was initially hardly any control here. In November 1939, these phenomena gave rise to the establishment of the army, air force and naval patrol services, which were combined on February 1, 1941 under the leadership of the OKW to form the “Wehrmacht patrol service”. The patrol units set up in 1940 as individual patrols or patrol companies of the respective command authorities were combined from 1941 onwards into army patrol groups (later Wehrmacht patrol groups) and train guard departments. The task of monitoring the behavior of individual soldiers in public was later replaced by the requirement to look after soldiers by setting up food stations, warming rooms, overnight accommodation, washrooms, etc. at rail junctions at home and in occupied territories, as well as at other locations where large concentrations of soldiers traveling alone suddenly appeared. To this end, the patrol services were then linked to the Wehrmacht travel agencies (transport offices, front control centers) and the mobile or stationary care facilities. The unit he was posted with also was:  Bahnhofs-Wach- u. Streifen-Abt. 108 Spent the winter of 1944/1945 in Bad Ems, their main task was the checking of Soldiers Soldbücher for holiday overstays etc. Entries in the Soldbuch:  Nice entries for, M43 Field Cap, Riders Boots, Peaked Visor Cap, and a Belgian Herstal Pistol in 7.65mm.  Entry on page 14, on the 16.4.1945 he was demobilised although this did not work when the allies got hold of him and he was arrested the same day!  Awarded the War Merit Cross with Swords in September of 1943.