Watch returned to family of WWII German soldier - Time to go home, from America with love

hello everybody today I'm going to show you a very interesting story that was submitted to me by a YouTube viewer Mr Steve Freeman Steve Freeman's father was an American Soldier during World War II and he fought in the 59th armored infantry battalion here you can see him in his uniform with a badge and here with one of his armored vehicles and this is the email that his son sent me asking help with his research project so you see he says I have a German watch which was in my father's personal effects my father was wounded in France in April 1945 somewhere around the town of madman when I sent the watch to be cleaned repaired a couple of years ago the watch repairman said that there was a piece of paper in the watch and that the watch belonged to a German soldier obaga fighter corporal Maya l25890 PA monster Germany so this sounds like something quite interesting and just to locate where this is happening this is the town of metmen and you can see it's near uh Dusseldorf and cologne and this is where it is on a more general map and of course he wrote a typo in the email he said it was in front that actually this met man is in Germany so his father was wounded in Germany in April 1945 and brought back this German watch and this is what the watch looks like you can see the company is Titus and it was made in Geneva I think this is a military issue watch if I'm not mistaken and when the watch repairman wanted to clean it he found this very interesting piece of paper inside so the first thing I do when somebody asks about researching a German soldier as I look him up online on the the databases of the German war Graves commission the foxworld the reason I do that is that only the German dead only lists of German dead are currently online on on this website and for the people who survived the war well they're not online so you have to do actual research and I look up this and there are zero responses so uh that's lucky for him he survived the war but unlucky for the research because it means now we're actually going to have to go to real archives to try to research this man so let's look at these inscriptions and try to understand them and see what can be done with them we're going to start by the number the l25890 so what is that these five number numbers for the German army during World War II were felt personal so that just means a field postal number and what it actually is in practice is just uh a coded version of a unit's name so for example this is a letter written by a German officer who was a reserve on a deer Battalion 164 and you can see on top of the letter instead of putting the unit's name he put this uh felt posnuma so basically it's just a way of having coded the unit's name coded so that not everybody you know if the letter falls into enemy hands and stuff not anybody can just find out immediately what units are in the area so researching field post numbers used to be complicated but now it's very easy everything is online so you just type it at Google and then you find out what unit it belongs to so this one on the watch 25890 uh belongs to Fourth battery of flux 438 so that means fourth battery of uh anti-aircraft Searchlight Detachment 438 so the guy who had this watch would have been in the German air force uh Manning searchlights or doing something with the switch lights and if we go back to the watch you can see that before the felt was numeral there's an Al and that owl is for luftwaffe so German air force so all this matches we see it's a German air force unit now people often contact me assuming that because they know a German soldier's family name and his unit which is the case here he's just going to be able to to be researched extremely easily and that is actually very wrong I'm going to explain to you why with another example this is a German mestin and you see the guy who owned it carved his name and his felt postnuma into it so it was back and people think okay so that's easy now we have the third push number so we'll just go to that unit look up back and find out who he was but that's not the way it works because for the vast majority of German units there are no rosters no lists of personnel available the way this works is you actually have to do the research starting with the name so the way the German archives are arranged is that all the files are classified by family name first name and date of birth so for this example of Beck what you actually have to do and I think everybody knows Beck is a common name you'd have to look at the files of let's say the one thousand or two thousand or three thousand guys who are called back go through each file and then look for which one of them was in the corresponding unit and basically the way this is now with this data being in Berlin you just cannot do that you either would have to go to Berlin for several weeks or something or at least several days or a peer researcher you know several days to look up the the spec so now it's not really feasible unless you have a lot of money to spend maybe and I hope all this information will be put online in the next years and then maybe you'll be able to solve these kinds of cases in 10 seconds you know so let's go back to our watch we have the unit we have the family name Maya which is one of the most common family names that exist in Germany so basically it's not looking too good but there's something special with this guy that saves the case it's his first name you see his first name is and I've never heard that name before I have no idea if I'm pronouncing it correctly it's extremely unusual and as you saw there's not one single guy called quirkin Mayo who died during World War One or World War II that proves since since there were no matches on the German wargraves website so that proves this is a very rare name so I told Steve that presumably there was only one or maybe two or three guys in the whole German army with this name so probably thanks to the first name firin it would be possible to find out exactly who this watch belonged to so then Steve sent this a very nice letter to the to the German archives so it used to be called Deutsche dinster back then nowadays called he explains the whole story and he says please you know do you have a file corresponding to a cure himaire a flock Shrine 438 and after a few months in the various normal procedures with the archives Steve receives this reply from from the bundles archive and it says the watch probably belongs to cover him mail born in 1914 in an unknown location and his next kin information listed in our documents is Anna Mia living in heshingen and um here they don't actually send a copy of the file but later on I got a copy of Queen mayor's file and uh sure enough the stuff matches what you want you see it's unit is 438 so a perfect match his rank is here so that's not the same as on the watch but because he presumably um was commissioned in the meantime and very interesting it says he was captured at ports by colon so this is just an outskirt of Kern on 12th of April 1945. so if we summarize the German information and the American information this is what we have we have um the soldier Freeman wounded on April 17 1945 at Madman and just a few kilometers away and a few days before was captured in Cologne on April 14 1945. so as in all correct Stories the information cross-checks and so these two guys Freeman and the mayor their paths must have crossed at some point during these days of April 1945. so now we have uh clearing mayor's next of kin address and heshingen so um Steve Freeman wrote another very nice letter to uh to heshingen again explaining the story and saying that he would like to give the watch back to the descendants and uh we waited a while but heshingen never responded but now since I had quite a bit of information about Kevin may I actually simply Googled him and I found this old article from the 1970s from the town of bisingen which is the the town right beside hashingen and it mentions that was participating in the carnival and stuff so I told Steve I said maybe you can try writing to bissingen and see if they respond and that's what worked missing and did respond and they said we found his daughters and stuff one of them was still living in the town and one of the daughters so Steve sent the watch to be given back to the family and one of the daughters sent a letter to Steve which I'm going to read to you now so it says Dear Mr Freeman you touched our hearts for looking after us there must be a story about our father's watch he told nothing about this hard time and his life he was not the only one our father was in in 1945 just 30 years old when he came back at home no father no mother no wife and at last no job he started a new life illness on his body and soul he became and he so he received a new chance with her mother and they had three children at last he received this change from your father when God touched his heart we'll never know it but we know there is a piece of time not in vain God bless you and your family life is the best teacher now in time of Corona we all know that everyone needs help from the others when our father died in 1988 after illness more than four years he said goodbye to three children one granddaughter and two grandsons this Offspring grew up with twins boy and girl and once more with a girl best wishes to you and your family be saved in the name of my sisters so this was um quite touching to read and that's an example of a a research case that ended very nicely of course this is only a minority most cases don't have enough information to be solved but you never know you should always look at the information and even if there's a small chance you should try and I'm very happy to have enabled this this watch to be sent back to the the family of a German soldier after after 78 years it brought peace to to the American family and it also brought some peace to the German family so it in a very small way helped repair some of the damage of uh of World War II and um if any of you guys need help for similar stuff you can always feel free to contact me and uh I wish you guys a nice day bye bye

Channel: CrocodileTear

Views: 187,244

Keywords: 1939, 1945, World War II, WWII, Wehrmacht, Nazi, German soldier, genealogy, research, serial number, Bundesarchiv, Deutsche Dienststelle, files, feldpostnummer, what is a feldpostnummer, researching a feldpostnummer, how to research a German soldier, how to research a feldpostnummer, POW, prisonner of war, flak, 59th Armored Infantry Battalion, Flakscheinwerfer Abteilung 438, How to obtain German soldier service records

Id: G-B6klEY22g

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023