Before I post any photos in this thread, something needs to be explained.
One never knows what will turn up when researching history. That includes the history of one's own family.
Last fall, I sent word out to relatives in Germany looking for wartime photographs of my father, brother, or any other relative. I didn't have much hope. So many of them had been lost to the war, and even Allied souvenir hunters.
From Bavaria I received one of my own baby photos. From further north, a cousin sent me a large package. Her father, my uncle Ernst, had been a minor official for the Riechsbahn, the wartime German railroad.
The package contained more than 100 photographs. Some large, some small. Some appearing posed, some candid. Some with hand entered dates in pen on the backs, others with three-digit numbers written in pencil.
My uncle had been an hobby photographer, but these could not have been his. These photographs are too professional, and testing done by a photo lab tech who works for one of the newspapers of the chain my wife is employed by, confirmed that most of them had been screened. A process that enables them to be printed or published.
However, after numerous inquires, exposure on another site, countless hours of Google, I can find no published photos to match them. There is a chance they have never been published, or published within the Reich in some now lost volume of work.
My uncle Ernst can not help with the mystery, as he died in the 1980s.
Along with Pirate-Drakk and Panzermacher, we have, on another site, examined all of these photographs to try and link dates and locations. I hope they will try and repeat that process with me here, along with other members.
It is my hope, that our members will not only enjoy and learn from the posting of these photographs, but help ID whatever we can with them, and perhaps even discover if they have been published, and help me provide a link from them to my uncle.
Either way, I think you will find them a rare and at times fascinating glimpse into the lives of those caught up in Hitler's war.
I will start with the posting of four of these photographs, and continue with installments of two thereafter:
Heer troops at ease in an open boxcar. To my eye, this photo looks posed.
A nervous looking young man has his papers checked by a female conductor
Panzers being rolled up for transport
Sign on a delousing station for troops home on leave includes a warning to behave while back in Germany