The Case of the Missing Soldier
On 22 August 1914, German and French troops met in battle across Belgium and France. For many German soldiers from the state of Hessen, these clashes in villages like Orgéo, Ochamps, Neufchateau, and Bertrix constituted their first battle of the war. Writing home, these soldiers did not censor their depictions of the blood, gore, and chaos.
In diesem Moment krachts in unsere Gruppe und ich erhalte einen fürchterlichen Schlag auf den Arm. Hauptmann W. schreit auf und stürzt über mich. Die Granate muss ihn in den Rücken voll getroffen haben. Ich greife nach meinem Arm, er ist noch da. Von denen, die da lagen, sah ich keinen aufstehen.
“In that moment there is a bang in our group and I receive a terrible blow to the arm. Captain W. screams and falls on me. The grenade must have hit him directly in the back. I reach for my arm; it’s still there. Of the men who lay there, I saw none rise.”
Unsere Artillerie vernichtete auf 1800 Meter eine französische Batterie. Als wir den Feind verfolgten, fuhren wir über Haufen von Leichen, Verwundeten und Pferden. Vor lauter Kanonendonner, Infanteriefeuer und Jammergeschrei hörte man sein eigenes Wort nicht mehr.
“Our artillery destroyed a French battery at 1800 meters. As we pursued the enemy, we drove over piles of dead bodies, wounded and horses. With the roar of cannons, infantry fire and cries of misery, it was impossible to hear one’s own words.”
Jetzt erst bekamen wir einen vollen Überblick über die Arbeit unserer Artillerie: wie gesät lagen hier die Toten des Feindes, meist Kolonialtruppen. Köpfe waren von Rumpfe abgerissen, anderen war der Leib aufgerissen, abgerissene Arme und Beine lagen zerstreut umher — ein schrecklicher Anblick.
“Only now did we get a full overview of the work of our artillery: the enemy’s dead, mostly colonial troops, lay sown across the fields. Heads were torn off their bodies, others had their bodies rent open, ripped-off arms and legs were scattered about — a terrible sight.”
The magnitude of losses sustained by French forces that day led to their subsequent retreat across the entire front. Yet the German troops’ victory did not come without a price. Because Germany had not fought a major European war since 1871, the majority of officers and enlisted soldiers in 1914 had never experienced a real battle. Nor were they entirely prepared for the volume of losses that twentieth-century military technology could inflict or the destructive nature of injuries that made bodies unidentifiable. Thus, in the aftermath of Bertrix and Neufchateau, Hessian regiments struggled to account for the dead, wounded, and captured.
Back home, families began to worry as days and then weeks went by with no word from their fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands at the front. As a last resort, many of them turned to the press. In Wiesbaden, newspaper editors, reacting to the numerous pleas for news of missing soldiers, set up a “Missing Persons” column. By the time that a man’s name appeared here, he had often been missing for several months.
Against all odds, some of the men in the excerpt above did in fact survive. The German casualty lists report that Alfred Hindorf had been taken prisoner (though he later died in captivity) while a long stay in a hospital accounted for August Wagner’s disappearance. No happy ending awaited the others, however; Carl May, Fritz Schuth, and Ferdinand Busch all died. Valentin Hellerbach, who went missing in August 1914, was never found.
Karl Lebert also numbered among the missing at Bertrix, though his family did not advertise in the missing persons column in the Wiesbaden papers. Yet his disappearance touched them no less deeply for it.
Johann Karl Lebert, known as Karl, was twenty-four years old when the war broke out in 1914. His father Johann Bernard was a master baker whose wife Katharina bore him at least nine children, seven of whom survived infancy. They lived in Erbach, a small town on the Rhine in Hessen.
Like all German men, Karl owed seven years of military service to the state beginning at the age of 18. The first two years consisted of active service while the balance was spent in the reserves. When the war broke out, Karl was attached as a reservist to Fusilier-Regiment №80, garrisoned in nearby Wiesbaden; it was with this regiment that he marched into Belgium in August 1914.
Karl is listed as lightly wounded in the casualty lists compiled by the Prussian war department after Bertrix. His fellow soldiers believed that they had seen him retire from the battlefield with his injuries — yet he failed to either rejoin his regiment or communicate with his family.
He could well have died. More optimistically, however, he could have survived but been captured by the retreating French troops. To this end, Johann, his father, inquired with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Belligerent countries of World War I sent lists of prisoners-of-war (POW) to this organisation, headquartered in Geneva in neutral Switzerland. For each inquiry that the Red Cross received, they created an index card with relevant information. There are two cards for Karl Lebert in their archives.
Both of them provide basic information about the circumstances of his disappearance; on one of them, someone has written the word “prisonnier.” Whether the writer intended it as a question, an avenue of further investigation, or something else is unclear, but in any case it did not reflect reality: Karl Lebert was not POW.
So where was he, if not in a French POW camp? In a time when soldiers often wrote home multiple times a week, and sometimes every day, extended silence was usually a harbinger of death. Of course, there were exceptions. August Kern, for example, fought in Tsingtao, China, in the early months of the war, after which nothing more was heard from him. His family eventually came to believe that he had died. Then, on Boxing Day, a postcard reached them from Japan: August had been captured and was now a prisoner of war in Kurume.
In Erbach, however, Christmas came and went with no sign of life from Karl.
By February 1915, the military seems to have decided that, absent any information to the contrary, soldiers missing since August 1914 could be said to be dead. Hence, many belated death notices for soldiers who had died at Bertrix began to appear in Hessian newspapers at this time. Karl Lebert’s was among them.
And life went on. His sister Katharina married a few months later, in June; around the same time, their father was fined 10 Marks for baking more bread than he was legally permitted to do. “The citizens of Erbach want more bread than I can bake, and no out-of-town bakers come here to supply them,” he explained in court.
In the ensuing years, tragedy again visited the Lebert family. Karl’s brother Paul, a machine gunner, died of wounds in a military hospital; the family brought his body back to Erbach to be buried, and his funeral took place in December 1917. That he had won an Iron Cross shortly before his death came as little comfort. Nevertheless, an article in the local press tried to make the best of the situation: “Both brothers shed their blood for the Fatherland, and, inseparable in life, they are now united again in death.”
Two brothers dead. The body of one never recovered; the other buried at home; a family plunged into grief. Similar stories played out around the world, and it would not be unusual for that of the Leberts to end here.
Bertrix, however, still had secrets to reveal.
At the beginning of the war, the dead were often inhumed in ad hoc ways. They might be were buried where they fell in a field or in the wilderness with a makeshift cross topped with a helmet to mark their grave; other times, a local churchyard might be completely taken over with soldiers’ graves. Eventually, many of them were exhumed and reburied in purpose-built cemeteries. A single “concentration cemetery,” so-called because it concentrates burials in a single area, can contain the remains of tens of thousands of soldiers.
In Bertrix, the construction of a concentration cemetery and the exhumation of nearby dead for reburial there began in 1915. It was gruesome work. A German soldier assigned to exhumation duty told a reporter that “the dead lie barely a foot under the sprouting seeds…then comes the worst part: the exhumation and the reburial. I can’t bear to watch; it’s simply terrible.” Yet the work continued and in the spring of 1918 a very particular body came to light.
At this point, this soldier had spent nearly four years underground. His clothes might have been no more than rags and his body no more than bones. He might well have remained among the ranks of the nameless dead but for a series of objects found with him: a watch and its chain, a prayer book, and a Soldbuch — a military document issued to all soldiers that functioned among other things as ID.
In May 1918, Karl Lebert’s family took possession of the watch, chain, prayer book, and Soldbuch. At the same time, they received an assurance that his remains had been reburied in a military cemetery. Later, according to the German War Graves Commission, he was exhumed yet again and buried at home in Erbach. Perhaps he shares a plot with his brother Paul or with their parents, who died just before the Nazis led Germany into another war. Whatever the case, he is no longer missing.
