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- Notes:
- Otto Skoppek was born near Treuberg, East Prussia, on December 15, 1916. Sometime in the early 1940s, he enlisted in the German Army and was assigned to Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps. He served as a paratrooper and went behind British and French lines to disrupt their forces so the Germans could advance. Based on this information, he was most likely in the Ramcke Parachute Brigade. He saw fighting across North Africa in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, and was stationed in Tunis for a time. He did six combat jumps, and fought at El Alamein, Tobruk, and Sollum. In 1943, due to dire supply shortages, he and the other German forces surrendered to American forces. Due to being under Rommel's command, they were treated with great respect and civility. Otto was brought to America and spent the rest of the war at a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas near the Mexican border picking cotton, then briefly at a canning factory in Wyoming. He returned to Germany (most likely in 1946 or 1947), and lived in West Germany until 1957 when he and his wife and child moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
- Date Created:
- 2017-02-07T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Collection:
- Veterans History Project (U.S.)
- Notes:
- Leonhard Grams was born on May 20, 1920, in Adamow, Poland. After war broke out in 1939, his family moved to German-occupied Poland because they were ethnic Germans. On February 2, 1941, he was drafted into the Luftwaffe and served at Tempelhof-Berlin Field in Berlin. He served as part of an antiaircraft crew and witnessed multiple bombings of Berlin. He was sent to the Russian front in 1942, and was later wounded and sent to a hospital in Austria, went back into the army and was taken prisoner by the French at the end of the war.
- Date Created:
- 2017-01-10T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
- Collection:
- Veterans History Project (U.S.)
