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| Photo of Johannes Schladetsch with daughter Hannah |
Johannes fought for Germany in WWI (1914 – 1918) on the Western front against England and France. He never talked about the war. Dad remembers the big rifle that stood in the corner from after the war. If Johannes enlisted at the beginning of the war he would have been 26 - although as a married man it is also likely he was conscripted (see below).
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| Johannes Christian Schladetsch, in WWI uniform. |
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| The Western Front trenches |
On 11 July 1867, the regiment was named Holstein Infantry Regiment no. 85 , according to the province from which it mainly recruited. Kaiser Wilhelm II. Gave the regiment on 27 January 1889 final name Infantry Regiment "Duke of Holstein" (Holstein) No. 85 . Members of the Holstein ducal family had for generations lead the Brandenburg-Prussian House military service.
This is the regiment flag/ crest. He may have fought the Russians - assuming he stayed in the war until the end and follow the movements of the last known regiment he was in. I am still trying to locate Prussian military records - although some may have been lost in a fire.
Information from wikipedia, “From the end of the First Battle of Ypres, at the end of the Race to the Sea, until late 1918, the Western Front consisted of a relatively static line of trench systems which stretched from the coast of the North Sea southwards to the Swiss border. In their efforts to break through the opposing lines of trenches and barbed wire entanglements, the opposing forces employed huge artillery bombardments followed by attacks of tens of thousands of soldiers. Battles typically lasted for months and lead to casualties measured in the hundreds of thousands for attacker and defender alike, such as the Battle of the Somme, where 20,000 men died on the first day. Battles on this front were also typified by poor advance planning and the application of 19th century warfare tactics, such as direct frontal assaults on enemy positions, that were doomed to failure in the face of modern technology. The general result of these huge expenditures of effort was only a small shift, measured in a few kilometres, in a short section of the front.
The principal adversaries on the Western Front, who fielded armies of millions of men, were Germany to the east against France and the United Kingdom to the west, with sizable contingents taken from the Allied empires, especially the British Dominions. The United States entered the war on the side of the Entente Powers in 1917 and by mid-1918 had an army of around half a million men, this rising to a million by the time the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.”
Photos of Gretje Katerina from a toddler 1907, as a teenager, (above right) maybe this was a confirmation photo? And left, in 1924, age 20.
Dad remembers his father Johannes never really talked much about his childhood, and after the WWI was a different man, well liked, and respected, but didn't talk much about the war or the past.
Following the war Johaness and Gretje had four children:
Liesa, born 27.8.1927 who married Kurt Obenhack and had daughter Suzannah
Klaus Egon, born 26.1.1929, who married and has family
Hanna, born 14.1.1932 who Married Bix and had a daughter
Rheimer, born 25.7.1936 who married and had two children Sven and Antje
This is the farmhouse where Leisa, Egon, and Hanna were born. Dad lived here until 1935, when he was aged about 6. He has many fond memories of this farm
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