12th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment

[Trenchrat]

Hello,

I have recently acquired the diary,letters,paybook and photo album of a member of this regiment.He was Feldwebel Adolf Baumeister and the diary goes from 1917-1918. Along with these items I am receiving his IC 2nd Class,a wound badge and another badge. I need assistance in translating this diary and was wondering if anyone on this forum could help me out with this?

Regards,

John Vaughn

[bob lembke]

Hello,

  I have recently acquired the diary,letters,paybook and photo album of a member of this regiment.

John Vaughn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

John; Sounds like an interesting set of materials. By "paybook" I assume you mean the Soldbuch. Do you also have the Militaer=Pass?

Why don't you lay out the length of the diary, and how many letters? Are the latter in their envelopes, or are they Feld=Postbriefe? Often the postal marks and cancellations provide more information than the actual letter messages, which usually are quite banal.

You might have quite an opportunity there, but also quite a project.

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

Hello?

I hope I didn't come off too strongly, or seem to pry too much. Can you read Suetterlin and Kurrent?

The Feldwebel actually ran his company from day to day, typically, even in peace-time, and in 1917 and 1918 he very likely may actually have been the company CO. If you have a nice lot of material you have a very interesting resource. However, if it is of some size, you are talking about a project requiring possibly several hundred hours of work, unless the writing is exceptional (for a Feldwebel it might easily be very good), and the translator is a whiz, which I am not. I was translating the Militaer=Pass from a NCO from the pre-war era and I noticed a mention that he had taken a course in military penmanship in 1905. The Feldwebel would prepare entries in Militaer=Paesse and other documents and present them to the CO for signature; these inscriptions always seem to be in another hand than that of the signatory. The handwritten inscriptions are often in exceptional micro-writing. Incidentally, in the last several months the quality of the writing usually went badly down hill, as the war effort fell apart, and the quality of the writing done by members of the communistic Soldiers' Councils in 1918-19 was usually terrible.

Bob Lembke