Erich Kaestner: Last German WWI Vet dies @107
"Last German WWI Veteran Dies at 107"
Associated Press Jan 25, 2007
BERLIN - Erich Kaestner, a German believed to have been the country's last World War I veteran, died Jan. 1 in a nursing home in Cologne at the age of 107, his son said Friday.
When France's second-last surviving veteran from World War I, Louis de Cazenave, died Jan. 20, the news made international headlines. But in Germany — which lost both world wars and has had to cope with the shame of the Nazi genocide for more than six decades — there is not even an organization keeping track of the remaining veterans.
"That is the way history has developed," Kaestner's son, Peter Kaestner, said in a telephone interview. "In Germany, in this respect, these things are kept quiet — they're not a big deal."
The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week, and the stories were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner's death itself.
"The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self-denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting," the daily Die Welt wrote Friday in its obituary for Kaestner.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that "the German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era" until someone who had read Kaestner's death notice in a newspaper figured out who he was and updated a Wikipedia entry on the Internet.
Soldier for a short time - Kaestner was born in 1900, and had just graduated from high school in 1918 when he entered the army, his son said. Following training, he was sent to the Western Front to fight in France, but was never sent to the front lines, he said.
For Kaestner, his service during the war, in which more than 2 million German soldiers were killed, was only a small part of his long life. He was just a soldier for a quarter to a half a year," Peter Kaestner said.
Kaestner rejoined the military in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War, serving as a first lieutenant in ground support for the Luftwaffe, primarily in France.
An accomplished jurist - Following the end of the war in 1945, Kaestner became a judge in Hanover.
For his work as a jurist, he received Lower Saxony's Merit Cross, 1st Class. He was also honored by Germany's president for his 75-year marriage to his wife, Maria, shortly before her death in 2003 at age 102.
Note: I found this article at www.msnbc.msn.com. I thought this would be of interest to those searching the Kaestner surname. The article also includes a photo.