Real Lives: A German captain’s perspective on the end of WWI
Historian feature
The letters of Captain Christian Wachtel
Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected sto greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily basis. Sometimes we might even play a part in the big events, although our names are not recorded, while on other occasions we are witnesses to events and times which we would now consider remarkable. Sometimes our regular lives are the perfect illustration of how people live at any given time – but all our lives matter and we want to celebrate some of those lives here. If you have any people that you think might also fit this category and would like to write about them, please do contact: martin.hoare@history.org.uk
Using letters written by his great-great-grandfather during the First World War and carefully passed down through the generations, Kaleb Peeters provides an alternative account of the experience of the last months of war on the Western Front.
As a German growing up in England, I often wondered about my family’s role in the two world wars of the twentieth century. It was never really something we talked about at home, and history lessons in school always focused on the Allied perspective. One day, my dad revealed that one of his cousins had done some research. My great-great-grandfather, Christian Wachtel, was a captain in the German army from 1915 to 1918. After spending most of the war on the Eastern Front, acting primarily as a searchlight operator, in mid–1918 Christian was moved to a post near Lille. In October, he was stationed near Brussels, where he saw out the rest of the war. Throughout, he wrote many letters to his wife, Hanna Wachtel, which reveal the experience of a soldier and his family in the final days of the First World War...
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