The case of Manfred Kropp

Certainty about the whereabouts of the war-missing father from Russian archives

In early 2020, shortly after his 79^th birthday, Manfred Kropp writes a letter to the GRC Tracing Service. In it he asks for information about his father, Wilhelm Kropp, born 1914 in Thiersheim, Upper Franconia, a member of the Wehrmacht since 1939 who went missing in the Crimea in March 1942. The tracing request also includes an astonishing amount of details and information about his father’s military career.

Manfred Kropp, in Bavarian dialect and with the raspy voice of an elderly man, remembers how the request came about:

“My second son knew that the Tracing Service had received new information from the archives of the Soviet Union and said to me ‘Come on, you should inquire again’. And so I did.”

Between the end of the Second World War and 1990, the GRC Tracing Service sent tracing requests for missing persons suspected to be in the Soviet Union to the Tracing Service of the Alliance of the Red Cross and Red Crescent of the Soviet Union. Their staff capacities were smaller than those of the GRC Tracing Service, so that these requests could not all be processed. It was therefore very beneficial to research that the GRC Tracing Service itself gained direct access to the former Soviet archives after the perestroika and dissolution of the former Soviet Union. In the decades that followed, the GRC Tracing Service concluded corresponding agreements with the Soviet archives on the basis of which it continuously received, and in some cases still receives, fate clarifying information about Germans soldiers and civilians who went missing during the war.

Instead of the single indication “Lost on the Eastern Front”, the GRC Tracing Service can now, after many years of uncertainty, provide the families searching for a relative with more detailed findings from its investigations.

Manfred Kropp systematically collected his father’s pictures and documents. These include letters from the front, photographs and all his self-written memories and records of his missions. During his home leave, the soldier Wilhelm Kropp documented his various stations on his typewriter and listed exactly from when to when he took part in various campaigns. And he always sent mail from the front to his wife and his two sons.

Manfred Kropp has kept his father’s old typewriter and camera until today. “He wrote so much that I think he wrote more than he battled,” Manfred Kropp says today with a smile.

“My mother did not talk about him much, as was customary for many of the elderly. ‘Leave it alone, that’s water under the bridge’ and so on. And if you asked a question, the answer was always ‘I don’t remember.’”

Some time after the soldier Wilhelm Kropp was captured in March 1942, the family received a letter from the troop’s commanding officer expressing regret that “Willi Kropp” had disappeared in the Crimea. The officer also thanked the family for their “commitment in the fight against Bolshevism”.

The young Manfred Kropp grew up assuming that his father was dead. “I know that the Crimea region was full of mines. And I imagined him leaving the barracks at night and stepping on a mine. If he had been captured, a man who wrote as much as he did would certainly have found a way of sending a letter or a note from the camp. But we never received anything. So we assumed he’d been killed.”

Until 1955, however, a number of former prisoners of war from the East returned to Germany. Thousands of families waited hopefully at the railroad tracks to see whether their father, son or brother was among them. In the meantime, the GRC Tracing Service had compiled an index card system with hundreds of thousands of entries, divided into two categories: "those searching" – with personal details of those searching for a relative, and “those being sought” – with information on missing relatives. To this day, the Tracing Service works on linking the two categories and, in each individual case, connecting the family members affected.

Manfred Kropp remembers many hours spent in front of the radio in his grandparents’ house where he grew up, together with his mother and his two-year younger brother. “When I was 14-15, I especially listened to interviews with former soldiers or prisoners to hear if they mentioned anything about my father. But no, they didn’t.”

An important source of information about the POW camps was the interviews conducted with former prisoners, so-called “returnee interviews”. These returnees were often able to provide more detailed information about the missing persons from their own ranks. 1,921,000 war returnees were questioned up to 1955. But there was no trace of Wilhelm “Willi” Kropp. “I cannot say that I suffered from growing up without a father,” Manfred Kropp says today. “The post-war period was of course hard, as it was for all of us, but overall we did not fare badly. My mother inherited a small estate and earned extra money selling ice cream and pastry.

But in 2020 Manfred Kropp undertakes a new attempt, motivated by the confidence of his own son that there might be new insights into the whereabouts of his father. And indeed – within three months he receives an answer from the GRC Tracing Service.

“It was a thick, heavy envelope. Obviously they had found something. I didn’t know if I should dare open the letter.”
“The prisoner file written in Russian shows that Wilhelm Kropp was taken prisoner of war by the Soviets on March 19, 1942 in Vladislavovka, Crimea, and was registered on April 18, 1942 in the camp of Temnikov, Mordovia, Russian Federation.
Wilhelm Kropp died of pellagra on July 3, 1942 in the hospital of the Monetno-Losinovsky camp and was buried in the cemetery of the Losinovsky camp, grave no. 21/742.”

Finally, precise data, including the cause of death and even a burial place – redeeming certainty!

“Appended were documents, copies and all kinds of other data. But what gave me certainty was a questionnaire from the camp that my father had signed. And I know his signature from letters and so on, and it was clear to me that this information was genuine. I knew from that moment on what had happened.”

“Pellagra” was the cause of his father’s death, a disease caused by malnutrition. A fate that Wilhelm Kropp shared with thousands of other prisoners of war. Manfred Kropp considers the fact that his father was in the prison camp for no longer than about two and a half months to be a good thing. “Thus he was certainly spared a lot of suffering,” he says.