Soldiers Mistakenly Reported Killed in Action: Three German World War II Examples Related to Operation Dragoon in August 1944

Abstract

While researching the histories of 492 German soldiers killed in Southern France in August and September 1944, three cases of soldiers having falsely been reported as killed in action were discovered. There were different reasons for each of the misidentifications; in the first case, the precise circumstances are unclear, but may have occurred after an accidental exchange of identification tags with a fellow soldier; the second case was probably caused by a mistaken report from a witness; the third seems to have been misidentification by medical personnel unfamiliar with the bodies they were dealing with. The Wehrmacht used poorly designed identification tags, while there was no use of methods such as fingerprinting and tooth charts when identification tags were not available. Unreliable methods such as visual identification or witness testimony were deemed to be sufficient to report a soldier dead. As a consequence, false reports of death seem to have been relatively commonplace.

Keywords:

• casualty misidentification
• graves registrations
• Volksbund
• Operation Dragoon
• identification tags
• mass grave

Notes

1 This description is based on the analysis of over one hundred Individual Deceased Personnel Files of American soldiers killed in the Var and Maritime Alps in 1944, on the Field Manual 10-63: Graves Registration, on an interview conducted with Joseph Reek, of the 46th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company, and on the oral accounts of Francis John Maloney of the 3043 Quartermaster Graves Registration Company, that are available on the YouTube account of Cinthya Maloney under the title Oral History of WWII, at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BI5YY6wwNM&index=6&list=PL7E6EAE48159DDB7A> [accessed 10 March 2015].

2 The current practice of the US Defense POW/Missing Person Accounting Agency (DPAA) is that identification of individuals has to be proven through physical evidence (ID tags, personal effects, dental evidence, DNA evidence, etc.) before missing personnel can be declared killed in action.

3 In the US case there is a mistake on the tag, as the soldier's name was Bartow, not Baroow, but the soldier's serial number was sufficient to confirm his identity, and the name still remained recognizable; In the case of German ID tags, with such a coding system, a mistake in one single digit was enough to seriously complicate the identification of the owner, as illustrated by the Josef Krzyzowski example mentioned in the section about Alois Wu¨hr. Close inspection of this German tag reveals that the last digit of the unit number is missing on the lower portion of the tag. Such a mistake was sufficient to render a body unidentifiable.