Every family memory keeper or genealogist knows this moment. You are deep in a paper trail, full-blown tunnel vision, hunting answers, and a doorway opens that you did not see coming. That moment where history lights up and speaks straight to you – “Look closer.” It is the moment many of us live for.
My name is Erin Faith Allen, and I am an investigative war historian. I spend my days inside archives with battlefield reports, civilian accounts, military diaries, burial records, and handwritten documents. My upcoming book, One Day Over the Rhine, traces American men in a tank battalion during the final weeks of the war. The story has taken over my life in all the best and strangest ways. Every time I think I have reached the end of a thread, it reveals another mile of tangled and hidden history.
What I am about to describe is one of those moments.
I had been studying the events leading up to the day a tank was hit outside the German town of Dinslaken (see the above map). I wanted to understand the specific context of what was happening in the town the Americans happened to roll into. I followed every thread that place offered. Geography. Civilian experience. Allied and Wehrmacht troop movements. Every nook and cranny of the historical record lit up under my curiosity.
Then, when looking up stories of the people of Dinslaken, I found a resident with a career that made me want to dig deeper. Arnold Wilmschen, a Dinslaken native, was an SS man. Wow. What was his story? I continued to dig.
Wilmschen was not in Dinslaken when the war turned.
In fact, he was nowhere near the battlefield.
So where was he?
Bergen-Belsen sits roughly one hundred fifty miles to the northeast, yet on the very days Dinslaken was under fire, Wilmschen’s signature was being scratched in ink across paperwork inside the camp. He had been assigned to Bergen-Belsen as an SS clerk, and one of his duties was recording deaths in the official camp register.
This stopped me in my tracks. A man from the very town where my tank crew was hit, miles away inside a concentration camp, participating in what we now understand as the machinery of the Holocaust.
So I did what any investigator would do.
I pulled the Bergen-Belsen registers for March 25, 1945. I wanted to know what exactly this man from Dinslaken was doing that day in Bergen-Belsen – the day when my soldiers were on the ground in his hometown. My instinct told me that if I could find his signature, it would help me to solve this mystery.
And this is where my Germanology Unlocked training paid off.
Just prior to this discovery, after years of wanting the skill, I had finally signed up for Katherine’s course on reading old German handwriting, the script known as Kurrent and Sütterlin. So, when I opened the register, I was immediately able to recognize Wilmschen’s signature, written in Sütterlin, the moment my eyes hit the page. There he was!
And then I wondered…whose death certificates was this man recording on that fateful day?
I began reading the names of those who died on March 25 inside Bergen-Belsen.
I began to research them.
And my jaw hit the floor when the most unexpected and profound connection appeared before my eyes.
One of names listed was Therese Klee, the grandmother of Hannah Goslar. Hannah Goslar, if you do not know, was Anne Frank’s close childhood friend. Approximately fifty thousand people perished in Bergen-Belsen, and Hannah’s grandmother, the grandmother of Anne Frank’s friend, was one of them – with her death certificate having been signed by the very man I was researching, Arnold Wilmschen.
And on the same day that her grandmother Therese Klee died in Bergen-Belsen, young Americans were fighting all across Europe to end the very tyranny that took her life.
In Dinslaken, the town Wilmschen was from, tankers died trying to rescue one another under fire. The next morning, Wilmschen recorded Therese’s death in the very script I had just learned to read.
Two worlds. One date. One seemingly unrelated, yet very related, chain of events. The battlefield and the concentration camp ledger bridge the fates of many lives, and many family legacies.
I sat with this discovery for a long time. I was not shocked, because this was not the first time my work revealed hidden intersections like this. But I always sit up and pay attention to the deep, electric awareness that arrives when history shows you its long-reaching threads of connection.
This is one example of why constantly expanding your skillset matters.
For me, learning the old German script offers far more than the ability to translate.
It unlocks facts.
It gives immediate access to truth.
It allows you to verify with your own eyes.
It reveals signatures and connections that would otherwise remain buried.
This is the work I do.
I follow these threads wherever they go.
I unearth stories.
And I will never stop.
Have you ever found a meaningful connection among old records? Let us know your special find in the comments!
About the Author
Erin Faith Allen is an investigative war historian whose work blends archival research, battlefield reconstruction, and the excavation of hidden family stories. Her upcoming book, One Day Over the Rhine, traces American tankers during the final weeks of the war. Her work includes multi-year in-depth research projects, authoring books, battlefield tours for families retracing their relatives’ paths, and short historical films that illuminate the human stories inside the archives. You can follow her work on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/erinfaithallen/ and sign up for updates at www.fortitude-research.com. She can be reached at erin@fortitude-research.com.
6 Responses
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you for sharing your story and your work. I’m curious if you could send me to a site or someone who could help me unearth the story of May 1, 1945 in Germany. Many people in my family committed suicide on this day but I would like to know what was happening in their specific area of Griefenhagen, Germany. I know the Russians were invading but I would like more details. I would appreciate any help you can lend.
Dear Karla, your family story sounds compelling and I can understand why you’d want to learn more. Please feel free to send me an email with what you know now – I’d love to discuss your story and determine (based on any documentation you may already have) how you might be able to pursue further information to fill in your family story in those final days of war.
Thanks so much for sharing what you have here, I look forward to connecting.
Erin
Hi Karla,
The events you describe are detailed in a book by Florian Huber called “Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself.” It’s available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Me-Youll-Shoot-Yourself/dp/0316534307. Huber’s story covers the events that occurred in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the end of WW II, but it seems likely that the situation would have been very similar in all parts of the Soviet-occupied zone, like Griefenhagen.
I found this information for Greifenhagen https://www.pommerscher-greif.de/tag/massenselbstmord/
Mrs. Allen,
That’s an interesting story but I have a question: Where do you know from that “Arnold Wilmschen, a Dinslaken native, was an SS man”.
You found him in Bergen-Belsen where he had been the registrar. You say you „pulled the Bergen-Belsen registers for March 25, 1945″. The registers of what? The town? The camp?
You show an image with his signature. That’s looks as it has been taken from a register of the town, not the camp. The camp may have had it’s registers, too.
But as far as I know they could not certifiy someone’s death, they could simply note it. Noting it doesn’t make it official.
They had to write a report to the registrar in town’s Registrar’s office (Standesamt). He’s the only one who can certify the death and make it official.
That’s what I learned from notes of death of people who died in our civil and military hospitals in my hometown, and I wonder if that was different to a concentration camp. Germans have always been masters of bureaucracy – they stuck to their procedures.
“Der Standesbeamte” is the official word for “registrar” as a representant of the mayor of the town who is CIC of the town government, thus the registrar’s office (therefore “In Vertretung” = in representation of.
I wonder whether Wilmschen worked there because he has been SS or because he had been a civil registrar.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Roland Geiger, St. Wendel, Germany
Hello Mr. Geiger,
Thank you very much for these questions. They go straight to the heart of how complicated documentation trails in the final months of the war can be.
The article uses intentional compression and narrative shorthand to convey a broad and complex documentation landscape from the final months of the war. The specific materials referenced are death records from Bergen-Belsen, preserved among postwar British-captured documents and used as evidence in the Belsen trials. The intention was to convey the historical connection rather than outline procedural mechanics, which are extraordinarily interesting and important in their own right.
Regarding Wilmschen: the material I worked with identifies him as SS (Politische Abteilung) assigned to the record-keeping function in Bergen-Belsen, where he kept the death lists and signed internal death records within the camp administration.
I would be very glad to exchange more detailed information by email. The archival history of these documents is complex, and I would welcome the chance to compare notes, and deepen the story, with you. My primary purpose with the book on the tank battalion kept my focus on the American events in Dinslaken, but your comment opens a door to exploring the Wilmschen material more fully.
Thanks again for reaching out with your questions,
Erin