Post by Gerry on Mar 27, 2010 3:01:17 GMT
The Character History is certainly a magnificent length, but the writing sample falls a bit short of the mark for a Captain Rank. I can give you Leutnant for what you have now (And you might want to lower the age of your character a bit 
), or you can choose to lengthen your Writing sample. We don't hand out Hauptmann ranks as easily as we used to, so it would need to be a fairly big improvement.
~Dan
Account E-Mail: It is good old Gerry
Name: Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl III
Nationality: Aryan [Pure German]
What Army will Your Character Serve Beneath? Heer [Ground branch of the Wehrmacht]
Character History:
The Kriegstahl family was steeped in tradition and history since the farthest records housed in the Hitler’s Germany even distantly touched. Given the harsh, militaristic baring of the Nordic people it is no surprise that they have been involved in many of the world’s major conflicts, both directly and indirectly. This seems even certainly true for the Kriegstahl family; for their surname, when broken apart, translates into “War Steel” from German. The farthest confirmed record of the family’s warlike history is a Teutonic knight by the name of “Noah Kriegstahl” who fought in both the Third Crusade and against the pagan Lithuanians in the Teutonic order’s holy wars. The kingdom of Prussia was graced with a total of twenty-seven Kriegstahl footmen among its ranks, fighting bravely with musket and shot. A distant relative of the Kriegstahl family living near the Hessian mountain range was killed in Pennsylvania while fighting alongside the British special units drawn from Germany in the American war for independence. That Hessian relative, however, was the only Kriegstahl ever to lay foot in the dirty god-forsaken soil of the United States of America. When the other powerful families set sail and headed west over the great Atlantic, the Kriegstahl looked on them with contempt and yelled accusations of cowardice over the loud din of ship engines pulling away from the fatherland for good.
From the beginning of its founding the Kriegstahl family has had one debilitating affliction: a crippling heretic case of the Prussian disease. The suffocating desire to be better, to be more civilized, and to crush others beneath one’s boot heel found often was found gnawing at the soul of honest Kriegstahls, driving many a good soldier into a downward spiral of bigotry. Although they were not an obnoxious or loud family, they were powerful. And power added to selfishness is akin to adding electricity to water; no matter how innocent a tiny spark can be someone is always injured. Also running in the family was a fateful weakness for alcohol, forcing many Kriegstahls to end up sloshed on bars or dead in ditches, drowned in 3 inches of water.
Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl II was born in 1856 to Dietrich von Kriegstahl I in Kiel, Germany, the traditional home of their family. Dietrich II was sent to Royal Grammar School in Buckinghamshire, England to get an education in his early years and to experience world cultures. The young German was teased horribly in his youth, the native English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish boys hurling insults of “Kraut” and other racial slurs that burned deep into Dietrich II’s soul. Of course he wrote his father nothing of this, for his fear of his father’s riding crop he called the “weakling cracker” outweighed the pebbles thrown at him from the funny freckle-faced children in Buckinghamshire. One good thing sprouted from his time in his time in the Rainy Islands, and that was his newly-kindled love of fencing. Dietrich II loved the chance to get back at his tormentors in sporting events. The young boy did averagely in school, but that would have been brilliantly anywhere other than the Royal Academy. Only geniuses excelled in Buckinghamshire.
Upon return to Kiel after graduation Dietrich II enlisted in the Imperial German Navy. The young sailor worked in dockyards and on battleships in and near the Baltic Sea, becoming an expert on the freezing Nordic waters. After two years working as an enlisted man he was accepted into the Officer’s Cadet Corps and re-instated as a Lieutenant. Around the time of his enlistment he met a lovely young woman by the name of Marie von der Bult and married after one year of mingling. In the year 1890 Dietrich II and Marie bought a large estate on the waterfront of Schreven Lake. Marie was thrilled. The young Freiherr’s daughter had always wanted a white mansion on the water, and the house and her husband answered all of the girlish dreams that she had as a child.
The first born of this certain branch of the vast Kriegstahl family was Dietrich Wilhelm III. Marie gave birth to him in the freezing echoes of December in the year 1895, the baby coming out excruciatingly fast. He was named after his father and grandfather behind him, hoping to add to the proud warrior heritage of his family. His brother, Mikeal, and sister, Agnes, in the November of the same year. They were twins, born unsuspectingly when Dietrich II came back from a sea voyage around the Northern Swedish seaboard, stopping in Finland, and coming back to Kiel seaport to his loving wife. Marie kept the children in their bedroom, three wooden cribs lining the wall next to her wardrobe and vanity table. The cribs were painted white with a single red hart at the foot, a small bundle of blankets wrapping each infant up. Dietrich II was gone more and more, preparing the German Empire for the wave that they would, some glorious day, unleash on the world.
Dietrich III was born bald, but he soon developed a healthy dollop of blonde hair to match his clear blue eyes. His siblings looked largely like him, inheriting both parent’s German hair and eyes. From an early age his father could tell his eldest son would be a large man, his baby’s arms, still laced with birth fat, grew large and his feet grew even larger. Dietrich III was gruff even in his toddler years, refusing the lacy shirts and dapper caps that his mother wanted him to wear and insisting on carrying on when she tried to dress him. When Marie threw up her hands, exasperated with the young child, the father of the house just laughed. Dietrich III’s earliest memories were the tobacco-scented hugs of his father, his big yellow moustache brushing his youthful face. The Dietrich III, Mikeal, and Agnes would play outside in the fresh spring grass outside of their house around the turn of the century, the two boys gussied up in sailor’s outfits while Agnes wore pretty lace dresses perfectly tailored for a toddler’s size. The Kriegstahls seemed to be enjoying their life to the fullest, their family the ideal Imperial dream. Some of the Kaiser’s propagandists thought the family was so ideal that they took photo-shoots of the parents and children on their lawn to use as representation of a typical German family.
Sadly, their happiness was short lived. The day that disaster struck was alike to any other day, with Dietrich II rising at 0500 to go to work at the Imperial War Docks in Kiel, his wife frying eggs and slabs of bacon for him like always. The father of three kissed his wife for the last time and left for the dockyards. While working on a small patrol ship an accident involving a welder and a gas drum left the seacraft nothing but a smoking black dot in the water. Dietrich II’s remains were never identified, but he was suspected to be among the twelve corpses they found floating in the water, steel identity tags melted and faces charred beyond recognition. Marie was informed later in the day, confining herself to her room to cry herself to sleep. The children, too young to fully grasp the concept of death, cried after seeing their mother in such rustic condition. Just like that, the ideal German family was shattered.
The rest of Dietrich’s early childhood went on as normal, but being fatherless always echoed in the back of his mind. Until 1902, at the age of seven, Dietrich lived in the same home in Kiel. Instead of going to the local academy he was sent, like his father, to boarding school, but this time a school in Germany. Dietrich was dressed in his finest clothes and given two leather suitcases before boarding a train for Leipzig, his destination one of the oldest Lutheran boy’s schools in the world; Saint Thomas’s School.
Life at St. Thomas’s was pleasant for the most part, but there were still drawbacks. The dormitories, perched at the bottom of the hill the schoolhouse was situated on, were dark and drafty, housing a plethora of insects and rodents along with small boys. Each child was issued a wooden trunk and three school uniforms, their discipline almost militaristic. Classes were tough, and the uncomfortable wooden desks soon wreaked havoc on young bottoms. Lice ran amok, clinging to the short-cropped blond hair of Dietrich. The young son of a widow made friends with the other boys almost immediately, the seven and eight year olds playing with dice and wooden guns on Saturdays and after church on Sundays. All in all, life was pleasant, despite the occasional riding crop to the buttocks.
Dietrich, following in the footsteps of his father, took up fencing at age eight. He was often regarded as a prodigy, dancing across the dueling floor as if he was a butterfly floating from perch to perch. Dietrich’s foil would snap out like a viper’s strike, the poison of a gained point spreading quickly through his opponent’s bloodstream. During the brutally long practices sustained by the fencing boys young Dietrich, sometimes called “Little Wasp”, would beat some of the teenage boys facing him. If the eight year old managed to put a particularly nasty defeat on any of the older boys sometimes they would rough up young Kriegstahl after the match, leaving the boy with many a bruise and bump in his time at St. Thomas’s. He won top in the Leipzig Fencing Tournament in 1904, followed by the tournaments in Gunthersdorf, Dosen, and Rapritz, but being overturned in the Imperial German Fencing Tournament in Berlin, Germany, earning fourth in his entire country in the age group of 5-12 years of age.
At the age of twelve Marie cancelled her son’s tuition at St. Thomas’s and enrolled him at the local boy’s school in Kiel. When he arrived back at his home he realized right off the train platform that the other Kriegstahl children were not who he remembered them to be. Grief-stricken Marie had transformed Mikeal and Agnes into small little drones, Mikeal’s golden hair shoulder length and both of them dressed up in powder blues and lace. This shocked Dietrich, whose dirty school uniform hung off of his body boyishly and his hair messy and tousled. His mother was even worse. Living with the death of her husband had warped her mind akin to how water warps wood. Her blood-shot eyes stared freakishly at Dietrich all the time, the tiny blue irises following him to make sure he did nothing dangerous. Marie hated the eldest Kriegstahl’s passion for fencing, which she found utterly dangerous despite the soft metal foils and large protective suits. For the rest of his adolescent years the little boy had to live in fear of his mother, who would sometimes go into spastic fits of rage, destroying the immaculate knick-knacks plastered on shelves and tables that she seemed to love more than her oldest child.
It was not until an incident on Dietrich’s thirteenth birthday that he released all the built up emotion on his mother that had been bottled up inside of him since he had arrived in Kiel. Dietrich had been secretly keeping an old pistol in a box under his bed. The weapon was not loaded, nor did he intend on ever using it on someone, for he didn’t even have one bullet for it. It was simply a token of boyhood, a souvenir found in the desk of a deceased professor back at St. Thomas’s. Every once in a while he would show the pistol to one of his friends, the mesmerized peer poking at the metal firearm lying on Dietrich’s bed. Unfortunately, one day near-insane Marie was poking around her children’s bedroom and found the handgun. She waited in ambush for her son to come home from school, grabbing him by the collar when he arrived and giving him a good slap across the mouth. Marie went into her psychopathic ramblings, smashing the pistol repeatedly against the boy’s skinny body, breaking two major bones in his left arm and leaving him unable to reproduce and produce offspring for the rest of his life.
The day after his mother gave him the remarkable beating that would stick with him the rest of his life Dietrich went to school normally, although his arm was in a sling put on by the local doctor; the poor physician forced by the madwoman to bandage her son without saying a word to anyone about his mysterious wounds. Marie had neglected to think of her son’s wounded crotch and paid for it dearly. Dietrich was referred to the school nurse after complaining of pain in his lower regions to his teacher, Dr. Zachariah Witt. The nurse was startled to find serious injuries and sent him to a certified public physician. Fortunately, the doctor was able to stop the wounds from being infected but was unable to repair the damaged reproductive organs. The young boy, startled by his mother’s threats of death if he told anyone about the events that had transpired the day before, explained that he had been riding bicycles and had been in a rather nasty crash.
Dr. Witt, Dietrich’s aforementioned teacher, had other ideas about Dietrich’s injuries. He had a discussion with the Kriegstahl boy in his office the next day, coaxing Dietrich into telling him the entire story. Dr. Witt soon got the entire story of how his mother had exploded when she found the unloaded firearm under the boy’s bed. The kind teacher was astonished and appealed to take the boy to his house to be safe from his maternal monster. Dietrich happily complied, setting up a small bedroom in Dr. Witt’s pantry. Around the turn of the century adoption and guardian laws were much more lenient then they are in modern times, and understandably so. When Marie called the Imperial authorities about the “terrible” teacher who had whisked her son away from his doting mother showed up at Witt’s residence the good doctor simply showed them the dreadful wounds upon the boy’s body. The authorities simply shook Witt’s hand and slapped Marie with a fine for extreme measures of discipline, leaving the boy to live with his new caretaker.
Dietrich Kriegstahl’s life increased in joy dramatically after Dr. Witt took him in. He was allowed to take up the foil again, honing his rusted fencing skills in the park in Kiel’s main square. Another hobby was kindled within him, this time more fitting for Kiel’s perch on the shore of the Baltic. Dr. Witt, a member of the prestigious Kiel Yacht Club, let fourteen year old Dietrich sail the small boat on small fishing trips and sightseeing voyages. Kriegstahl studied harder in school during his time under Dr. Witt’s wing, for the educator put a very high standard on the quality of work expected by a youngster of Kriegstahl’s age.
Upon graduation from Kiel Academy there was no doubt about what the proud Kriegstahl boy would do with his life. Egged on by uncles and cousins Dietrich enlisted in the Imperial German Reichsheer in the year 1913. The young German, a man for not even one year, was sent to a training camp near Hamburg. Dietrich’s long, handsome blond hair was shaved to the scalp upon arrival. With a new shaved skull he was stripped and then given two uniforms, a rifle, and an infamous Pickelhaube helmet. Recruit Kriegstahl was drilled until his fingernails bled and spots formed in front of his eyes, performing the rigorous Teutonic hazing process that so many of his family’s soldiers and warriors had gone through before him. Kriegstahl graduated basic with flying colors, gladly taking the rank of Private in the enlisted corps. Dietrich was allowed one week leave in his home city before being shipped out to various installments around the Fatherland. He did not spend one moment of his leave with his mother or siblings.
During Dietrich’s time in the enlisted corps he picked up some common habits among his comrades, including smoking and drinking, which he had rarely done in Kiel. Another sickness that he caught was swearing rather profusely, which appalled his conservative caretaker Doctor Witt. When Witt stared at him wide-eyed from behind his spectacles and lectured him on the dangers of becoming unruly Dietrich just laughed cynically and lit a cigarette, knocking the ashes carelessly onto the fine wooden floor before propping his jackbooted feet up on the immaculate kitchen table. Witt realized then that Dietrich was not the naïve teenager that he had taken in so few years before; stubble had replaced acne, curses and rowdiness taking over where academics had once ruled. Dr. Witt screamed at the warlike abomination that desecrated his house to get away and to never come back. Dietrich, fueled with anger, gave a good punch to the elderly teacher’s nose and left Witt lying in a pool of his own blood on his own kitchen floor. Dietrich never knew if the old man died or was simply knocked unconscious by the punch, and he never really cared. His childhood was behind him. Caregivers have no place in a military career.
Kriegstahl was shipped south to Berlin by railroad and was only on active duty for a few weeks before being accepted into an officer cadet school. He attended the academy in uptown Berlin for three months, his mind being racked with thousands of tactical plans and coordinates. Dietrich learned to keep himself better while earning his commission, shaving twice a week and keeping all of his uniforms clean and jackboots polished. This was the only time of his life that he felt remorse for what he did during his childhood; leaving his mother, beating Witt, using the Lord’s name in vain, all of his past sins came back to haunt him as he sat through lectures by Colonels and Majors. Dietrich attended Catholic Church near his Officer’s Academy, praying for forgiveness. One night the cadet went to pay his respects to his beliefs. It was a gusty, stormy night and an unfortunate wind worked its way through the cracks in the stained glass windows and managed to blow out the single candle illuminating Dietrich’s solitary midnight mass. The soldier fell asleep in one of the pews, his jackbooted legs pulled boyishly up to his chest in the fetal position as his troubled mind rested.
Early the next morning he was aroused by a priest. When Dietrich opened his eyes he felt as if a spiritual curtain was raised from his blue eyes and he could see the world through clearer, more innocent eyes. From that day forward Dietrich Kriegstahl believed that God was on his side and that whatever the young soldier would do the Holy Spirit would back it up. Dietrich immediately did better at the academy, his superiors struck by how well this young Teuton was doing. Whether it was actually higher powers or just Dietrich’s renewed strength remained unknown to the young soldier, but he knew he had some help when he was giving a Lieutenant’s shoulderboards in December 1913. Dietrich was sent west and placed upon the German-French border to lead a small checkpoint on a day-to-day basis.
On the 28th of June, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg by a Serbian activist marked the start of WWI. Germany decided to try to take France by invading through Belgium and encircling the French armies. Lieutenant Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl and his men were mobilized immediately, spearheading south throughout the summer and coming back up north towards Paris in August. Dietrich did little actual fighting, instead guarding caravans of supplies to the front from ambushes and aerial attacks. He was seen as a decent commander, fair with his men but still firm. He did have one debilitating weakness; overconfidence. Dietrich wanted to hop in and fight the enemy even when odds were completely against him, his headstrong nature coming from both his warlike roots and his sudden faith. His superiors disliked him for this attitude, trying to save the young Lieutenant until he was needed.
The time when Dietrich finally got to try out all of the tactics and weapons drills he had learned was during the Battle of the Marne, taking place in the first wave of offensive infantry crawling against the muddy, barbed-wire ridden No-Man’s Land to the river. After hitting one of the many German trenches worked into the earth Dietrich was advised to take cover while some Commonwealth planes did strafing runs on the No-Man’s Land that the Lieutenant had to cross next. Kriegstahl scoffed at this plan and told the soldiers in the trench to fire their Maxim machineguns at the planes while the rest of the troops moved up. Not minutes after Dietrich and his men started to crawl on their bellies across the muddy turf the planes moved down, their weapons trained on the sitting ducks in front of them. The machineguns in the trenches did nothing to stop the ruthless onslaught of the planes, which zeroed in quickly and killed most of Kriegstahl’s platoon in one dip.
Dietrich himself was attacked by a Sopwith Camel diving down for its second run. One bullet sliced right through his hard leather Pickelhaube, cutting up his hairline but causing no serious damage. A second round grazed his left cheek, sending a nice puff of blood out from his torn face. A third bullet smacked into his thigh, causing him to spew crimson liquid and to curse God’s name and he rolled around in pain on the muddy ground. He started to go pale after two minutes, and his leg went numb after seven. Within ten minutes he was out cold. His lifeless body was largely forgotten in the following battle, the Allies using superior tactics to win back the Marne River. The Central Powers were sent reeling back after the loss, the rest of the war going largely downhill from that point onward.
When Kriegstahl woke up he was in a French hospital in the outskirts of Paris, his leg wrapped up with a dirty, blood-stained bandage and his hairline and cheek covered with tiny pieces of gauze. For two weeks he was neglected at the hospital, only fed a thin broth with rice one time a day. His cries of agony were left unanswered, both to the snobby French doctors and his “God”. While living in lice-infected mud and filth while your countrymen lay dying and you can feel maggots crawling around under your bandages Dietrich made up his mind, once and for all, that there was nothing that could save him. He was alone in the world. For many hours a day he screamed into the air, starting with pleas for help and ending with sobbing gibberish, cursing his headstrong ways and gullibility. Dietrich pounded his hands furiously against the ground, his palms getting sliced up by the sharp slate plentiful in the French ground.
Luckily, Kriegstahl’s wound did not become infected. The god-forsaken worms that had gnawed away at his leg wound had actually saved his limb, eating the bacteria that could cause certain death if not treated properly. After three weeks laying outside the French hospital exposed to the elements he was deemed “recovered enough for relocation” and was sent to a French Prisoner of War camp near Rouen, France. Unfortunately, the conditions at Rouen War Prisoner Penitentiary were only slightly better than the one at the hospital. The camp was pretty much just a half-a-mile by half-a-mile patch of dirt surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, one dingy building containing bunks for 40 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners. They were forced to work in a nearby stone quarry during the day and return to fulfill their miserable existences at night under the close watch of the brutal and cruel French guards, tormenting their prisoners unendingly.
It was here that Kriegstahl learned of what headquarters thought of him from a junior communications officer captured near Mainz. Lieutenant Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl of Kiel, Germany was officially declared missing and presumed dead on January 3rd, 1915. For a good part of 1915 he remained in Rouen War Prisoner Penitentiary before getting the orders that he was to be moved to a small camp in southern England. Kriegstahl and several other captured officers were forced to march north to the English Channel’s waterline, boarded a rough pontoon boat, and sailed the quick voyage to the Rainy Isles. Upon arrival the flustered Germans were stripped of their uniform and given prisoner’s clothes before being sent to a small coastal town that housed a large POW camp.
Life at the British camp was considerably better then life at the one in mainland Europe. Prisoners were allowed reading material, rations fit for a regular British soldier, and a considerable amount of free time. No hard labor was expected only community service and the occasional road maintenance. Dietrich spent most of his time in the small recreational yard lifting weights and doing sit ups; he thought that if he was in captivity, he might as well work his body in the hope that when Germany one the war he could be in the same shape, if not better, than he was before. Dietrich socialized lightly with the other officers, although he did routinely joke around with the more friendly British military guards. He decided the British were a worthy opponent, unlike the disgusting French.
Unfortunately, the day when Germany decimated the Allied powers never came. The Americans swept into Europe, and the Allies slowly pressured the Central powers into surrendering. After Germany’s defeat the British decided to hold all prisoners until a formal treaty was drawn up. The Treaty of Versailles marked freedom for Dietrich, the British releasing him in August 1919. By December he had arrived back in Kiel and was absolutely appalled at what he found. Weimar Germany disgusted him. The government officials were nothing but absolute cowards put in place by the Allies to keep Germany from its destined greatness. Dietrich left Kiel after just three days there, trekking southeast in hopes to escape from this out-of-place government and live in the new, less puppeteered nation of Austria.
Dietrich Kriegstahl finally decided to settle down in the large, historic city of Vienna, Austria. He purchased a small home in a nice, rather high-class district of the city, the young veteran purchasing two small Dachshund puppies to share his life with. He dabbled in romance during his late twenties, hosting short relationships with several women during the early 1920’s. Dietrich finally proposed to a young Rossa Schiethaur in 1923. Rossa was a native Austrian who had lost her father in the Great War and had been living in Vienna all of her life. They had a quiet marriage, never producing any children due to Dietrich’s infertility.
Dietrich got by in the rough economic times by staying flexible, taking on whatever job needed workers. He often worked on construction, bridgework, and driving projects. His blond hair became steel gray faster than most, and in his mid thirties his square face was framed by silver. Dietrich still held his contempt of the Weimars, having to resist the urge to spit when Germany’s false government was mentioned. Overall, a large part of his life was spent in relative peace living in the suburbs of Vienna.
Military Rank: Hauptmann
Writing Sample:
Hauptmann Kriegstahl’s eyes fluttered as the veil of unconsciousness was lifted from the clear blue irises, strength returning to his limbs as slowly as intelligence returned to his foggy brain like a small boat wading through musky seas. A primal croak ushered itself gutturally from his dry lungs as his tongue moved around the inside of his mouth, the dehydrated organ trying fitfully to restore some moisture to his palate. Dietrich dared to move himself upward in the troop truck’s cracked leather seat so that he sat up straight, wincing as his leather belt squeaked; the sound echoing like a gunshot in the otherwise silent cab. Dietrich stared oddly at his belt buckle as he tried to work up the strength to do something else. Gott Mitt Uns. God is with us. Where the hell is god now? Kriegstahl thought with grim humor, his cracked lips painfully turning up into a morbid smile. The truck had been ambushed about four hours ago according to the officer’s scratched watchface and already he was grossly dehydrated. The windshield was cracked in more places than any one being could count, the tiny spiders of bullet holes positioned on their glass webs ever since a Vickers machinegun had sent them there. Particles of dust floated around in front of the Hauptmann, shining in the harsh North African sunlight. Gefrieter Weisel, the truck’s driver, was slumped towards Dietrich grotesquely as if he had tried to reach for his commanding officer before his unfortunate demise. Four bloody rips in his tan uniform bled gore and small trickles of blood arched down his face from his nose and mouth, shards of glass peppering his raven-colored hairline. His red-stained fingers, thrown over the clutch, held a small crucifix, and Kriegstahl could not help but wonder if the poor boy had not been killed immediately, but had managed to pray to his god before succumbing to the alluring spirits of death. Dietrich reached over to the corpse’s eyes and slowly shut the eyelids, wishing the unfortunate youth fortune in whatever afterlife he believed in.
Kriegstahl removed his field cap from his blond hair, streaked with steely gray, to try to alleviate some of the built up heat within him. He fumbled with the straps to his canteen, stuck over the cup like shackles on a prisoner. When he finally unlatched it he drained its contents in a matter of seconds, warm water passing through dry lips, down a parched esophagus, and into his thirsty gullet. After he was finished he leaned over and guiltily took Weisel’s water, a sharp metallic taste biting his tongue from blood that had percolated through the hard woolen shell of the canteen. He discarded both drinking vessels onto the truck’s floor, bursting with the newfound strength of hydration. Dietrich put his cap back on, undoing the fastener for belt that held him to the truck’s seat. He removed the khaki tunic and necktie that bound him on most days and opened the first few buttons of his tan service shirt, his sweaty chest airing out in the humid truck cab. After a moment of catching his breath after guzzling a half a gallon of water he rolled down his passenger side window as silently as he could, for whoever had ambushed the truck the first time could definitely be around now. Sticking his head out the opening the Hauptmann could see a barbed wire fence in the distance, marking some type of outpost. He didn’t remember seeing any German occupied forts around these coordinates on the maps he had studied before the trip. Italian maybe? He filled himself with false hope as he stared at the almost certainly Allied outpost, fear nagging at the loose ends of his brain.
Dietrich decided that he had to do something. He remembered a radio in the back for the enlisted men riding in the tarp-covered storage space of the truck. Perhaps he could radio in command. Maybe there was even another survivor back there. He undid the fastener on his Walther P38’s holster, the sun-warmed metal of the pistol solid in his dominant right hand. He made sure it was ready to fire and slowly inched his other hand over to the truck’s door, letting it swing open to make the least amount of sound possible. Dietrich waited for a few seconds before stepping out. He felt one jackboot sink into the dense sand, followed by a second, and then he silently plodded to the covered back of the tan truck. Already he could see it did not look good. The tarp was chewed to pieces from high-caliber rounds, coming from either Brens or Vickers. Dietrich covered his nose with his sleeve as his nostrils caught the odor of corpses stagnant in the hot summer sun. As he rounded the back he could see a scene of intense gore in the rear riding space, half a dozen bodies strewn on the benches and on the floor. They were literally ripped to pieces, limbs lay around and internal organs were liquefied against the inside of the tarp.
Kriegstahl hoisted his body into the rear of the truck and felt the suspension creak slightly with added weight. Wading through dead bodies Dietrich reached the radio placed in the back and found a communications cadet slumped over his equipment; dead in a valiant attempt to save his comrades. Miraculously, his body had absorbed all of the bullets that would have pierced the delicate machinery. Dietrich pushed his limp body away and turned on the radio, attempting to get any signal at all. Unfortunately, all he was getting was static. He lay the pistol down on top of the radio hesitantly to use both hands to deftly turn the knobs, switching frequencies quickly to find any garble of a human voice on the other side.
“Holy shit, Staff Sergeant, I swear that that door was closed when we checked this god-damned Kraut truck last! I swear!”
Dietrich froze, his sweat suddenly cold against his sun-heated body.
“Alright Reed, we’ll go down there and check it just for you. You take the cab, I’ll check the back.”
The voices were obviously of English descent. “Reed” might have had a little Welsh in him, but it didn’t matter. He recognized their language from his time in England during the First World War. Dietrich grabbed his black steel pistol and slouched on one of the benches, playing dead and hoping to just let them go away. He hopped the Sergeant would just look in, see a bunch of dead “krauts” as they called the Germans, and go on his jolly way. Dietrich flipped off the radio just as the Staff Sergeant came into view, walking swiftly at the truck holding a Bren LMG jauntily in his hands. Dietrich continued is charade of death as he walked up to the edge of the bed, peering around inside with his Bren trained on the corpses. He then lazily hopped up into the truck and started poking at the bodies with the barrel of his rifle, slowly approaching Kriegstahl. The German knew that he had to act. But he needed to do it without Reed knowing. He could here the soldier poking around in the cab, probably looting poor Weisel’s corpse.
Dietrich’s attack came like a viper’s bite. He waited until the British Sergeant had been distracted by tiny creak in the wood. The second his eyes diverted from the corpses Dietrich leapt up and unsheathed his long Imperial bayonet, coming up on the Briton quickly. The German clamped a hand over his adversaries’ mouth as he watched the wild surprise and fear in the Sergeant’s brown eyes as Kriegstahl’s blade came down. One strike the shoulder made a small splotch of blood. The second hit a major artery and sent blood soaking the entire front of the khaki uniform. A final slice went to the jugular, ending the Sergeant’s life in a horribly bloody way. The British NCO’s weapon clattered against the bed of the truck, alerting Reed that something was wrong.
“Staff Sergeant, are you alright?”
Dietrich heard the soft plod of Reed’s steps to the back of the truck, the dopey Private not looking up until he was at the edge. Kriegstahl smashed a jackbooted foot directly into the soldier’s face, the hobnails etching deep gouges into Reed’s boyish, freckled face. With a whimper the Private was down on the ground, holding his face and rolling in the sand. Dietrich hopped down from the bed of the truck and grimaced as he felt one of the Private’s arms break under his heel. The Hauptmann was on top of the Private almost instantaneously, smashing two consecutive punches directly into Reed’s jaw. Without knowing it he felt his scraped knuckles close around the Private’s windpipe, cutting off all flow of air into his brain. Just as he thought he felt Reed’s very life force leave his body Dietrich felt a burning sensation in his right side.
This bastard has a knife in me. Dietrich thought angrily, wincing and applying even more pressure to Reed’s neck. Only a second later he saw the Private’s eyes roll back into his skull and the color drain from his face. Kriegstahl immediately applied pressure to where the soldier had stabbed him. It was bleeding pretty badly, so he removed his cap and tried to staunch the bleeding. Dietrich knew he had to get someone on the radio soon or he would die out here in the desert from blood loss. The soldier jumped back up into the bed and started to fumble with the radio’s controls again. Just as he swore he heard a tinny voice in German his whole world sank into blackness like a single pearl into a puddle of oil.
), or you can choose to lengthen your Writing sample. We don't hand out Hauptmann ranks as easily as we used to, so it would need to be a fairly big improvement. ~Dan
Account E-Mail: It is good old Gerry
Name: Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl III
Nationality: Aryan [Pure German]
What Army will Your Character Serve Beneath? Heer [Ground branch of the Wehrmacht]
Character History:
The Kriegstahl family was steeped in tradition and history since the farthest records housed in the Hitler’s Germany even distantly touched. Given the harsh, militaristic baring of the Nordic people it is no surprise that they have been involved in many of the world’s major conflicts, both directly and indirectly. This seems even certainly true for the Kriegstahl family; for their surname, when broken apart, translates into “War Steel” from German. The farthest confirmed record of the family’s warlike history is a Teutonic knight by the name of “Noah Kriegstahl” who fought in both the Third Crusade and against the pagan Lithuanians in the Teutonic order’s holy wars. The kingdom of Prussia was graced with a total of twenty-seven Kriegstahl footmen among its ranks, fighting bravely with musket and shot. A distant relative of the Kriegstahl family living near the Hessian mountain range was killed in Pennsylvania while fighting alongside the British special units drawn from Germany in the American war for independence. That Hessian relative, however, was the only Kriegstahl ever to lay foot in the dirty god-forsaken soil of the United States of America. When the other powerful families set sail and headed west over the great Atlantic, the Kriegstahl looked on them with contempt and yelled accusations of cowardice over the loud din of ship engines pulling away from the fatherland for good.
From the beginning of its founding the Kriegstahl family has had one debilitating affliction: a crippling heretic case of the Prussian disease. The suffocating desire to be better, to be more civilized, and to crush others beneath one’s boot heel found often was found gnawing at the soul of honest Kriegstahls, driving many a good soldier into a downward spiral of bigotry. Although they were not an obnoxious or loud family, they were powerful. And power added to selfishness is akin to adding electricity to water; no matter how innocent a tiny spark can be someone is always injured. Also running in the family was a fateful weakness for alcohol, forcing many Kriegstahls to end up sloshed on bars or dead in ditches, drowned in 3 inches of water.
Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl II was born in 1856 to Dietrich von Kriegstahl I in Kiel, Germany, the traditional home of their family. Dietrich II was sent to Royal Grammar School in Buckinghamshire, England to get an education in his early years and to experience world cultures. The young German was teased horribly in his youth, the native English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish boys hurling insults of “Kraut” and other racial slurs that burned deep into Dietrich II’s soul. Of course he wrote his father nothing of this, for his fear of his father’s riding crop he called the “weakling cracker” outweighed the pebbles thrown at him from the funny freckle-faced children in Buckinghamshire. One good thing sprouted from his time in his time in the Rainy Islands, and that was his newly-kindled love of fencing. Dietrich II loved the chance to get back at his tormentors in sporting events. The young boy did averagely in school, but that would have been brilliantly anywhere other than the Royal Academy. Only geniuses excelled in Buckinghamshire.
Upon return to Kiel after graduation Dietrich II enlisted in the Imperial German Navy. The young sailor worked in dockyards and on battleships in and near the Baltic Sea, becoming an expert on the freezing Nordic waters. After two years working as an enlisted man he was accepted into the Officer’s Cadet Corps and re-instated as a Lieutenant. Around the time of his enlistment he met a lovely young woman by the name of Marie von der Bult and married after one year of mingling. In the year 1890 Dietrich II and Marie bought a large estate on the waterfront of Schreven Lake. Marie was thrilled. The young Freiherr’s daughter had always wanted a white mansion on the water, and the house and her husband answered all of the girlish dreams that she had as a child.
The first born of this certain branch of the vast Kriegstahl family was Dietrich Wilhelm III. Marie gave birth to him in the freezing echoes of December in the year 1895, the baby coming out excruciatingly fast. He was named after his father and grandfather behind him, hoping to add to the proud warrior heritage of his family. His brother, Mikeal, and sister, Agnes, in the November of the same year. They were twins, born unsuspectingly when Dietrich II came back from a sea voyage around the Northern Swedish seaboard, stopping in Finland, and coming back to Kiel seaport to his loving wife. Marie kept the children in their bedroom, three wooden cribs lining the wall next to her wardrobe and vanity table. The cribs were painted white with a single red hart at the foot, a small bundle of blankets wrapping each infant up. Dietrich II was gone more and more, preparing the German Empire for the wave that they would, some glorious day, unleash on the world.
Dietrich III was born bald, but he soon developed a healthy dollop of blonde hair to match his clear blue eyes. His siblings looked largely like him, inheriting both parent’s German hair and eyes. From an early age his father could tell his eldest son would be a large man, his baby’s arms, still laced with birth fat, grew large and his feet grew even larger. Dietrich III was gruff even in his toddler years, refusing the lacy shirts and dapper caps that his mother wanted him to wear and insisting on carrying on when she tried to dress him. When Marie threw up her hands, exasperated with the young child, the father of the house just laughed. Dietrich III’s earliest memories were the tobacco-scented hugs of his father, his big yellow moustache brushing his youthful face. The Dietrich III, Mikeal, and Agnes would play outside in the fresh spring grass outside of their house around the turn of the century, the two boys gussied up in sailor’s outfits while Agnes wore pretty lace dresses perfectly tailored for a toddler’s size. The Kriegstahls seemed to be enjoying their life to the fullest, their family the ideal Imperial dream. Some of the Kaiser’s propagandists thought the family was so ideal that they took photo-shoots of the parents and children on their lawn to use as representation of a typical German family.
Sadly, their happiness was short lived. The day that disaster struck was alike to any other day, with Dietrich II rising at 0500 to go to work at the Imperial War Docks in Kiel, his wife frying eggs and slabs of bacon for him like always. The father of three kissed his wife for the last time and left for the dockyards. While working on a small patrol ship an accident involving a welder and a gas drum left the seacraft nothing but a smoking black dot in the water. Dietrich II’s remains were never identified, but he was suspected to be among the twelve corpses they found floating in the water, steel identity tags melted and faces charred beyond recognition. Marie was informed later in the day, confining herself to her room to cry herself to sleep. The children, too young to fully grasp the concept of death, cried after seeing their mother in such rustic condition. Just like that, the ideal German family was shattered.
The rest of Dietrich’s early childhood went on as normal, but being fatherless always echoed in the back of his mind. Until 1902, at the age of seven, Dietrich lived in the same home in Kiel. Instead of going to the local academy he was sent, like his father, to boarding school, but this time a school in Germany. Dietrich was dressed in his finest clothes and given two leather suitcases before boarding a train for Leipzig, his destination one of the oldest Lutheran boy’s schools in the world; Saint Thomas’s School.
Life at St. Thomas’s was pleasant for the most part, but there were still drawbacks. The dormitories, perched at the bottom of the hill the schoolhouse was situated on, were dark and drafty, housing a plethora of insects and rodents along with small boys. Each child was issued a wooden trunk and three school uniforms, their discipline almost militaristic. Classes were tough, and the uncomfortable wooden desks soon wreaked havoc on young bottoms. Lice ran amok, clinging to the short-cropped blond hair of Dietrich. The young son of a widow made friends with the other boys almost immediately, the seven and eight year olds playing with dice and wooden guns on Saturdays and after church on Sundays. All in all, life was pleasant, despite the occasional riding crop to the buttocks.
Dietrich, following in the footsteps of his father, took up fencing at age eight. He was often regarded as a prodigy, dancing across the dueling floor as if he was a butterfly floating from perch to perch. Dietrich’s foil would snap out like a viper’s strike, the poison of a gained point spreading quickly through his opponent’s bloodstream. During the brutally long practices sustained by the fencing boys young Dietrich, sometimes called “Little Wasp”, would beat some of the teenage boys facing him. If the eight year old managed to put a particularly nasty defeat on any of the older boys sometimes they would rough up young Kriegstahl after the match, leaving the boy with many a bruise and bump in his time at St. Thomas’s. He won top in the Leipzig Fencing Tournament in 1904, followed by the tournaments in Gunthersdorf, Dosen, and Rapritz, but being overturned in the Imperial German Fencing Tournament in Berlin, Germany, earning fourth in his entire country in the age group of 5-12 years of age.
At the age of twelve Marie cancelled her son’s tuition at St. Thomas’s and enrolled him at the local boy’s school in Kiel. When he arrived back at his home he realized right off the train platform that the other Kriegstahl children were not who he remembered them to be. Grief-stricken Marie had transformed Mikeal and Agnes into small little drones, Mikeal’s golden hair shoulder length and both of them dressed up in powder blues and lace. This shocked Dietrich, whose dirty school uniform hung off of his body boyishly and his hair messy and tousled. His mother was even worse. Living with the death of her husband had warped her mind akin to how water warps wood. Her blood-shot eyes stared freakishly at Dietrich all the time, the tiny blue irises following him to make sure he did nothing dangerous. Marie hated the eldest Kriegstahl’s passion for fencing, which she found utterly dangerous despite the soft metal foils and large protective suits. For the rest of his adolescent years the little boy had to live in fear of his mother, who would sometimes go into spastic fits of rage, destroying the immaculate knick-knacks plastered on shelves and tables that she seemed to love more than her oldest child.
It was not until an incident on Dietrich’s thirteenth birthday that he released all the built up emotion on his mother that had been bottled up inside of him since he had arrived in Kiel. Dietrich had been secretly keeping an old pistol in a box under his bed. The weapon was not loaded, nor did he intend on ever using it on someone, for he didn’t even have one bullet for it. It was simply a token of boyhood, a souvenir found in the desk of a deceased professor back at St. Thomas’s. Every once in a while he would show the pistol to one of his friends, the mesmerized peer poking at the metal firearm lying on Dietrich’s bed. Unfortunately, one day near-insane Marie was poking around her children’s bedroom and found the handgun. She waited in ambush for her son to come home from school, grabbing him by the collar when he arrived and giving him a good slap across the mouth. Marie went into her psychopathic ramblings, smashing the pistol repeatedly against the boy’s skinny body, breaking two major bones in his left arm and leaving him unable to reproduce and produce offspring for the rest of his life.
The day after his mother gave him the remarkable beating that would stick with him the rest of his life Dietrich went to school normally, although his arm was in a sling put on by the local doctor; the poor physician forced by the madwoman to bandage her son without saying a word to anyone about his mysterious wounds. Marie had neglected to think of her son’s wounded crotch and paid for it dearly. Dietrich was referred to the school nurse after complaining of pain in his lower regions to his teacher, Dr. Zachariah Witt. The nurse was startled to find serious injuries and sent him to a certified public physician. Fortunately, the doctor was able to stop the wounds from being infected but was unable to repair the damaged reproductive organs. The young boy, startled by his mother’s threats of death if he told anyone about the events that had transpired the day before, explained that he had been riding bicycles and had been in a rather nasty crash.
Dr. Witt, Dietrich’s aforementioned teacher, had other ideas about Dietrich’s injuries. He had a discussion with the Kriegstahl boy in his office the next day, coaxing Dietrich into telling him the entire story. Dr. Witt soon got the entire story of how his mother had exploded when she found the unloaded firearm under the boy’s bed. The kind teacher was astonished and appealed to take the boy to his house to be safe from his maternal monster. Dietrich happily complied, setting up a small bedroom in Dr. Witt’s pantry. Around the turn of the century adoption and guardian laws were much more lenient then they are in modern times, and understandably so. When Marie called the Imperial authorities about the “terrible” teacher who had whisked her son away from his doting mother showed up at Witt’s residence the good doctor simply showed them the dreadful wounds upon the boy’s body. The authorities simply shook Witt’s hand and slapped Marie with a fine for extreme measures of discipline, leaving the boy to live with his new caretaker.
Dietrich Kriegstahl’s life increased in joy dramatically after Dr. Witt took him in. He was allowed to take up the foil again, honing his rusted fencing skills in the park in Kiel’s main square. Another hobby was kindled within him, this time more fitting for Kiel’s perch on the shore of the Baltic. Dr. Witt, a member of the prestigious Kiel Yacht Club, let fourteen year old Dietrich sail the small boat on small fishing trips and sightseeing voyages. Kriegstahl studied harder in school during his time under Dr. Witt’s wing, for the educator put a very high standard on the quality of work expected by a youngster of Kriegstahl’s age.
Upon graduation from Kiel Academy there was no doubt about what the proud Kriegstahl boy would do with his life. Egged on by uncles and cousins Dietrich enlisted in the Imperial German Reichsheer in the year 1913. The young German, a man for not even one year, was sent to a training camp near Hamburg. Dietrich’s long, handsome blond hair was shaved to the scalp upon arrival. With a new shaved skull he was stripped and then given two uniforms, a rifle, and an infamous Pickelhaube helmet. Recruit Kriegstahl was drilled until his fingernails bled and spots formed in front of his eyes, performing the rigorous Teutonic hazing process that so many of his family’s soldiers and warriors had gone through before him. Kriegstahl graduated basic with flying colors, gladly taking the rank of Private in the enlisted corps. Dietrich was allowed one week leave in his home city before being shipped out to various installments around the Fatherland. He did not spend one moment of his leave with his mother or siblings.
During Dietrich’s time in the enlisted corps he picked up some common habits among his comrades, including smoking and drinking, which he had rarely done in Kiel. Another sickness that he caught was swearing rather profusely, which appalled his conservative caretaker Doctor Witt. When Witt stared at him wide-eyed from behind his spectacles and lectured him on the dangers of becoming unruly Dietrich just laughed cynically and lit a cigarette, knocking the ashes carelessly onto the fine wooden floor before propping his jackbooted feet up on the immaculate kitchen table. Witt realized then that Dietrich was not the naïve teenager that he had taken in so few years before; stubble had replaced acne, curses and rowdiness taking over where academics had once ruled. Dr. Witt screamed at the warlike abomination that desecrated his house to get away and to never come back. Dietrich, fueled with anger, gave a good punch to the elderly teacher’s nose and left Witt lying in a pool of his own blood on his own kitchen floor. Dietrich never knew if the old man died or was simply knocked unconscious by the punch, and he never really cared. His childhood was behind him. Caregivers have no place in a military career.
Kriegstahl was shipped south to Berlin by railroad and was only on active duty for a few weeks before being accepted into an officer cadet school. He attended the academy in uptown Berlin for three months, his mind being racked with thousands of tactical plans and coordinates. Dietrich learned to keep himself better while earning his commission, shaving twice a week and keeping all of his uniforms clean and jackboots polished. This was the only time of his life that he felt remorse for what he did during his childhood; leaving his mother, beating Witt, using the Lord’s name in vain, all of his past sins came back to haunt him as he sat through lectures by Colonels and Majors. Dietrich attended Catholic Church near his Officer’s Academy, praying for forgiveness. One night the cadet went to pay his respects to his beliefs. It was a gusty, stormy night and an unfortunate wind worked its way through the cracks in the stained glass windows and managed to blow out the single candle illuminating Dietrich’s solitary midnight mass. The soldier fell asleep in one of the pews, his jackbooted legs pulled boyishly up to his chest in the fetal position as his troubled mind rested.
Early the next morning he was aroused by a priest. When Dietrich opened his eyes he felt as if a spiritual curtain was raised from his blue eyes and he could see the world through clearer, more innocent eyes. From that day forward Dietrich Kriegstahl believed that God was on his side and that whatever the young soldier would do the Holy Spirit would back it up. Dietrich immediately did better at the academy, his superiors struck by how well this young Teuton was doing. Whether it was actually higher powers or just Dietrich’s renewed strength remained unknown to the young soldier, but he knew he had some help when he was giving a Lieutenant’s shoulderboards in December 1913. Dietrich was sent west and placed upon the German-French border to lead a small checkpoint on a day-to-day basis.
On the 28th of June, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg by a Serbian activist marked the start of WWI. Germany decided to try to take France by invading through Belgium and encircling the French armies. Lieutenant Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl and his men were mobilized immediately, spearheading south throughout the summer and coming back up north towards Paris in August. Dietrich did little actual fighting, instead guarding caravans of supplies to the front from ambushes and aerial attacks. He was seen as a decent commander, fair with his men but still firm. He did have one debilitating weakness; overconfidence. Dietrich wanted to hop in and fight the enemy even when odds were completely against him, his headstrong nature coming from both his warlike roots and his sudden faith. His superiors disliked him for this attitude, trying to save the young Lieutenant until he was needed.
The time when Dietrich finally got to try out all of the tactics and weapons drills he had learned was during the Battle of the Marne, taking place in the first wave of offensive infantry crawling against the muddy, barbed-wire ridden No-Man’s Land to the river. After hitting one of the many German trenches worked into the earth Dietrich was advised to take cover while some Commonwealth planes did strafing runs on the No-Man’s Land that the Lieutenant had to cross next. Kriegstahl scoffed at this plan and told the soldiers in the trench to fire their Maxim machineguns at the planes while the rest of the troops moved up. Not minutes after Dietrich and his men started to crawl on their bellies across the muddy turf the planes moved down, their weapons trained on the sitting ducks in front of them. The machineguns in the trenches did nothing to stop the ruthless onslaught of the planes, which zeroed in quickly and killed most of Kriegstahl’s platoon in one dip.
Dietrich himself was attacked by a Sopwith Camel diving down for its second run. One bullet sliced right through his hard leather Pickelhaube, cutting up his hairline but causing no serious damage. A second round grazed his left cheek, sending a nice puff of blood out from his torn face. A third bullet smacked into his thigh, causing him to spew crimson liquid and to curse God’s name and he rolled around in pain on the muddy ground. He started to go pale after two minutes, and his leg went numb after seven. Within ten minutes he was out cold. His lifeless body was largely forgotten in the following battle, the Allies using superior tactics to win back the Marne River. The Central Powers were sent reeling back after the loss, the rest of the war going largely downhill from that point onward.
When Kriegstahl woke up he was in a French hospital in the outskirts of Paris, his leg wrapped up with a dirty, blood-stained bandage and his hairline and cheek covered with tiny pieces of gauze. For two weeks he was neglected at the hospital, only fed a thin broth with rice one time a day. His cries of agony were left unanswered, both to the snobby French doctors and his “God”. While living in lice-infected mud and filth while your countrymen lay dying and you can feel maggots crawling around under your bandages Dietrich made up his mind, once and for all, that there was nothing that could save him. He was alone in the world. For many hours a day he screamed into the air, starting with pleas for help and ending with sobbing gibberish, cursing his headstrong ways and gullibility. Dietrich pounded his hands furiously against the ground, his palms getting sliced up by the sharp slate plentiful in the French ground.
Luckily, Kriegstahl’s wound did not become infected. The god-forsaken worms that had gnawed away at his leg wound had actually saved his limb, eating the bacteria that could cause certain death if not treated properly. After three weeks laying outside the French hospital exposed to the elements he was deemed “recovered enough for relocation” and was sent to a French Prisoner of War camp near Rouen, France. Unfortunately, the conditions at Rouen War Prisoner Penitentiary were only slightly better than the one at the hospital. The camp was pretty much just a half-a-mile by half-a-mile patch of dirt surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, one dingy building containing bunks for 40 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners. They were forced to work in a nearby stone quarry during the day and return to fulfill their miserable existences at night under the close watch of the brutal and cruel French guards, tormenting their prisoners unendingly.
It was here that Kriegstahl learned of what headquarters thought of him from a junior communications officer captured near Mainz. Lieutenant Dietrich Wilhelm von Kriegstahl of Kiel, Germany was officially declared missing and presumed dead on January 3rd, 1915. For a good part of 1915 he remained in Rouen War Prisoner Penitentiary before getting the orders that he was to be moved to a small camp in southern England. Kriegstahl and several other captured officers were forced to march north to the English Channel’s waterline, boarded a rough pontoon boat, and sailed the quick voyage to the Rainy Isles. Upon arrival the flustered Germans were stripped of their uniform and given prisoner’s clothes before being sent to a small coastal town that housed a large POW camp.
Life at the British camp was considerably better then life at the one in mainland Europe. Prisoners were allowed reading material, rations fit for a regular British soldier, and a considerable amount of free time. No hard labor was expected only community service and the occasional road maintenance. Dietrich spent most of his time in the small recreational yard lifting weights and doing sit ups; he thought that if he was in captivity, he might as well work his body in the hope that when Germany one the war he could be in the same shape, if not better, than he was before. Dietrich socialized lightly with the other officers, although he did routinely joke around with the more friendly British military guards. He decided the British were a worthy opponent, unlike the disgusting French.
Unfortunately, the day when Germany decimated the Allied powers never came. The Americans swept into Europe, and the Allies slowly pressured the Central powers into surrendering. After Germany’s defeat the British decided to hold all prisoners until a formal treaty was drawn up. The Treaty of Versailles marked freedom for Dietrich, the British releasing him in August 1919. By December he had arrived back in Kiel and was absolutely appalled at what he found. Weimar Germany disgusted him. The government officials were nothing but absolute cowards put in place by the Allies to keep Germany from its destined greatness. Dietrich left Kiel after just three days there, trekking southeast in hopes to escape from this out-of-place government and live in the new, less puppeteered nation of Austria.
Dietrich Kriegstahl finally decided to settle down in the large, historic city of Vienna, Austria. He purchased a small home in a nice, rather high-class district of the city, the young veteran purchasing two small Dachshund puppies to share his life with. He dabbled in romance during his late twenties, hosting short relationships with several women during the early 1920’s. Dietrich finally proposed to a young Rossa Schiethaur in 1923. Rossa was a native Austrian who had lost her father in the Great War and had been living in Vienna all of her life. They had a quiet marriage, never producing any children due to Dietrich’s infertility.
Dietrich got by in the rough economic times by staying flexible, taking on whatever job needed workers. He often worked on construction, bridgework, and driving projects. His blond hair became steel gray faster than most, and in his mid thirties his square face was framed by silver. Dietrich still held his contempt of the Weimars, having to resist the urge to spit when Germany’s false government was mentioned. Overall, a large part of his life was spent in relative peace living in the suburbs of Vienna.
Military Rank: Hauptmann
Writing Sample:
Hauptmann Kriegstahl’s eyes fluttered as the veil of unconsciousness was lifted from the clear blue irises, strength returning to his limbs as slowly as intelligence returned to his foggy brain like a small boat wading through musky seas. A primal croak ushered itself gutturally from his dry lungs as his tongue moved around the inside of his mouth, the dehydrated organ trying fitfully to restore some moisture to his palate. Dietrich dared to move himself upward in the troop truck’s cracked leather seat so that he sat up straight, wincing as his leather belt squeaked; the sound echoing like a gunshot in the otherwise silent cab. Dietrich stared oddly at his belt buckle as he tried to work up the strength to do something else. Gott Mitt Uns. God is with us. Where the hell is god now? Kriegstahl thought with grim humor, his cracked lips painfully turning up into a morbid smile. The truck had been ambushed about four hours ago according to the officer’s scratched watchface and already he was grossly dehydrated. The windshield was cracked in more places than any one being could count, the tiny spiders of bullet holes positioned on their glass webs ever since a Vickers machinegun had sent them there. Particles of dust floated around in front of the Hauptmann, shining in the harsh North African sunlight. Gefrieter Weisel, the truck’s driver, was slumped towards Dietrich grotesquely as if he had tried to reach for his commanding officer before his unfortunate demise. Four bloody rips in his tan uniform bled gore and small trickles of blood arched down his face from his nose and mouth, shards of glass peppering his raven-colored hairline. His red-stained fingers, thrown over the clutch, held a small crucifix, and Kriegstahl could not help but wonder if the poor boy had not been killed immediately, but had managed to pray to his god before succumbing to the alluring spirits of death. Dietrich reached over to the corpse’s eyes and slowly shut the eyelids, wishing the unfortunate youth fortune in whatever afterlife he believed in.
Kriegstahl removed his field cap from his blond hair, streaked with steely gray, to try to alleviate some of the built up heat within him. He fumbled with the straps to his canteen, stuck over the cup like shackles on a prisoner. When he finally unlatched it he drained its contents in a matter of seconds, warm water passing through dry lips, down a parched esophagus, and into his thirsty gullet. After he was finished he leaned over and guiltily took Weisel’s water, a sharp metallic taste biting his tongue from blood that had percolated through the hard woolen shell of the canteen. He discarded both drinking vessels onto the truck’s floor, bursting with the newfound strength of hydration. Dietrich put his cap back on, undoing the fastener for belt that held him to the truck’s seat. He removed the khaki tunic and necktie that bound him on most days and opened the first few buttons of his tan service shirt, his sweaty chest airing out in the humid truck cab. After a moment of catching his breath after guzzling a half a gallon of water he rolled down his passenger side window as silently as he could, for whoever had ambushed the truck the first time could definitely be around now. Sticking his head out the opening the Hauptmann could see a barbed wire fence in the distance, marking some type of outpost. He didn’t remember seeing any German occupied forts around these coordinates on the maps he had studied before the trip. Italian maybe? He filled himself with false hope as he stared at the almost certainly Allied outpost, fear nagging at the loose ends of his brain.
Dietrich decided that he had to do something. He remembered a radio in the back for the enlisted men riding in the tarp-covered storage space of the truck. Perhaps he could radio in command. Maybe there was even another survivor back there. He undid the fastener on his Walther P38’s holster, the sun-warmed metal of the pistol solid in his dominant right hand. He made sure it was ready to fire and slowly inched his other hand over to the truck’s door, letting it swing open to make the least amount of sound possible. Dietrich waited for a few seconds before stepping out. He felt one jackboot sink into the dense sand, followed by a second, and then he silently plodded to the covered back of the tan truck. Already he could see it did not look good. The tarp was chewed to pieces from high-caliber rounds, coming from either Brens or Vickers. Dietrich covered his nose with his sleeve as his nostrils caught the odor of corpses stagnant in the hot summer sun. As he rounded the back he could see a scene of intense gore in the rear riding space, half a dozen bodies strewn on the benches and on the floor. They were literally ripped to pieces, limbs lay around and internal organs were liquefied against the inside of the tarp.
Kriegstahl hoisted his body into the rear of the truck and felt the suspension creak slightly with added weight. Wading through dead bodies Dietrich reached the radio placed in the back and found a communications cadet slumped over his equipment; dead in a valiant attempt to save his comrades. Miraculously, his body had absorbed all of the bullets that would have pierced the delicate machinery. Dietrich pushed his limp body away and turned on the radio, attempting to get any signal at all. Unfortunately, all he was getting was static. He lay the pistol down on top of the radio hesitantly to use both hands to deftly turn the knobs, switching frequencies quickly to find any garble of a human voice on the other side.
“Holy shit, Staff Sergeant, I swear that that door was closed when we checked this god-damned Kraut truck last! I swear!”
Dietrich froze, his sweat suddenly cold against his sun-heated body.
“Alright Reed, we’ll go down there and check it just for you. You take the cab, I’ll check the back.”
The voices were obviously of English descent. “Reed” might have had a little Welsh in him, but it didn’t matter. He recognized their language from his time in England during the First World War. Dietrich grabbed his black steel pistol and slouched on one of the benches, playing dead and hoping to just let them go away. He hopped the Sergeant would just look in, see a bunch of dead “krauts” as they called the Germans, and go on his jolly way. Dietrich flipped off the radio just as the Staff Sergeant came into view, walking swiftly at the truck holding a Bren LMG jauntily in his hands. Dietrich continued is charade of death as he walked up to the edge of the bed, peering around inside with his Bren trained on the corpses. He then lazily hopped up into the truck and started poking at the bodies with the barrel of his rifle, slowly approaching Kriegstahl. The German knew that he had to act. But he needed to do it without Reed knowing. He could here the soldier poking around in the cab, probably looting poor Weisel’s corpse.
Dietrich’s attack came like a viper’s bite. He waited until the British Sergeant had been distracted by tiny creak in the wood. The second his eyes diverted from the corpses Dietrich leapt up and unsheathed his long Imperial bayonet, coming up on the Briton quickly. The German clamped a hand over his adversaries’ mouth as he watched the wild surprise and fear in the Sergeant’s brown eyes as Kriegstahl’s blade came down. One strike the shoulder made a small splotch of blood. The second hit a major artery and sent blood soaking the entire front of the khaki uniform. A final slice went to the jugular, ending the Sergeant’s life in a horribly bloody way. The British NCO’s weapon clattered against the bed of the truck, alerting Reed that something was wrong.
“Staff Sergeant, are you alright?”
Dietrich heard the soft plod of Reed’s steps to the back of the truck, the dopey Private not looking up until he was at the edge. Kriegstahl smashed a jackbooted foot directly into the soldier’s face, the hobnails etching deep gouges into Reed’s boyish, freckled face. With a whimper the Private was down on the ground, holding his face and rolling in the sand. Dietrich hopped down from the bed of the truck and grimaced as he felt one of the Private’s arms break under his heel. The Hauptmann was on top of the Private almost instantaneously, smashing two consecutive punches directly into Reed’s jaw. Without knowing it he felt his scraped knuckles close around the Private’s windpipe, cutting off all flow of air into his brain. Just as he thought he felt Reed’s very life force leave his body Dietrich felt a burning sensation in his right side.
This bastard has a knife in me. Dietrich thought angrily, wincing and applying even more pressure to Reed’s neck. Only a second later he saw the Private’s eyes roll back into his skull and the color drain from his face. Kriegstahl immediately applied pressure to where the soldier had stabbed him. It was bleeding pretty badly, so he removed his cap and tried to staunch the bleeding. Dietrich knew he had to get someone on the radio soon or he would die out here in the desert from blood loss. The soldier jumped back up into the bed and started to fumble with the radio’s controls again. Just as he swore he heard a tinny voice in German his whole world sank into blackness like a single pearl into a puddle of oil.
