Post by Wolfgang Kleist on May 22, 2010 18:39:16 GMT
Denied on request of applicant.
Name: Wolfgang Gerd Kleist
Nationality: German
What Army will Your Character Serve Beneath? Waffen-SS Medical Corps
Character History:
Wolfgang G. Kleist was born in Rostock, Germany during a warm Baltic summer. His parents were Derrick and Elsa Kleist, a middle-aged couple living in a quiet stone-and-mortar house on the corner of a narrow street where the bay that Rostock was built around was within walking distance. Herr Derrick was a short balding man with a large girth and a sharp mind. Frau Elsa, on the other hand, was tall and willowy, her blond hair hanging limply over her face like a great tree’s leaves bent over a riverbank. The Kleists had one other child, a female named Maria born four years before Wolfgang. Derrick was a physician, serving in the Imperial German Army as a frontline physician. Wolfgang was but an infant during the Great War and did not remember the long periods of time when his father was away, but Frau Kleist and Maria did. They remembered him before the incident. Before the tragedy.
The attack came in the fall of 1915 during a heated firefight between two German regiments and a combined force of British and French troops. Derrick was working in a forward medical station only minutes away from the thick of the fighting, operating under devastating artillery barrages while dying soldiers were piled up outside the door. He was forced to pick only the easily treated ones, leaving soldiers with multiple bullet wounds or severe internal bleeding to die. So many Germans came to his field hospital cut almost in two by “female” British tanks, for the feminine armor was outfitted with extra machine guns to make up for the lack of a main turret.
The gas came swiftly from the bowels of the British attack force. The Germans had not bothered with gas maskes due to the warm weather and the mask’s narrowing of vision. Poisonous mist floated gracefully over Axis lines, killing the majority of the regiment with burning mustard gas and blinding those lucky [or unlucky, depending on how you think of it] the other percentage. When the mustard gas entered the camp the waiting patients were killed first, moaning as their skin fell from their faces and their lungs filled with burning fluid. Derrick was scarred hideously, his eyes purged of all sight and color and his face disfigured all the way from his forehead to where his neck met his collar. Luckily an artillery barrage shook away the Allied troops and dispersed the gas cloud, allowing German troops to recover Derrick’s mauled but alive body. He was sent home with an honorable discharge in summer 1916 after being treated extensively.
Frau Elsa descended into grief-induced madness after seeing her husband transformed from a respected military surgeon into a blind and immobile cripple condemned by society and unable to provide for her family. The Kleists got a military pension with added severe wound bonuses and that kept Elsa’s head above the flood of financial depression swirling out from holes blasted in the economy by the war Germany was quickly loosing, but it could not keep sanity in her head. Maria cared for both baby Wolfgang and her ailing father, for miraculously Derrick was showing signs of once again being competent and even being able to walk short distances by 1918. This shocked Elsa back into reality just in time for the end of the Great War.
When the Versailles treaty was signed it plunged all of Germany, including Rostock, into a depression. One by one the neighbors were swallowed by the need for money; moving to get jobs in the rural country farmland, selling their daughter’s bodies, committing suicide, and even more despicable and degrading things that no self-respecting German citizen should be forced to do. The Weimer Republic was a disgrace. To have that piss-poor aristocracy running the proud fatherland made the Kleist family to bow their heads in shame.
Wolfgang spent his childhood wallowing in the slums of Rostock and listening to stories of the faded glory of the Imperial German government. His blind father insisted on teaching the boy the basics of medicine in the hopes that young Wolfgang would grow up to be a great physician. These lessons were often little more than a basic conversation about the main organs of a human being or how a broken bone mended and the youngest Kleist could care less about the dry and boring discussions. He would rather be running about in the streets in muddy clothing, ducking in and out of alleyways in a warped child’s game of war. The boys of Rostock would take tiny bits of their father’s war memorabilia; a scratched leather pickelhaube or a dented stahlhelm, a ripped tunic, a pair of battered boots, and many other items left over from the Great War.
Ironically, this immature war game was what first caused six year old Wolfgang to appreciate his blind father’s medical lessons. Wolfgang had previously been playing as a pretend infantryman, but he realized that his father had little standard kit that he could steal to wear in the games. Kleist had the breakthrough that he would pretend to be a medic, a type of combat doctor in his mind. Wolfgang slipped on his father’s Red Cross armband and borrowed some gauze and cough syrup from his kitchen cabinet. He placed his tiny arrangement of playthings into an old leather school satchel that served as a medical kit and went into the streets to bandage up imaginary wounds. He used his father’s lessons to treat the make-believe bullet holes, stunning the neighborhood boys with his knowledge of medicine. Soon Wolfgang was taping up scratched knees and bruised arms.
The most fantastic real wound the boy ever bandaged was when Elmer Friehl was bitten by a street mutt when Wolfgang was 12. It was small, nothing but a few bloody holes in his palm, but Kleist got the chance to wash, staunch, and clumsily bandage it before adult intervention. From that day forward Wolfgang knew he was destined to become a doctor. He listened closer to his father’s tales and respect for the old man grew in the young boy’s heart. Wolfgang sprouted out of the economic depression like a fern out of the site of a volcanic eruption, becoming one of the brightest and most daring schoolchildren in Rostock. That was not saying much, for poor times make for poor people and poor people often educate their children less, but at least Frau and Herr Kleist could be proud of their child.
During high school Wolfgang Kleist did well. His generation was decided to be the ones who would bring Germany out of the depression and lead the fatherland on to greater glory. When Kleist was sixteen Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party came to power, abolishing the Weimer government to the joy of the German population. Wolfgang waved a crisp blood-red Swastika flag stitched by Maria from his family’s hotel room in Berlin during Hitler’s victory parade. Only a few weeks later Kleist joined the Hitler Youth, helping to crack down on the Jewish rats polluting Germany. Wolfgang hung signs in the windows of Jewish shops warning citizens not to shop there and raided Jewish households expected of defying Nazi law, killing pets and beating old men in bloodthirsty displays of affection for Germany’s new leader.
When Wolfgang graduated High School in 1934 he enlisted in the newly formed ideological army called the Waffen-SS. The military force was extremely hard to enlist in at that time and Kleist had to go through numerous cleansing processes including a family background check to the 1600s and an extensive physical and health checks, for even a filling in the wrong tooth could put a man out. Kleist was an almost perfect candidate and was quickly ushered into Waffen-SS basic training and was forced to go through the same rigorous training regime as an infantryman. Climbing barriers, running miles, lifting weights, shooting weapons, it all became second nature to Wolfgang. In the thirties it was even part of Waffen-SS infantry training to learn the basics of artillery, which Kleist enjoyed greatly and exclaimed it would have been his choice if he hadn’t of pledged himself to medicine. Wolfgang kept a dud artillery shell that he had decorated with chalk in his office for the rest of his life as a reminder of the precious few days he got to spend with the big guns.
After basic training Wolfgang was put into Waffen-SS Basic Medical Courses. Most of this was spent in stuffy classrooms using mannequins with organs as references, but his class was able to practice on cadavers at the end of the course. Kleist was regarded as a fantastic medical mind both for long-term physician care and first-response combat medic. Wolfgang was given a military scholarship to the Nazi medical college at Heidelberg, attaining a bachelor’s degree in emergency medicine on government money while still maintaining the rank of recruit. He finished college in 1938 and was put through a four-month Waffen-SS Advanced Medical Course, finally earning a certification to call himself a Waffen-SS medic and wear a snake entwined on a staff on the sleeve of his tunic.
Wolfgang was given a commission into the Officer’s Corps in April 1939 when he was only 22. During the attack on Poland in September the soldier was given a promotion to Senior Physician, or 1st Lieutenant.
Military Rank: SS-Oberärtzlichführer
Writing Sample:
“Sanitater! Sanitater!”
The frantic cry for medical help by a hysterical voice was the first thing that made Oberärtzlichführer Kleist open his eyes in the darkness. He squinted at his crystal watch face. According to the time he had slept for less than a half an hour. It had just been a little noonday rest in an abandoned French gardening shack. He hoped for some peace for just a while. Ever since the German field hospital in the small city of St DuPont was struck by a American incendiary bomb and half the medical support for the war effort in the surrounding area burnt to a crisp Wolfgang’s life had been a living hell. There were very few front-line stretcher-bearers let alone medical NCOs. Kleist, being an officer, was in high demand. He knew he would have to take this call.
Wolfgang hoisted himself off the cot and let his socked feet touch the warm floor. It was stifling hot in the shack, but that was the price he had paid when he closed the windows for the sake of darkness. Kleist pulled on his pebbled leather jackboots; hands deftly tucked his grey trousers into the shoes. He ignored his coarse tunic and instead pulled his equipment belt on over his white undershirt, for when lives were at stake a single article of clothing could not be fretted over. He did, however, pull his Red Cross armband over his sleeve before running out the door.
“Sani! Sanitater! Sani!” A frantic voice shouted again. Machine gun fire rattled over the town and the drone of artillery could be heard smashing into buildings. A few squads stood huddled behind a crumbling wall. A few feet away a SS-Rottenfuhrer crouched by a prone figure sprawled out on the ground. Upon closer examination the body was SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Michael van Duzer, sputtering and coughing up red liquid. Blood plastered his chest and lower body. “He was shot in the chest! A bullet went right through!”
Wolfgang knelt down before the major. “Rottenfuhrer, please step away.” Kleist ordered imperatively, sliding on plastic gloves and undressing van Duzer’s torso. A rifle bullet had entered his chest, collapsed the left lung, and escaped through his back. Wolfgang ripped open a package of bandages and quickly patched them over the entry and exit wounds to staunch the bleeding and stop any possible sucking wounds.
The doctor then raised the major into a sitting position, letting him sit comfortably. Wolfgang unlatched the top of his canteen and let van Duzer spit the blood in his mouth into the cup. “Rottenfuhrer, hold this cup in front of the major’s mouth. Let him spit, but if anything excessive comes out alert me.”
Kleist rummaged through his medical bag and retracted a long tube with a container at one end and a point at the other. He then inserted the chest tube right below the major’s chest, piercing “safe zone” of the lung. Immediately it started siphoning blood out and into the container to prevent the major from drowning in his own bodily fluids.
Name: Wolfgang Gerd Kleist
Nationality: German
What Army will Your Character Serve Beneath? Waffen-SS Medical Corps
Character History:
Wolfgang G. Kleist was born in Rostock, Germany during a warm Baltic summer. His parents were Derrick and Elsa Kleist, a middle-aged couple living in a quiet stone-and-mortar house on the corner of a narrow street where the bay that Rostock was built around was within walking distance. Herr Derrick was a short balding man with a large girth and a sharp mind. Frau Elsa, on the other hand, was tall and willowy, her blond hair hanging limply over her face like a great tree’s leaves bent over a riverbank. The Kleists had one other child, a female named Maria born four years before Wolfgang. Derrick was a physician, serving in the Imperial German Army as a frontline physician. Wolfgang was but an infant during the Great War and did not remember the long periods of time when his father was away, but Frau Kleist and Maria did. They remembered him before the incident. Before the tragedy.
The attack came in the fall of 1915 during a heated firefight between two German regiments and a combined force of British and French troops. Derrick was working in a forward medical station only minutes away from the thick of the fighting, operating under devastating artillery barrages while dying soldiers were piled up outside the door. He was forced to pick only the easily treated ones, leaving soldiers with multiple bullet wounds or severe internal bleeding to die. So many Germans came to his field hospital cut almost in two by “female” British tanks, for the feminine armor was outfitted with extra machine guns to make up for the lack of a main turret.
The gas came swiftly from the bowels of the British attack force. The Germans had not bothered with gas maskes due to the warm weather and the mask’s narrowing of vision. Poisonous mist floated gracefully over Axis lines, killing the majority of the regiment with burning mustard gas and blinding those lucky [or unlucky, depending on how you think of it] the other percentage. When the mustard gas entered the camp the waiting patients were killed first, moaning as their skin fell from their faces and their lungs filled with burning fluid. Derrick was scarred hideously, his eyes purged of all sight and color and his face disfigured all the way from his forehead to where his neck met his collar. Luckily an artillery barrage shook away the Allied troops and dispersed the gas cloud, allowing German troops to recover Derrick’s mauled but alive body. He was sent home with an honorable discharge in summer 1916 after being treated extensively.
Frau Elsa descended into grief-induced madness after seeing her husband transformed from a respected military surgeon into a blind and immobile cripple condemned by society and unable to provide for her family. The Kleists got a military pension with added severe wound bonuses and that kept Elsa’s head above the flood of financial depression swirling out from holes blasted in the economy by the war Germany was quickly loosing, but it could not keep sanity in her head. Maria cared for both baby Wolfgang and her ailing father, for miraculously Derrick was showing signs of once again being competent and even being able to walk short distances by 1918. This shocked Elsa back into reality just in time for the end of the Great War.
When the Versailles treaty was signed it plunged all of Germany, including Rostock, into a depression. One by one the neighbors were swallowed by the need for money; moving to get jobs in the rural country farmland, selling their daughter’s bodies, committing suicide, and even more despicable and degrading things that no self-respecting German citizen should be forced to do. The Weimer Republic was a disgrace. To have that piss-poor aristocracy running the proud fatherland made the Kleist family to bow their heads in shame.
Wolfgang spent his childhood wallowing in the slums of Rostock and listening to stories of the faded glory of the Imperial German government. His blind father insisted on teaching the boy the basics of medicine in the hopes that young Wolfgang would grow up to be a great physician. These lessons were often little more than a basic conversation about the main organs of a human being or how a broken bone mended and the youngest Kleist could care less about the dry and boring discussions. He would rather be running about in the streets in muddy clothing, ducking in and out of alleyways in a warped child’s game of war. The boys of Rostock would take tiny bits of their father’s war memorabilia; a scratched leather pickelhaube or a dented stahlhelm, a ripped tunic, a pair of battered boots, and many other items left over from the Great War.
Ironically, this immature war game was what first caused six year old Wolfgang to appreciate his blind father’s medical lessons. Wolfgang had previously been playing as a pretend infantryman, but he realized that his father had little standard kit that he could steal to wear in the games. Kleist had the breakthrough that he would pretend to be a medic, a type of combat doctor in his mind. Wolfgang slipped on his father’s Red Cross armband and borrowed some gauze and cough syrup from his kitchen cabinet. He placed his tiny arrangement of playthings into an old leather school satchel that served as a medical kit and went into the streets to bandage up imaginary wounds. He used his father’s lessons to treat the make-believe bullet holes, stunning the neighborhood boys with his knowledge of medicine. Soon Wolfgang was taping up scratched knees and bruised arms.
The most fantastic real wound the boy ever bandaged was when Elmer Friehl was bitten by a street mutt when Wolfgang was 12. It was small, nothing but a few bloody holes in his palm, but Kleist got the chance to wash, staunch, and clumsily bandage it before adult intervention. From that day forward Wolfgang knew he was destined to become a doctor. He listened closer to his father’s tales and respect for the old man grew in the young boy’s heart. Wolfgang sprouted out of the economic depression like a fern out of the site of a volcanic eruption, becoming one of the brightest and most daring schoolchildren in Rostock. That was not saying much, for poor times make for poor people and poor people often educate their children less, but at least Frau and Herr Kleist could be proud of their child.
During high school Wolfgang Kleist did well. His generation was decided to be the ones who would bring Germany out of the depression and lead the fatherland on to greater glory. When Kleist was sixteen Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party came to power, abolishing the Weimer government to the joy of the German population. Wolfgang waved a crisp blood-red Swastika flag stitched by Maria from his family’s hotel room in Berlin during Hitler’s victory parade. Only a few weeks later Kleist joined the Hitler Youth, helping to crack down on the Jewish rats polluting Germany. Wolfgang hung signs in the windows of Jewish shops warning citizens not to shop there and raided Jewish households expected of defying Nazi law, killing pets and beating old men in bloodthirsty displays of affection for Germany’s new leader.
When Wolfgang graduated High School in 1934 he enlisted in the newly formed ideological army called the Waffen-SS. The military force was extremely hard to enlist in at that time and Kleist had to go through numerous cleansing processes including a family background check to the 1600s and an extensive physical and health checks, for even a filling in the wrong tooth could put a man out. Kleist was an almost perfect candidate and was quickly ushered into Waffen-SS basic training and was forced to go through the same rigorous training regime as an infantryman. Climbing barriers, running miles, lifting weights, shooting weapons, it all became second nature to Wolfgang. In the thirties it was even part of Waffen-SS infantry training to learn the basics of artillery, which Kleist enjoyed greatly and exclaimed it would have been his choice if he hadn’t of pledged himself to medicine. Wolfgang kept a dud artillery shell that he had decorated with chalk in his office for the rest of his life as a reminder of the precious few days he got to spend with the big guns.
After basic training Wolfgang was put into Waffen-SS Basic Medical Courses. Most of this was spent in stuffy classrooms using mannequins with organs as references, but his class was able to practice on cadavers at the end of the course. Kleist was regarded as a fantastic medical mind both for long-term physician care and first-response combat medic. Wolfgang was given a military scholarship to the Nazi medical college at Heidelberg, attaining a bachelor’s degree in emergency medicine on government money while still maintaining the rank of recruit. He finished college in 1938 and was put through a four-month Waffen-SS Advanced Medical Course, finally earning a certification to call himself a Waffen-SS medic and wear a snake entwined on a staff on the sleeve of his tunic.
Wolfgang was given a commission into the Officer’s Corps in April 1939 when he was only 22. During the attack on Poland in September the soldier was given a promotion to Senior Physician, or 1st Lieutenant.
Military Rank: SS-Oberärtzlichführer
Writing Sample:
“Sanitater! Sanitater!”
The frantic cry for medical help by a hysterical voice was the first thing that made Oberärtzlichführer Kleist open his eyes in the darkness. He squinted at his crystal watch face. According to the time he had slept for less than a half an hour. It had just been a little noonday rest in an abandoned French gardening shack. He hoped for some peace for just a while. Ever since the German field hospital in the small city of St DuPont was struck by a American incendiary bomb and half the medical support for the war effort in the surrounding area burnt to a crisp Wolfgang’s life had been a living hell. There were very few front-line stretcher-bearers let alone medical NCOs. Kleist, being an officer, was in high demand. He knew he would have to take this call.
Wolfgang hoisted himself off the cot and let his socked feet touch the warm floor. It was stifling hot in the shack, but that was the price he had paid when he closed the windows for the sake of darkness. Kleist pulled on his pebbled leather jackboots; hands deftly tucked his grey trousers into the shoes. He ignored his coarse tunic and instead pulled his equipment belt on over his white undershirt, for when lives were at stake a single article of clothing could not be fretted over. He did, however, pull his Red Cross armband over his sleeve before running out the door.
“Sani! Sanitater! Sani!” A frantic voice shouted again. Machine gun fire rattled over the town and the drone of artillery could be heard smashing into buildings. A few squads stood huddled behind a crumbling wall. A few feet away a SS-Rottenfuhrer crouched by a prone figure sprawled out on the ground. Upon closer examination the body was SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Michael van Duzer, sputtering and coughing up red liquid. Blood plastered his chest and lower body. “He was shot in the chest! A bullet went right through!”
Wolfgang knelt down before the major. “Rottenfuhrer, please step away.” Kleist ordered imperatively, sliding on plastic gloves and undressing van Duzer’s torso. A rifle bullet had entered his chest, collapsed the left lung, and escaped through his back. Wolfgang ripped open a package of bandages and quickly patched them over the entry and exit wounds to staunch the bleeding and stop any possible sucking wounds.
The doctor then raised the major into a sitting position, letting him sit comfortably. Wolfgang unlatched the top of his canteen and let van Duzer spit the blood in his mouth into the cup. “Rottenfuhrer, hold this cup in front of the major’s mouth. Let him spit, but if anything excessive comes out alert me.”
Kleist rummaged through his medical bag and retracted a long tube with a container at one end and a point at the other. He then inserted the chest tube right below the major’s chest, piercing “safe zone” of the lung. Immediately it started siphoning blood out and into the container to prevent the major from drowning in his own bodily fluids.
