Frasin

“Kőrösmező [Yasinia]. Rafter’s prayer on the arrival of dam water”

“Ngs. [Nagyságos] Tabéry Géza urnak, Oradea-Mare, Kálvária útca 21. Édes Gézám, oly szép ez a vidék, ahol járunk, hogy idekivánunk benneteket is. Pompás helyek, kitünő koszt, szegény zsidók és rongyos oroszok… Igen érdekes helyek. Cseh-lengyel határnál, néha átjárunk 14°-os pilseni sört inni Csehiába. Kár hogy oly kevés a hátralevő idő, de vigaszul szolgál, hogy visszatértünk utján ujra meleg és értékes aranyos közeletekben leszünk pár órára. Igen nagy szeretettel gondolunk rátok! Károly.”

“To the Honourable Mr. Géza Tabéry, Oradea-Mare, Kálvária str. 21. My dear Géza, this region, where we are wandering, is so beautiful, that we wish you were here. Gorgeous places, excellent food, poor Jews and ragged Russians… Very interesting places. We sometimes cross the Czech-Polish border to drink 14° Pilsen beer in Czechia. Too bad that so little time remains, but it is a consolation that on our way home we will spend a few hours in your warm, precious and kind company. We think of you with much love! Károly.”

After the previous post we would like to stay for a few more posts in Kőrösmező/Yasinya. But until the next one is completed, we invite our readers to play a new game.

Kőrösmező/Yasinia in today’s Subcarpathia/Zakarpattya, Ukraine

As we know, between the two world wars Kőrösmező/Yasinia (at that time Jasiňa) belonged to Czechoslovakia together with the whole Subcarpathia, and it was transferred de facto only in 1944, de jure in 1947 to the Ukraine. However, the above postcard, which we found on an auction site, was sent with a printed Romanian caption and Romanian stamp from Kőrösmező (here called Frasin) to Oradea-Mare. In addition, the sender writes that they “go over” to Czechia to have a beer from Pilsen.

How is this possible?

And in general, an old postcard like this is always a message in a bottle, giving news about a number of complicated and interesting stories. What might be the stories referred to by this postcard, including the Romanian royal stamp and the overprinted Hungarian label “Levelezőlap” (Post card), the addressee and Oradea-Mare, the “prayer of the rafters” and the rafters of Kőrösmező, and did these latter belong to the “poor Jews” or to the “ragged Russians”?

We ask our usual experts to let our “outsider” readers guess for a couple of hours before commenting, and in the meantime send us your eventual materials to the post in preparation about this story. :)

A Bridge in Winter

Yesterday, I happened to be in the center of Prague. I often go weeks without venturing there; most of what I need to do can be done more easily closer to home. But there I was, finished with my errand, and starting for home. A soft, light snow was falling. I thought, I haven’t been near Charles Bridge (Karlův Most) in a long time — I generally prefer to avoid the press of tourists. I thought, I shall go now to the Charles Bridge, to see what it looks like in this nice afternoon snow.

There were few tourists today, as it happens. January, by itself, keeps them at home; bad weather often keeps them indoors. Swans were paddling the cold brown waters of the Vltava and sea gulls floated effortlessly on the air, calling at each other with piercing squeals. The statues of the Charles Bridge, famous for their black and gold, had added white to their wardrobes.

A young couple made the traditional wish (throwing a coin in the river) at the spot where Jan Nepomucký, on 20 March 1393, was thrown into the water, his tongue cut out, for having angered King Wenceslas.

A tourist was feeding french fries to the seagulls.

It was quiet and cold. The Christians were shivering and pleading, as they always do, in their tiny cell watched over by the fat, indifferent Turk. As I crossed over Kampa Island and neared U tří pštrosů (At the Three Ostriches), where, in 1714 the Armenian Deodat Ramajan sold the first coffee in Bohemia, I needed to warm up. I headed for the nearest coffee house to enjoy one of Ramajan’s hot beverages.


Trio Bayanistov (А. И. Кузнецов, Я. Ф. Попков, А. Ф. Данилов): Дунайские волны, 1940

Perdieron su vida en un procedimiento de inmigración

Publicamos esta entrada simultáneamente aquí y en el Boletín de la Asociación Cultural Húngaro-Judía.

El autobús serpentea despacio sorteando los baches de la carretera que sube el paso de los Cárpatos. De tanto en tanto no logra evitar un socavón del que parece que ha de salir desballestado. El sol ya hace un rato que se ha despedido. El río Tisza forma bancos de vapor y una niebla baja flota sobre la carretera. Dejamos atrás un largo camino desde que muy temprano, en la madrugada, partimos de Budapest. Unas horas deprimentes en la frontera ucraniana. Andrea y yo intentamos que la gente olvide esta espera capaz de rompernos los nervios. Les contamos nuestras peores experiencias de otras veces y las viejas técnicas para ir más rápido («pasaportes rellenos»). Beregszász/Beregovo, donde se nos invita a ver la renovación, iniciada por fin, de la pequeña sinagoga que durante décadas se usó como almacén de municiones. Luego Huszt/Khust y Rahó/Rahov. El camino empeora a cada paso. Y deberíamos estar ya en Czernowitz. Nos queda un largo trecho por recorrer –esto, por suerte, aún no lo sabemos– a lo largo de los ríos Prut y Cheremosh, por carreteras salpicadas de cráteres causados ​​por el congelamiento y los deshielos sucesivos. Justo después de nuestro paso las autoridades las cerrarán declarándolas impracticables. Solo a las cinco de la mañana llegaremos a Jerusalén, a orillas del Prut: así se llamó la ciudad más judía de la monarquía austro-húngara a la vuelta del siglo, y desde aquí necesitaremos medio día más para llegar a Kamenets-Podolsk por carreteras igualmente asoladas. Pero ahora aún tenemos delante de nosotros Kőrösmező/Yasinya, primero frontera húngaro-polaca, más tarde checo-polaca y aún más tarde húngaro-alemana. En la noche cada vez más cerrada, me inclino en el asiento delantero para atisbar ahí afuera la estación de tren donde entre el 15 de julio y 12 de agosto 1941 las autoridades húngaras entregaron aquellos veinte mil «apátridas» judíos a las autoridades alemanas.

De repente me despierto para ver que estamos en una reluciente gasolinera donde Andrea pregunta gde nakhoditsya vokzal, ¿dónde está la estación de tren? De no haber ella notado que este lugar le resultaba familiar ya habríamos pasado Kőrösmező. La vokzal está sólo a medio kilómetro, en la ladera de la colina. Hacemos los últimos cien metros a pie. Es cerca de medianoche. El edificio de la estación de tren está a oscuras y desierto, y justo debajo de nosotros, en el valle, parpadean las luces de la ciudad dormida. Con la luz de un teléfono móvil buscamos alguna placa en la pared de la estación. La húngara y la ucraniana han desaparecido hace mucho tiempo; solo una, rota, escrita en mal hebreo, queda todavía en su sitio. Las hermanas Prágai dejan una pequeña corona de flores apoyada en la pared, luego pondrán otra mayor en la fosa común de Kamenets-Podolsk, por su abuelo, que siguió este camino. Diez hombres judíos nos acompañan pero no todos saben la oración de memoria. Andrea saca su calendario judío, e ilumina con el iPhone el texto del kadish.

Kőrösmező/Yasinya, cementerio judío

Ocho meses más tarde, a plena luz del día, la carretera ya no es aquella desolación. La mayoría de los baches han sido cubiertos y tres placas acaban de ser colgadas de la pared de la estación. La reparación la inició el Estado húngaro a instancias de la Asociación Cultural Húngaro-Judía y el Holocaust Memorial Centre después de nuestra visita de abril. También se pusieron en contacto con el Cónsul de Hungría en Ungvár/Uzhgorod, quien visitó el lugar, y el Cónsul General József Bacskai además encontró una foto donde se ven intactas las tres placas inauguradas en 2009 por el Instituto Teológico Luterano Wesley John. Así estas tres placas se reconstruyeron y colocaron en la pared como trabajo social en diciembre de 2013.


«En memoria de nuestros hermanos judíos, que eran húngaros o buscaban refugio en Hungría en 1941. El Estado húngaro de entonces y el inhumano furor nazi los pusieron fuera de la ley y los persiguieron hasta la muerte. ¡Sea bendita su memoria!» En la inauguración de la placa, aparte del Estado húngaro y el consulado húngaro de Uzhgorod, también participaron desde el lado ucraniano Oleksandr Kovalj, profesor del Departamento de Turismo de la Universidad Nacional de Uzhgorod y Director del Centro de Información Turística de Transcarpacia; Mihaylo Kolodko, escultor, líder de la UnGang, ONG cultural y educativa; Sandor Fegyir, PhD, el Vicerrector de la Universidad Nacional de Uzhgorod y líder de la ONG Panonia, y Dmitro Andriyuk, jefe de la oficina administrativa del distrito de Rahov.

En Kamenets-Podolsk, donde la mayoría de los judíos «apátridas» entregados en Kőrösmező fueron ejecutados entre el 27 y el 28 de agosto de 1941, hasta el momento sólo el Instituto Teológico John Wesley ha erigido un recordatorio en la fosa común. Así, la segunda fase de esta nueva iniciativa aún no se ha realizado, y al gobierno húngaro le toca aún dedicar un digno homenaje a aquellos que se convirtieron en víctimas de la milicia ucraniana y de los pelotones de fusilamiento alemán como consecuencia de un «procedimiento de inmigración» establecido por las autoridades húngaras mucho antes del comienzo del Holocausto.


En verano de 1941 las autoridades húngaras –sin duda a petición del personal de defensa húngaro y con la aprobación del Consejo de Ministros– recogieron en redadas policiales y expulsaron del país a veinte mil judíos, denominados «apátridas», que no tenían ciudadanía húngara. La mayoría eran aquellos que habían huido de Polonia entonces ocupada por los alemanes, pero muchos llevaban viviendo en Hungría por generaciones, o habían sido expulsados ​​de Eslovaquia a causa de su actividad pro-húngara. Los prisioneros fueron deportados al campo de acogida de Kőrösmező, donde hasta el 12 de agosto se entregaron al ejército alemán invasor de Polonia. A la vista de las dimensiones de la deportación las autoridades alemanas solicitaron detener el procedimiento porque no eran capaces de ubicar a tanta gente. La mayoría de las personas entregadas fue conducida a Kamenets-Podolsk para ser recluida durante un tiempo en el ghetto. Pero los días 27 y 28 los prisioneros fueron fusilados ante una fosa común. Este fue el primer genocidio alemán de tal envergadura perpetrado contra los judíos, un mes antes de Baby Yar y mucho antes de la instauración de los campos de exterminio.

Visitamos estas dos estaciones de la carretera de la muerte, Kőrösmező y Kamenets-Podolsk, durante la peregrinación cultural East Unlimited — Budapest-Odessa organizada en abril de 2013 por la Asociación Cultural Hungaro-Judía.

Una breve aclaración sobre nuestro título: el Gobierno húngaro ha decidido recientemente erigir un monumento conmemorativo de la ocupación nazi de Hungría el 19 de marzo de 1944. De acuerdo con la interpretación del Instituto Histórico Veritas, creado por el gobierno para reescribir la historia nacional, el Holocausto de los judíos de Hungría solo empezó después de la invasión alemana, y las autoridades húngaras fueron allí inocentes. Siguiendo este punto de vista, tras la investigación de lo ocurrido, la deportación masiva de verano de 1941 que acabaría con la muerte de casi veinte mil judíos llegó a ser definida por Sándor Szakály, director de dicho Instituto, como: «un mero procedimiento de inmigración».

Lost their lives in an immigration procedure

We publish our post at the same time here and in the Newsletter of the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association.

The bus is slowly worming uphill among the potholes along the pass of the Carpathians, from time to time dropping into them up to the axle. The sun has long gone down, vapors emerge from the river Tisza, milky mist floats over the road. We have a long way behind us, after an early morning departure from Budapest, then the depressing Ukrainian border, where Andrea and I try to let the people forget the hours of the usual nerve-racking waiting by quoting from the chronicle of our earlier border crossings and speaking about the techniques of accelerating it (“padded passport”). Beregszász/Beregovo, where we are invited to see the finally started renovation of the small synagogue, used for decades as an ammunition store. Then Huszt/Khust and Rahó/Rahov. The road is getting worse and worse, although we should be already in Czernowitz. We have a long way ahead, luckily we do not yet know this, along the rivers Prut and Cheremosh, on the road torn up with bomb-craters caused by freezing and melting, which will be closed down right behind us in a state of emergency. We will arrive only at five in the morning to Jerusalem along the Prut, as the most Jewish city of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was called at the turn of the century, and from then it takes another half day to reach Kamenets-Podolsk on the catastrophe-stricken roads. But now still ahead of us is Kőrösmező/Yasinya, before the old Hungarian-Polish, later Czech-Polish, and even later Hungarian-German border. In the increasingly dense night, I peer out from the front seat, looking for the turn for the railway station, where between 15 July and 12 August 1941 the Hungarian authorities handed over those twenty thousand “stateless” Jews to the German authorities.

Then I suddenly wake up to see that we are next to a glowing gas station, where Andrea is inquiring about gde nakhoditsya vokzal, where is the railway station. Had she not noticed this familiar place, we would already have passed Kőrösmező. The vokzal is just a half kilometer away, up in the hillside. We do the last hundred meters on foot. It is about midnight. The building of the railway station is dark and deserted and just below us, in the valley, are flickering the lights of the sleeping town. By the light of a mobile phone we search for the plaque on the wall of the station. The Hungarian and Ukrainian ones have long since disappeared, only the broken one in bad Hebrew is still on the site. The Prágai sisters leave a small wreath leaning against the wall, a bigger one they will put on the mass grave in Kamenets-Podolsk, for their grandfather followed this road. Ten Jewish men can be found in the company, but not everyone knows the prayer by heart. Andrea dredges up the Jewish calendar, and illuminates with iPhone the text of the Kaddish.

Kőrösmező/Yasinya, Jewish cemetery

Eight months later, in broad daylight, the road is no longer this desolate. Most of the potholes have been patched for some time, and three plaques have been freshly fixed on the wall of the station. Their renewal was initiated by the Hungarian State at the behest of the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association and the Holocausst Memorial Center, following our April visit. They also contacted the Hungarian Consulate in Ungvár/Uzhgorod, who also visited the site, and Consul General József Bacskai also found an earlier photo, still showing intact the three plaques inaugurated in 2009 by the John Wesley Lutheran Theological Institute. These three plaques were reconstructed and put on the wall as social work in December 2013.


“In memory of our Jewish brothers, who were Hungarian or sought refuge in Hungary in 1941. The Hungarian State of that period and the inhuman Nazi hatred outlawed them and chased them into death. Let their memory be blessed!” In the inauguration of the tablet, aside from the Hungarian State and the Hungarian Consulate of Uzhgorod, from the Ukrainian side also took part Oleksandr Kovalj, Professor of the Department of Tourism at the National University of Uzhgorod and Director of the Transcarpathian Tourist Information Center, Mihaylo Kolodko, sculptor, leader of the UnGang Cultural and Educational NGO, Sandor Fegyir, PhD, the Vice-Rector of the Uzhgorod National University and leader of the Pannonia NGO, and Dmitro Andriyuk, head of the Rahov district administrative office.

In Kamenets-Podolsk, where most of the “stateless” Jews handed over in Kőrösmező were executed on 27 and 28 August 1941, thus far, also only the John Wesley Theological Institute has set up a memorial on the mass grave. Thus the second part of the recent initiative has yet to be realized, and the Hungarian government should set a worthy memorial to those, who became the victims of the Ukrainian militia and German firing squads as a consequence of the “immigration procedure” of the Hungarian authorities, well ahead of the beginning of the Holocaust.


On the summer of 1941 the Hungarian authorities – certainly on the request of the Hungarian defense staff and approved by the Council of Ministers – gathered in the course of police raids and expelled from the country twenty thousand so-called “stateless” Jews, who had no Hungarian citizenship. The majority were those who had fled Poland, then occupied by the Germans, but many of them had lived in Hungary for generations, or had been expelled from Slovakia because of their pro-Hungarian activity. The captives were deported into the Kőrösmező collection camp, where on 12 August they were handed over to the German army invading Poland. At the sight of the dimensions of the deportation, the German authorities asked for the procedure to be stopped, because they were unable to place so many people. The majority of the persons handed over were delivered to Kamenets-Podolsk, and for a while guarded in the ghetto, but on 27 and 28, they were shot into a mass grave. This was the first German genocide of this size against Jews, one month before Baby Yar and long before the death camps.

We visited these two stations on the death road, Kőrösmező and Kamenets-Podolsk, during the cultural pilgrimage East Unlimited – Budapest-Odessa organized in April 2013 by the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association.

A short explanation about the title: The Hungarian Government has recently decided to set up a memorial statue to the Nazi occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944. According to the interpretation of the Veritas Historical Institute established by the government to rewrite national history, the holocaust of the Hungarian Jews only started after the German invasion, and the Hungarian authorities were innocent in it. On the inquiry as to what was, from this point of view, the mass deportation in the summer of 1941, causing the death of almost twenty thousand Jews, Sándor Szakály, the Institute’s director referred to it as: “just an immigration procedure”.

To the Holy Land without a Baedeker, 1916-1918

In some previous posts we have already written about the Austro-Hungarian artillerymen who served in Palestine during WWI. Now, on the occasion of a recently found photo album we will speak about their German comrades in arms, who were present in a much larger proportion at the Palestinian front. At a request by their Turkish allies with the aim of conquering the Suez Canal, in the spring of 1916, a large number of German units arrived in Palestine, including an air squad, several artillery batteries, a machine gun and mortars company, a radio and anti-aircraft platoon, two field hospitals and several motorized units. In one of the latter, the Kraftwagen-Park 505 – briefly, KP 505 – served the German soldier, whose photo album we recently found on a web site.

The journey from Constantinople to the Sinai front – to Gaza to be precise, where the German troops came under the command of the Turkish army – took two weeks. The train trip had to be interrupted several times, because the tunnels through the Taurus and Amanus mountains were not yet ready. In an irony of fate, these will be given over to traffic only at the same time of the armistice in late October 1918… The first transit and trans-shipment point was Bozanti (today Pozantı) at the northern foothills of the Taurus, where the troops arrived after a three-day train ride from Constantinople. The ammunition, packages and equipment, as well as the guns of the artillery units, were put on trucks, and the crew crossed on foot the 1,500 meter high passes of the Taurus.



A few days later, now at the southern slopes of the Taurus, they once again boarded the train, and then at the Amanus a new trans-shipment and a new march through the mountain followed. The rest of the road in Syria province – in the territory of today’s Syria, Lebanon and Palestine/Israel – was covered by two other trains.

The Middle Eastern scenery and the exotic “natives” certainly had a strong impression on the newly arrived European soldiers. It is no wonder that nearly half of the album’s forty pictures are made up by vistas of the Holy Land, as well as by genre photos representing “Oriental types”, beduins and camel caravans.

In some pictures, the owner of the album failed to correctly identify the captured spectacle. The caption of the following photo is only half true. The well is in Jaffa indeed, but it is not called Jacob’s Well, but rather that of Abu Nabbut – Sabil Abu Nabbut –, or Tabitha’s Well. The mistake is all the more strange, because – as you will see below – in 1917 the German motorized unit celebrated New Year’s Eve precisely in Nablus, where Jacob’s famous well is still visited.


A peaceful moment among civilian compatriots. Sarona was an agricultural colony of the German Templars – a Lutheran millenarian sect – near Jaffa, where they mainly produced oranges and grapes, and operated a winery. The peaceful times were ended by the advance of the British. In July 1918 all the Templars, as citizens of an enemy country, were interned in Egypt. The residents of Sarona were only allowed to return in 1920 to the settlement, which in the meantime had been completely devastated and looted.


But let us still stay in Gaza. Among the military-themed photos taken here, the first is an old friend: the British tank knocked out by the Austro-Hungarian howitzer battery on 19 April 1917, in the second battle of Gaza. Its photo was already shown in an earlier post. The complete seven-person crew of the tank, christened the HMLS (His Majesty’s Land Ship) Nutty, fell into Turkish captivity. Its commander, the thirty-five-year old Lieutenant Frank Carr from Birmingham, was seriously burned while trying to escape the tank, so that shortly after falling into captivity he died in the Turkish field hospital at Tel el Sheria. After the victorious battle even the three Pashas of the Staff – Izzet, Kress von Kressenstein and Djemal – stood proudly posing in front of the shot up tank.

Source: F. Kress von Kressenstein: Mit den Türken zum Suezkanal, 1938

Enver Pasha, the Turkish Minister of War visiting the Turkish and German forces at their headquarters near Beersheba at the beginning of March 1916. In the middle, the bearded Djemal Pasha, commander in chief of the troops in Palestine, and to the left Enver Pasha with raised right hand.

Djemal Pasha in Ramlee, at a German military air show. The pasha is the officer to the upper right of the picture looking in the camera.

The commander of Kraftwagen-Park 505, Captain Emil Axster, was captured in several images. In civilian life, Axster was the director of a well-known German bank, and it seems that even in the military service he could not fully put aside the style of a well-dressed bank-clerk. In contrast to his fellow officers buttoned up to their necks in the Prussian style, we always see Axster with turned-down collar, and under that an elegant white shirt and tie, almost ready to jump back into his former civilian role at the sight of an advantageous business opportunity. Axster was welcomed in distinguished circles even in Jerusalem. One of his intimate friends was Antonio de la Cierva y Lewita, Count of Ballobar, the Spanish consul in Jerusalem. For the sake of his friend and neighbor in Jerusalem, Axster even arranged the introduction of electricity to the consulate, supplied by the generator of the motorized unit.

Axster is the third from left in the front row.

“Pork dinner” in the casino of the German motorized units in Jerusalem. It would not have been an easy task to find a pig for the dinner in the city, mostly inhabited by Muslims and Jews.

Captain Axster in the middle of the back row, with a monkey (!) under his arm, celebrating his birthday. Notice the strategic difference between the positioning of the German and the Turkish imperial flags!

Of particular interest are the three pictures showing a military funeral in Jerusalem, about which we know many details due to the research of our colleague and friend in Nazareth, Norbert Schwake. In the late night of 16 July 1917, a German military vehicle failed to make a dangerous turn at the northeastern corner of the wall of Jerusalem, slid off the road, and overturned. The driver, Reserve Lieutenant Friedrich Schütze from Kraftwagenkolonne 506, and Lance-Corporal Karl Feldbrügge from Kraftwagen-Park 505, lost their lives on the spot. One other passenger of the car survived the accident with a skull fracture. The two victims were accompanied to their final resting place, the German and Austro-Hungarian military cemetery on Mount Zion – where their graves still can be seen – in a solemn funeral procession on 17 July at 5 pm. Feldbrügge’s commander, Captain Emil Axster, personally notified the deceased’s family about the tragedy in a detailed letter.

Funeral procession on the way to the military cemetery on Mount Zion. To the right appear the wall of Jerusalem’s old city, in the background the Ottoman clock tower at the Jaffa gate.

Another interesting feature is the ecumenical nature of the funeral. Feldbrügge was Catholic, and Schütze Lutheran. This is why the procession is followed both by a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister. Behind the last car carrying the coffin we see Dr. Friedrich Jeremias, the Lutheran pastor of the Jerusalem Erlöserkirche in black robes, and next to him a Catholic army chaplain in military uniform and wide-brimmed hat (Schlapphut).


The funeral was accompanied by the Kraftwagen-Park 505’s own band. It is characteristic that both the German and the Austro-Hungarian units brought with them, as a souvenir of the far away homeland, their own bands to Palestine.



The German troops would not long enjoy the hospitality of the Holy City. In the autumn of 1917, Allenby’s army broke through the Gaza-Beersheba line of defense, and constantly pushed the Turks and their allies north. On 9 December, Jerusalem itself was in British hands.


The British offensive was only stopped for a while by the bitter winter weather. The torrential rains, the overflown vadis, the flooding Jordan, and the deep mud covering the plains after the rains, made any military operations impossible. Thus the Germans retired to Galilea and could celebrate Christmas and New Year in relatively calm conditions. The following New Year’s Eve photo attests that, despite of the not so rosy military situation, the Germans did not fall into melancholy. No doubt that the abundant stocks of Scotch whiskey, French brandy and – in order to drink the enemy’s undoing with their own spirits – of Pfefferminz-liqueur and real Julius Meinl Dominikaner, also played an important part in this.


The rainy months at the turn of 1917 and 1918 were captured in several photographs. The rain hopelessly poured down both at the launch of the motor boat Henriette and – horribile dictu! – on the celebration of the birthday of Emperor William.

The allies celebrating the birthday of Emperor William. To the left, local notabilities, to the right, Turkish soldiers, in the middle, German soldiers, and behind them, partly covered, the brass band of KP 505.

The following series, which shows a ceremonial procession of the Turkish and German troops and their review by Marshal Falkenhayn, was also taken in Nablus, some time between November 1917 and March 1918. Erich von Falkenhayn, who on 7 September 1917 became the commander of chief of the Turkish army in Palestine in the rank of Ottoman Field Marshal, moved his headquarters from the advancing British on 14 November 1917 from Jerusalem to Nablus. He could not prevent the further advance of the British troops and the capture of Jerusalem, so on 1 March 1918 he was relieved by the new commander in chief, General Otto Liman von Sanders.

Falkenhayn – with holster on his side – is the second from left among the officers.

Falkenhayn – holding a stick – is the first officer from the right.

In the spring of 1918, the troops of General Liman von Sanders still managed to repel the British attacks in the two Battles of the Jordan, but they could no longer resist the overwhelming offensive of Allenby on 19 September. During the weeks of long, chaotic and bloody retreat, thousands of Turkish and hundreds of German, Austrian and Hungarian soldiers were killed or fell into captivity. We do not know what happened to the unknown original owner of the photo album. It may well be that he and his album were also captured. At least this is suggested by the many incomplete and incorrect English translations glued at a later date under the original German captions.

A postcard from Jerusalem with the post stamp of KP 505 (from an auction site)