Handwriting
 

I'd appreciate some help with the penultimate section of this card: "Tag, Stunde, Ort u. Art des Verlustes"


I've got as far as:

28.6.44 Ourches (Drôme) Südfr.
verstorben: infolge Verwundung Schlag v. [word] [word] fdl. Waffeneinwirkung.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Handwriting
 

Hello Nick,

Schlag durch Starkstrom = shock by high voltage current.

Regards
Leo

Re: Handwriting
 

Thanks Leo,

I hadn't been expecting that as a cause.

... and more
 

To me the relevant part reads like this (I'm not really good at decyphering German handwriting of the time):

verstorben: infolge Verwundung Schlag durch Starkstrom
unter fdl. Waffeneinwirkung

ENGLISH:
deceased: as a consequence of (or simply: after) being wounded - electrical shock (or: electrocution)
under enemy fire (literally:under the effect of enemy weapons)

It's not quite clear what happened. Perhaps the man was working on some electrical equipment when he came under fire (most probably from some Allied fighter-bomber for the Allied landings in southern France, far from this place (in the Saint-Tropez area), took place first on Agugust 15, 1944 and the French Résistance, albeit numerous and quite well-armed, was almost entirely quiet and waiting precisely for this opportunity to fight: from August 15 on).

The German text seems to mean that the man got an electrical shock as a consequence of being wounded (and disabled so he could not avoid hitting something which was under a dangerous voltage). On the other hand the clerk who wrote this could have written it in a less-than-clear way (?). This guy really had bad luck: wounded by enemy weapons, then killed by electrocution.

REMARK ABOUT "Starkstrom": even in Germany itself most people believe that "Starkstrom" (strong current) means "high voltage", for example 2,000 volts or more, like 380,000 V. This is wrong: Starkstrom is more or less the contrary of "electronics", in any case of all equipment working with low voltage and weak current intensity, like a portable radio with batteries giving 6 or 9 V and currents in milliampères mA (telephones too). High voltage is NOT required for Starkstrom, which is used (by professionals of electrical engineering) when sizeable currents and energy are involved, e.g. in domestic cookers and washing machines, lifts in tall buildings and all kinds of electrical motors delivering sizeable forces and energy levels, especially in various industrial plants. In such cases they can work with high voltage or not. 220 and 380 V are NOT high voltage but they are really dangerous for your life already.

PS: the opposite of “Starkstrom” (strong current) was (and still is?) “Schwachstrom” (weak current), used mainly for radio, TV, telephone, electronics. Indeed, the current intensity in amperes is mostly very low there.

Re: ... and more
 

Actually this was in the context of a German anti-partisan operation from Valence, involving both ground forces and aircraft, on 28 June 1944. The Resistance east of the Rhône Valley was very active at the time. The man was with a signals unit, so may well have been around electrical equipment, as you suggest.

Combat
 

Interesting. So I was wrong about the Résistance keeping quiet before the August landings.

Re: Combat
 

The Vercors Plateau action of July 1944 was the biggest of this period — there are several books about it in French and English (not sure how much there is in German).

Re: Handwriting
 

I don't really know about Britain (or France Yves), but both in Germany and in Sweden for that matter, we use strom (Swedish ström) rather casually simply because most of us don't really know how things work

In short, it is not actually the Voltage that kills us, it's the Ampère.
Having said that it is of course a combination of the two which makes the trick.

In Germany (and Sweden) we don't mention any names (Volta or Ampère) but at least in Britain one of the discoveres are named.... and I believe we all mean the same thing.

Cheers
Stig

Re: Handwriting
 

Interesting when you think that Ampère, Volta and Ohm weren’t British (although Watt was and we name him too).

Re: ... and more
 

In Germany up to the year 2000, all single or multi-phase installations up to 1000 V were referred to as high-voltage systems in the VDE regulations that were not low-voltage systems (colloquially low-voltage systems). In more recent VDE regulations, however, systems up to 1000 V are now referred to as low-voltage systems. Since then, only standards for systems with a nominal voltage of over 1000 V have used the term high-voltage systems. In contrast, the DIN 276 standard for determining construction costs names all electrical systems that are not used exclusively for signal transmission as high-voltage systems