This is a collection of letters from 1915-1922 from Lotte, who lived in northern Germany, to her boyfriend Ernst, who served on the SMS Gneisenau before WWI. The letters are Lotte’s half of the conversation in the WWI Postcard Collection, also found on this site. You can also find photos from the SMS Geneisenau 1910-1911 Far East tour here as well. The first year of a 5-year collection of translated letters from this relationship can also be found on Amazon.
This is a large collection with what will likely be well over a thousand images, and this index page will be updated over time as the collection is posted. They will be organized by year and month, but will not necessarily be scanned and posted in order. Previous posts may also be updated if new letters are discovered for the given year and month.
These letters, of course, are in German and I really wish I could read them. If you can read them, I’d very much appreciate some translations in the comments of the posts where the letters appear! (All of the postcards were translated this way, too.)
1915
- August 1915: 13 letters, 30 images
- September 1915: 12 letters, 24 images
- October 1915: 10 letters, 20 images
- November 1915: 7 letters, 21 images
- December 1915: 12 letters, 33 images
1916
- January 1916: 12 letters, 24 images
- February 1916: 9 letters, 26 images
- March 1916: 11 letters, 40 images
- April 1916: 9 letters, 31 images
- May 1916: 7 letters, 21 images
- June 1916: 6 letters, 20 images
- July 1916: 11 letters, 26 images
- August 1916: 11 letters, 26 images
- September 1916: 9 letters, 30 images
- October 1916: 7 letters, 24 images
- November 1916: 8 letters, 26 images
- December 1916: 8 letters, 28 images
1917
- January 1917: 7 letters, 23 images
- February 1917: 7 letters, 29 images
- March 1917: 8 letters, 33 images
- [More coming soon!]
Technical Information
Most files scanned with CZUR Shine Ultra (some with a Canon flatbed) and resized with imagemagick, using: convert *.JPG[1000x1000] -interlace line -quality 85 -gravity SouthEast -font Arial -pointsize 14 -fill black -annotate +2+2 "(c)2020 theFrankes.com" -fill white -annotate +3+3 "(c)2020 theFrankes.com" -set filename:f w%t.%e +adjoin %[filename:f]