Tri-Service

Soldier's 'Papers' Returned After Seventy Years

The story starts in the English Spa town of Droitwich when back in 1999 a young policeman is handed a bunch of German military identity papers.

Discovered by the sister of a colleague living in Weston-super-Mare, they'd been found taped under one of the drawers in a recently acquired piece of second-hand furniture.

With the officer in question married to a German woman it was hoped that the documents could be translated and returned to the rightful owner.

Career and family chaos however intervened and the papers were once again forgotten, placed in a box with other collectibles and stored out of sight, and out of mind.

Having served seven years in the police service our 'man' moved to Germany with his wife and children. They're now planning to once again return to the UK to live, prompting a clear-out of their accumulated junk.

And who should pop-up but Herr Willy Walter... born in 1901 and, at the time his ID papers were issued, serving in the German Replacement Army as a driver.

WATCH: WWII Memories - The German Prisoner Of War

Created in the First World War and part of the Wermacht in the Second, these were men tasked with the conscription, training and replacement of recruits, the testing of new military equipment, and responsibile for getting injured soldiers ready to return to the frontline.

Anyway, we digress. With a little online and social media sleuthing the former policeman managed to get in touch with authorities in the region where Willy had been born, married in 1926 and as it turns out, died in 1970 - having survived the war.

Herr Walter's surviving son is none other than the uncle of the town registrar's daughter-in-law. So, now armed with an address our former British bobby is to personally return the documents to the family.

Perhaps then the mystery as to how the German soldier's papers ended up taped to the underside of a drawer in an English seaside town will be solved...