The German Families Who Were Still Searching for Missing Soldiers 20 Years After WWII

The German Families Who Were Still Searching for Missing Soldiers 20 Years After WWII In the middle of the 1950s, a German teenager sat for hours at his grandparents' radio. Men who had come home from the war were talking about what they had been through. Manfred Kropp was listening for one name, his father's. It never came. More than sixty years later, at the age of seventy-nine, Manfred received a thick, heavy envelope from the Red Cross. The last German prisoners were released from Soviet captivity in 1955, but for many families that was barely the halfway point. Twenty years after the war, they were still filling in forms, still studying photographs of strangers, still waiting for a letter. In this video, we trace the long search for Germany's missing soldiers, from the registration of 1950 to the Soviet files that opened after 1992, through the families who finally got an answer and the ones who never did. SUBSCRIBE TO HISTORY HANGOVER For more deep dives into the hidden aftermath and complex figures of history:    / @historyhangover-yt   IN THIS VIDEO, WE EXPLORE: The Boy Who Listened to the Radio: How Manfred Kropp grew up with one officer's letter, a silent mother and a father who had simply disappeared in Crimea. The Two and a Half Million: How West Germany's registration of 1950 tried to count its missing, and who that count left out. "Have You Seen Him?": How returning prisoners were questioned and shown page after page of faces, right up to an exhibition in Berlin in 1962. The Letter to Ingrid: How a painter's letter to his baby daughter stayed hidden for fifty-eight years. The Agreement With Moscow: How a narrow Cold War deal gave some families a date of death and shut out many others. The Reports That Said "Probably": How the Red Cross reconstructed the last days of missing men, one unit at a time. The Files From Moscow: What Soviet prisoner files revealed after 1992, including one father's fate seventy-four years after his death. The Thick Envelope: What Manfred Kropp finally learned about his father in 2020. The Families Still Waiting: Why the search has not ended, and what one daughter still hopes for. KEY FACTS & THE SEARCH THAT NEVER ENDED In March 1950, a registration in West Germany alone counted two and a half million missing people. Around six million returnees were eventually questioned about the men they might have seen. From the 1960s until 1991, the Red Cross wrote 1.12 million reports reconstructing the likely fate of missing people. Since 1992, Russian files have helped clarify about 255,000 more cases. In 2024, the tracing service still received about 7,000 inquiries about the war, more and more of them from grandchildren. The fate of about 1.3 million people remains unknown. For those families, the war has still not delivered its last letter. If you found this historical investigation insightful, please leave a like and share your thoughts. If someone in your family had gone missing and you never found out what happened, would you keep searching your whole life, or let them rest? Let's talk below. Sources include: German Red Cross Tracing Service (history of the WWII search; case files on Manfred Kropp, Waldemar Jahr and Heinrich Evers); Nordkurier (Ingrid Krämer and Werner Matz); Abendzeitung/dpa (70 years of the tracing service); dpa, May 2025 (current inquiries and funding); German War Graves Commission (Rossoschka). Follow History Hangover: YouTube:    / @historyhangover-yt   #TheGermanFamiliesWhoWereStillSearchingForMissingSoldiers20YearsAfterWWII #HistoryHangover #WW2History #HistoricalSecrets #TrueHistory #MissingSoldiers #GermanRedCross #PrisonersOfWar #PostWarGermany