There but for fortune …

… may go you or I. (Phil Ochs / Joan Baez.)

Adolf Süssel (September 1914 – ? 1944) seems to have spent the first few years and the last few years of his short life in a Europe at war. We can imagine that like most people, his fate was determined by the place and time in which he was born and by his responses to whatever social engineering was in fashion.

In the German Military Cemetery at La Cambe, Normandy, he shares his last resting place with more than 21,000 others, many of whose lives would have been similar; but (death being a great leveller) he also shares it with SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Wittmann (a professional soldier who has commanded respect as a ‘Tiger Tank Ace’) and SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann (who was responsible for one of the worst atrocities in the European Theatre of War).