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Pfc Alvin A. Brodbeck attended high school for four years and was employed by the American Elevator & Machine Company.

He enlisted in Louisville, Kentucky on 22 July 1944 and was sent overseas in January 1945.

Alvin Brodbeck deferred from military service as an important mechanical designer for an American elevator factory for the war industry. The Brodbecks had bought a piece of land in Louisville, Kentucky, where they wanted to build a house. Although the drawings had already started when he was surprised to receive a call for military service in July 1944.

What turned out? The company administrator had forgotten to submit the usual forms for the periodic extension of his deferment. There was nothing to be done about it. A month after D-day, Butch was called up as a recruit in Camp Hood, Texas, for basic infantry training. After that training, he was told that he would be added to the officers' cadre school at the Cartographic Department in New Jersey, where he would be required to draw staff maps.

But first he was allowed to go home on leave. He had not seen his wife Mildred and his son for over four months. In the ten wonderful days of being back together, they decided that Mildred would move with little Butch as soon as Al had found a home in his new place. When his leave was over, Al got on the troop train that would take him to his new destination with optimistic prospects.

On the way to the east coast, it turned out that one of the conscripts in his compartment had the mumps, on which the whole wagon had to be quarantined and sidetracked. That maneuver would have fatal consequences for Al, because shortly afterwards the wagon was mistakenly linked to an army train with reserve troops for the front, which took the leave-goers to New York. Despite all the protests, they were brought there on board the Queen Mary and sent to Europe.

Instead of drawing army maps in New Jersey, he now underwent his baptism of fire as an armored infantryman in Nancy, Northern France, where Al Brodbeck was added to the 44th Battalion of the 6th Armored Division. His new unit then advanced through Germany and arrived in Groitzsch, in April 1945, where he was shot dead by an SS unit on Friday the 13th after volunteering for a night action.

Shortly thereafter, Mildred received the telegram that began with the phrase "We are sorry to inform you ...".

"My world was crushed," says Mildred. "Our little boy was almost three, and I still see his little face with those frightened eyes every time he asked, Mommy, are you crying now? After the war, I had a hard time All around us, the families were happily reunited, but I had to go on alone. Thank God I was able to get the pieces back together and build a happy life for my son and me. " Mildred later became a journalist for the Douglas Daily News press in Castle Rock - near Denver, Colorado - and made a name for herself as a balloonist in her spare time. Al Brodbeck, which was initially given a temporary grave in Brenau in East Germany, has been resting in Limburg soil for half a century now. His wife first visited him there in 1967, together with Mrs. Liberthe Jacobs-de Graaff from Heerlen, who had adopted the grave as a 14-year-old schoolgirl. "Because Margraten is so far away," says Mildred, "every year we go back to Louisville on Memorial Day, where his name is written on a memorial to the fallen of that place. That's pretty much our own Margraten." .