Renate’s album (the detective work continues)

Here’s yet another image from Renate Schmidt’s photo album from Germany.

I bought the album at a militaria show or an auction several years ago. It contains 40 black-and-white 3½” x 2¼” snapshots.

It’s starting to look like Renate may have lived in the Sudetenland – the portion of Czechoslovakia populated by a majority of ethnic Germans that was ceded to Germany has part of the infamous Munich Agreement in 1937.

The inscription on the back of this photo says, “This is how high the snow was in the winter of 1941 - 1942 in Bohemia.” The road signs are bilingual – the German place name on top and the Czech place name on the bottom.

At the time of the photo, the Sudetenland had become the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This road junction was in southwest Bohemia about 65 miles east and north of Regensburg, Germany.

If Renate and her family lived in Bohemia, I suspect they fled to the west as the Red Army struck deeper and deeper into the Reich. Otherwise, her album probably wouldn’t have fallen into the hands of an American soldier to turn up years later in the United States.

This is where the road signs were photographed. The map shows today’s national boundaries.