The Arkansas State University Museum will open the exhibition “Our German Soldier” on Sunday, Jan. 11, with a reception from 1:30 to 3 p.m. and a short program at 2 p.m. The exhibition continues through April 4.

Luise & August Faller with daughters Helga and Irmgard, 1939, Kahl am Main, Germany.

The exhibition is based on a World War II German soldier’s photograph album donated to the museum in 1961. The album had belonged to August Faller, a gefreiter (corporal) of the German Wehrmacht from Kahl am Main, Germany. Faller was a member of the Heer (Army), 168 Regiment of the 82 Infantry Division.

The 99 photographs depict the life of a German soldier from 1939 to 1943, from the Blitzkrieg across France and Holland to the fighting on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union.

Museum staff determined this very personal account of the war should be returned to its original owner.

In February 2003, Mark Steed, ASU Museum Exhibit Specialist, contacted the German government for assistance in finding the family who had owned the album. The German Bundesarchivs-Zentralnachweisstelle (National Archives) located the family and made initial contact with them. Mr. Faller survived the war but had died in 1986. However, two daughters, depicted in one of the photographs, were still living in Kahl am Main.

In August 2003 Steed and Dr. Scott Darwin, professor of German at ASU, went to Germany to return the album to Faller’s daughters, Irmgard Pfeifer and Helga Muller. Neither daughter nor any family member had seen any of the photographs since 1945.

Mark Steed, ASU Museum Exhibit Specialist (seated), with Helga Faller-Muller, Dr. Scott Darwin of ASU, and Irmgard Faller-Pfeifer, looking at the album upon its return to Germany in August 2003.