Time Capsule - A Letter from the Third Reich

Cleaning the attic on a gloomy fall day can yield unexpected surprises.  In a box of clipped out postage stamps and post marks this was found.

It was mailed to my wife's grandfather in 1940.  As you can see in the next photo it was from a man named Antonie Schafer in Windsheim, Bavaria.  Abs is a German abbreviation that means "sender".  Geoffnet means the letter had been opened by military authorities.

On one level this is straightforward.  My wife's grandmother had been a Schafer from Windsheim - now renamed Bad Windsheim - so this was likely from a family member.  It is difficult to remember that for the first 27 months of WW II the U.S. was neutral and there was no reason you could not send mail back and forth to Germany.  Obviously each side opened the letters up for a look.  Apparently the censors on this side of the pond were less obvious about it.

But beyond this there is no clarity.  The envelope only had been saved.  The letter might have contained anything perhaps even clues to a few lingering family mysteries.  I had assumed that the military authorities opening this letter meant that the sender was in the armed forces but perhaps not.  A search of the admittedly incomplete list of German casualties in WW II does not come up with a match, although with the mutable nature of German spelling it is possible that "Anton Shepherd" (German for Schafer in the English web version) from nearby Nuremberg could be the guy.  Or maybe Antonie, be he soldier or civilian, safely lived out the war.  It is not a name we heard on our visits to Bad Windsheim and the generation who would have known him has since passed on.