deep dive into our Resistance grandparents from Bavaria

I will be expanding on this post over weeks and months. For now, here is a gallery of images ....

from a 2024 email to my Australian siblings

On the GERMAN SIDE

SEE 👇 for Dad's dad. This is from Wikipedia. Karl Heinz Peitzker was a "Jewish German* military officer (v rare due to anti-semitism) who "fought on all the fronts". In the elite Bavarian Alpine troop Edelweiss as a professional soldier and Gebirgsjäger which is like a specialist mountaineer. Also for the desert.

But we think he was part of the Resistance as he and Oma were Jewish (Dad was ca 5 yo at the time). Oma worked with Karl Weller, head of the Resistance in Würzburg. I met him to thank him for saving Dad and Oma.

FYI Edelweiss is still going as a prestigious historic regiment. It was reserved for Bavarian kings, princes and aristocrats. For that reason the recent German Defence Minister Karl-Theodore zu Guttenberg is actually in it...

From WIKIPEDIA ABOUT THE REGIMENT

The mountain infantry of Austria have their roots in the three Landesschützen regiments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The mountain infantry of modern Germany carry on certain traditions of the German Alpenkorps (Alpine corps) of World War I. Both countries' mountain infantry share the Edelweiß insignia, established in 1907 as a symbol of the Austro-Hungarian Landesschützen regiments by Emperor Franz Joseph I. These troops wore the edelweiss on the uniform collar. When the Alpenkorps served alongside the Landesschützen on Austria's southern frontier against Italian forces from May 1915, the Landesschützen honoured the men of the Alpenkorps by awarding them their own insignia: the edelweiss.

I will provide a guide and commentary for this collection of photos that I digitised for a museum in DC

These digital "collages" are now held at the Holocaust Survivors Museum in Washington, as of 2026. I will post separately re the inventory and email exchange explaining this content in detail.