PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE 200
Charles Kuentz
THE ARDENT ALSATIAN
Charles Kuentz was born Karl Kuntz in the Alsatian town of Ranspach on February 18, 1897. He was the son of a French-born railwayman.
Alsace-Lorraine and its ethnic Franco-German population had been under Imperial German authority since the end of the Franco-Prussian War in early 1871. At the age of nineteen, Kuentz was conscripted into the Kaiser’s army. By that time, the Great War had been raging across Europe for two years.
Karl was sent straight from boarding school to a training camp for the Fifth German Field Artillery Regiment outside Berlin. Decades later, he remarked:
“I was told that I had to help my German brothers and fight for the Fatherland.”
Kuntz’s first posting was on the Eastern Front in early 1917… where he fought the armies of Tsarist Russia in the dead of winter! Temperatures were minus forty degrees Celsius:
“It was so terribly cold. We could see the Russians very close to us. Sometimes they shot at us… but most of the time it was just too cold for war… The cold was almost worse than the fighting.”
Kuntz was then transferred to the Western Front, where he witnessed the horrors of trench warfare at Arras, the Somme, and Ypres. He participated in Third Ypres and the blind slaughter at Passchendaele:
“They were terrible battles. It is almost impossible to imagine what we as soldiers had to endure, both physically and psychologically.”
Karl’s worst memory was seeing his best friend torn apart by shrapnel as they cowered in trenches pulverized by shell fire:
“I could do nothing for him and, to this day, I have not been able to escape that terrible moment.”
The mass slaughter was too much to bear for young Karl Kuntz. He desperately tried to find a way to avoid being sent back to the front:
“I hadn’t had a day’s leave since I joined the war, so I told my commanding officer that, as an Alsatian conscript, I had been denied the basic right to leave granted to all German soldiers. I told him I wasn’t going to go.”
Kuntz could have been court-martialed! Instead, his commander sent him home for a few days:
“When I returned to the front, nearly all my comrades were dead. If it hadn’t been for my commander, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
Following the armistice that ended the fighting on November 11, 1918, Kuntz returned home to Alsace (even before he was officially discharged). His homeland was eventually returned to France… thus, he became a French citizen named Charles Kuentz.
Taking a job as a postal employee, Kuentz married in 1921 and had four children: Marie-Odile, Francois, Marie-Therese, and Gerard. But in September 1939, the Second World War had begun in Europe. Kuentz was called up into the French Reserves to stem the imminent German onslaught. By July 1940, Alsace was once again under German control, and Charles Kuentz (Karl Kuntz) was a German citizen deemed too old for military service. However, his son Francois was drafted into the Waffen-SS… and died in June 1944 during the Allied invasion of Normandy.
PEACE WITH THE PAST
When World War II officially ended, Charles Kuentz became a French citizen once again… and would remain so for the rest of his life. He did not talk about his war experiences until he became a centenarian! When Kuentz finally spoke of the past, his daughter Marie-Therese said:
“…it was as if you had turned on a tap…”
He devoted the final years of his life visiting schools and giving lectures promoting peace. Marie-Therese said:
“It was his wish to contribute something to stopping wars, to prevent young men being sent out to die.”
In November 2004, Kuentz met British veteran Harry Patch, who had fought opposite Kuentz in the Battle of Passchendaele. It was filmed and broadcasted one year later in the BBC One documentary The Last Tommy.
Kuentz also gave thirty interviews, the purpose of which was to share his recollections of the Great War. He said that his aim in doing so was to ensure that the war would not be forgotten… thus, such a tragedy would not be repeated.
Charles Kuentz died in Colmar, France on April 7, 2005 at the age of 108 years and 48 days. His family had always considered themselves to be French, and Kuentz had been a member of multiple French patriotic organizations. At his funeral attended by an honor guard composed of fellow patriotic organization members, Kuentz’s coffin was draped with the French tricolor.
At the time of his death, Kuentz was believed to have been Imperial Germany’s last surviving veteran of The Great War. That distinction went to Erich Kästner, who died on New Year’s Day 2008 at the age of 107 years and 297 days.
In 2007, Harry Patch spoke of his meeting with Kuentz in Belgium:
“Three years ago, at the age of 106, I went back to Flanders for a memorial service. I met a German veteran, Charles Kuentz. It was eighty-seven years since we had fought. For all I know, he might have killed my own comrades. But we shook hands. And we had so much more in common than I could ever have thought.
He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak German. We had a translator but in a way we didn’t need him. After we had talked, we both sat in silence, looking at the landscape. Both of us remembering the stench, the noise, the gas, the mud crusted with blood, the cries of fallen comrades.
Once, to have shaken the hand of the enemy would have been treason, but Charles and I agreed on so much about that awful war. A nice old chap, he was. Why he should have been my enemy, I don’t know.
He told me: ‘I fought you because I was told to and you did the same.’ It’s sad but true.
When Charles and I met, we’d both had a long time to think about the war and all that had happened. We both agreed it had been a pointless exercise. We didn’t know each other, we’d never met before, so why would we want to kill each other?
Charles has died now, but after our meeting he wrote me a letter. It said: ‘Shaking your hand was an honor and with that handshake we said more about peace than anything else ever could. On Sunday, I shall think of you, old comrade.’”