Karin Kaltenbrunner

Otto Baumgartner, a private with the Imperial-Royal Infantry Regiment No. 9, was taken prisoner by the Russian Army in September 1915 in the fighting near Lutsk and spent five years in various prisoner-of-war camps in Siberia – including in Novo Nikolayevsk (today Novosibirsk) and Omsk. The correspondence between Otto Baumgartner and his father Anton Baumgartner during his years of absence testifies to his yearning for peace and homecoming, the wish for news and money dispatches from his home town of Vienna, and last but not least the parents’ worries about their son.

The Viennese Karl Artner fought on the eastern battlefields during the First World War – lastly as a corporal with the Imperial-Royal Infantry Regiment No. 100. He was taken prisoner by the Russians in Galicia in August 1916 and not released until 1920. While he was away from home, Karl Artner wrote countless letters and forces postcards to his parents, siblings and most of all to his later wife Karoline Eigner; filled in the beginning with ardent enthusiasm for the war, as time went by he repeatedly expressed to her his deeply felt desire for peace and homecoming.