Johann Obermüllner

The farm labourer Johann Obermüllner from Ardagger experienced military combat on the Eastern Front as a soldier with the Imperial-Royal Military Police Battalion No. 10. He was taken prisoner by the Russians in Galicia in June 1915, but freed in the wake of the Russian October Revolution and returned home. One of the few actions of the Imperial-Royal Army on the Western Front subsequently brought Johann Obermüllner to the environs of Verdun, where in autumn 1918 he experienced first-hand the dimensions of an industrialised war on the French-Belgian border – fighting that was no longer a war for him, but a “bestial extermination of human beings for which there are no words to describe.”