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Leonhard RUBY - Casualty of War

This post, provided by Project Leader Paul Howes, describes how serendipity plays a role in discovering new information and for the unfortunate Leonhard Ruby how his surname dictated where he was was sent as a prisoner of war.


When we were integrating two files of Ruby families of Swiss descent, initially received from Joe Brillhart and Gerhard Fischer, we noticed that there were war deaths of German soldiers throughout Europe and even beyond.  As noted in an earlier blog post they stretched from England to Kazakhstan.

I did a little figuring.  There are twelve German Ruby men who died between 1941 and 1945.  Three of them appear to have been old enough to have died from natural causes in their home towns, though interestingly perhaps, they all worked for the German railways.  Of the rest four died in Russia, two in Romania,one in Kazakhstan,one in England, and one was not known, just “gefallen im Weltkrieg” (died in the world war).

I didn’t think much more about this until I happened to spot Leonhard Ruby’s name among a list of War dead at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website .  His place of death is not recorded but the date of death was December 23, 1944 and he is buried in Cannock Chase in Staffordshire.  This was news to me.  
WW2 German Prisoner of War camp in Dorset, England - Dorset Life Magazine

I realized that some of the prisoners of war taken to the UK must have died there, but not that they would be buried and honoured with their British and Commonwealth opponents.  It is to the immense credit of the CWGC that they should honour all war dead in this way.

It then occurred to me that since Leonhard’s death was in England there might be a death registration for him.  I found a Leonard Ruby death in the Dorchester area of Dorset in Quarter 1[1] 1945.  Dorchester is 160 miles from Cannock.  Registration was in the quarter AFTER death, though it was wartime and Christmas.  Could it be the same person? 
 I obtained the death “un-certificate” from the GRO[2]  .  It shows that he committed suicide while “the balance of his mind was disturbed”.  Very sad.



While researching German prisoners of war in the UK, I stumbled across this little-known piece of social history in Wikipedia: “After D-Day, very large numbers of German military personnel were taken prisoner. ….  " As a rule, those whose surnames began with a letter in the first half of the alphabet were sent to the United States”[3]  So that’s probably why Leonhard Ruby ended up in Dorset.



[1] Q1 is January to March of a given year. 
[2] GRO – General Registry Office

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