Dauendorf, Alsace: Friendship, History, and the Long Game of WWII Research

Erin, Materne, and Mayor Claude Bebon of Dauendorf, Alsace © Erin Faith Allen

I first met Materne Schaerlinger in the winter of 2019, when he took me on a tour of the area where the 222nd Infantry of the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division fought during Operation Nordwind. Since then our friendship has grown in the way that the best working relationships do: slowly, through shared purpose, through correspondence and research and the bond that forms between people who care deeply about the same things with the same seriousness.

Materne works alongside Damien Bauer documenting the full history of the Allied divisions that came through Alsace, the Rainbow Division among them, building a record of what happened here at the local level that no archive alone can fully hold. The two of them have done extraordinary work in this region, and I am lucky to call them colleagues and friends.

Over the years we have worked together on a number of projects, but nothing brought that collaboration into fuller relief than the day Materne and Damien answered the call to help organize the surprise Legion of Honor ceremony for Lockered ‘Bud’ Gahs in Schweighouse-sur-Moder. They went above and beyond in every possible way to make that day what it was, and it remains one of the most extraordinary days of my life and of Bud's. I will never forget it.

This past summer, I reached out again to Materne and Damien for collaboration on Tom Breen's tour of the Alsace battlefield sites. Materne alongside Damien, who wasn’t able to be on this journey, helped confirm the location where Tom’s father was almost taken out by an 88 shell in Dauendorf. While in Dauendorf we were joined by Claude Bebon, the mayor of the town, who received us in the village square wearing his tricolor sash of office.

Standing there in the summer light felt like the accumulation of years of work taking physical form. This is what the long game looks like: not a single discovery or a single trip, but a decade of building relationships with people who share the same values, the same commitment to getting it right, and the same belief that the individual stories of the men and women who passed through these villages deserve to be remembered properly.