Coleman Barracks, just outside of Sandhofen, Germany (near Mannheim), sits just north of the A6 autobahn.  They all have numbers nowdays;  when I was a young trucker over there we just called them by names...The Frankfurt-Kassel...The Stuttgart-Munich...the A6 we called the Kaiserlautern-Mannheim autobahn.  Between the southern fence of Coleman Barracks and the autobahn, there is a rural-looking little neighborhood; a row of houses, really.  They were built in the fifties and sold (at reduced prices with grants and reduced interest or no-interest loans) to repatriated German soldiers who had been held in the Soviet Union for as much as ten years after the war was over.  In the middle of this small row of houses was one that had a German Shepherd kennel in the back yard.  This is where we bought Golf the Wonder Dog.  
We had shopped a bunch of kennels, some way out of town, some right in town, but hadn't found the "RIGHT" dog.  I don't even remember how we came by his name or how we found the place, but when we talked to him we found he only had a couple of young dogs for sale, no puppies...and only the one dog that had been trained.  The trained dog was a third class protection dog and very reasonably priced.  I have written a lot about that dog at JU and may re-post some of those on Blogster just for background...because as interesting as it is, this piece is not about Golf or any of his adventures.  It is about the Kennelmeister who sold me the dog.
I don't remember his name.  In conversation with him during the time we spent at his kennel, I learned that he, like my former landlord, was held in Russia after he had been captured by the Red Army.  He had been captured in 1944 and was returned to East Germany about 1955.  It took him a couple of years after that to get to the West German side of the border.  He arrived in his hometown of Mannheim, a city that was still rebuilding after having been bombed into the middle ages during the war, broke, in bad health, without any way of making a buck, and unable to find any surviving family.  The West German government stepped in and got him temporary lodging, medical help, and trained him to be a carpenter.  In a few years he was able to buy his house and set up his kennel.  I met him in 1968 and you would never guess from his appearance that he had survived more than ten years in the worst of conditions at the hands of his Russian captors...forced to labor on the rebuilding of Russian cities.  In '68 he was hale and healthy looking, robust and jolly.  We had a laugh over Golf's name.  I thought it must mean something in German so I asked.  His English was halting and rough, but he explained, "Well...you haf dis liddle vite ball..."  
The dog was great, the conversation was fun, the price was reasonable (we discovered why later) and we counted the trip a success.  Told you all that so I could tell you this:
We took Golf back to the States in 1970;  he had adventures in Texas and Arizona before being poisoned in 1974.  MamaCharlie and I had a few adventures, too.  We had gone to Fort Hood, got out of the Army and moved to Phoenix, gone back into the Army and moved to California, and in 1977 we returned to Germany.  We spent more than five years in Stuttgart.  Where the next part of this begins.  On a whim one afternoon in 1983, MamaCharlie and I decided to detour by the kennel to see the man, see what was in the kennel, and just recall some of our youth.  We bounced along the rough road (it doesn't even rate a name on the map) and found the house.  The Kennelmeister was still there, still large and, aside from a few more pounds and some missing hairs and others gone gray, he still looked the same.  It took him a few minutes to remember us;  but he remembered the dog really well.  His memory finally kicked in and we just talked awhile about our lives since the first time we met, what life with Golf had been like, and what was happening in his world. 
One of his  neighbors had just passed away that week, something that had been happening a lot of late.  There seemed to be a large number of German men in their fifties dropping dead with heart attacks.  A most of them were former POWs.  He told us that he had been having some heart issues himself.  I wondered out loud why this should be so.  He said he thought it was because of the privations they had endured during the last years of the war and the years after...especially those who had had to work as slaves in Russia.  The Germans' diets had been terrible;  many of them lived in bombed out basements exposed to the elements, and all of them had to drink water out of polluted ponds, shell holes, and rivers still running with spilled oil, chemicals, and more than a few bodies.  We wrapped up our trip down memory lane and said our goodbyes. 
On the way home, MamaCharlie and I continued the speculation about why all them Deutschers were having their hearts give out on them.  It seemed to us that all of those difficulties caused huge stresses and stress was probably the biggest contributor to the epidemic of early deaths.  Prolonged, unrelenting misery, fear, fatigue, and malnutrition is a recipe for permanent damage to one's health.  We have since found that this heart failure was not confined to the German people...almost all of Europe experienced an increase of fifty-year-olds dropping dead in the 1980s.  Victors and vanquished alike shared the consequences.  The most notable exception seemed to be those who left Europe right after the war and avoided the privations that continued there for years.    
Are you looking for a point to all this?  Don't have one.  Just an observation.  Living in Germany for so many years and getting to know many Germans (and other nationalities, too) who survived those times, made this an "up close and personal" issue for MamaCharlie and me.  The people of Europe and Russia lost unbelievable numbers of men to the war.  There was a true generation gap, a gap filled with fields of white crosses (or more likely, greener grass fields).  The United States lost in the neighborhood of 400,000 young men;  combined, the nations of Europe lost in the tens of millions.  
Our German landlord, Erich Jaeger,  was a corporal on the Eastern front and his story was very similar to the dog guy.  After ten years as a POW in Russia, he returned to East Germany and, after an extensive search, found his wife.  They hadn't seen or heard from each other in all that time; they didn't even know if the other was alive.  I asked her why she hadn't remarried.  She just looked at me and shrugged.  She asked me who would she marry?  There were no men left.