Lt. Gen. Friedrich Von Boettcher, the new German military attaché to Washington, is seen reviewing the horse soldiers of the 14th U.S. Cavalry during his visit to the World’s Fair, Chicago, in August 1933. These troops were stationed at Camp John Whistler in the Fair Grounds.
Signal Corps photo 111-SC-99762. National Archives Identifier 329583324.
A former artillery officer in the Royal Saxon Army (Königlich Sächsische Armee), during the Great War, Von Boetticher transferred to the German General Staff and ended the war as a major, with two Iron Crosses and the Hohenzollern Ritterkreuz. A buddy of Von Seeckt, he served on numerous disarmament commissions and was the German military plenipotentiary to the League of Nations during the Weimar era, then as head of the German Army’s Artillery School at Jüterbog, before being transferred to D.C. in April 1933.
He remained in Washington as something of a terribly ineffective attaché until he and the remainder of the German legation were shown the door in early 1942– leaving his adult children in America. Arriving back in Germany, he served a series of quiet roles on the OKW, earning a Kriegsverdienstkreuz and a Ritterkreuz during WWII. Captured in 1945, he cooled his heels in a POW camp in Luxembourg in Bad Mondorf in the former Palace Hotel with many other high-ranking German military officers for two years, then retired.
Meanwhile, his son Friedrich joined the U.S. Army in 1944, went to Japan with the Occupation forces, and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. His youngest daughter, Hildegard, later married the British officer Captain Horace Marsden, and the couple emigrated to Canada in 1951. Ironically, his New York-born grandson, from his physician daughter Adelheid, became a U.S. Army doctor who served as a physician in a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam.
Post-war, Herr Von Boetticher rekindled relations with assorted American officers and worked on compiling historical resources. Assigned to the U.S. Army’s Military Foreign Studies Program until 1952, he undertook lecture tours to the States.
Von Boetticher was a noted author who wrote at least seven volumes of military history and theory. He was also a super fan of the late, great Prussian Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, besides penning three books on the man, going so far as to marry the man’s second granddaughter, Anna Josepha von Hanke, 25 years his junior, in 1953.
General der Artillerie von Boetticher died on 28 September 1967 in Bielefeld-Schildesche, aged 85.
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