Wolfram Forster

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Wolfram Richard Forster was born on 22 October 1925 in Berlin, Germany. He grew up under Nazi rule, witnessing persecution, restrictions on speech and the Allied bombing of his city. His father, a First World War veteran and police officer, lost his position after refusing to join the Nazi Party. Wolfram hoped to become a doctor and began studying medicine in 1944, before conscription interrupted his education.

Drafted into the Wehrmacht in late 1944, aged nineteen, he was initially stationed in Denmark, then sent to Pomerania, where his unit came under Soviet artillery fire. A serious infection led to hospitalization. After recovering, he was reassigned to the Western Front, where American soldiers captured him on 10 April 1945.

His captivity continued long after Germany’s surrender. In July 1945, he was transferred to French custody and taken to Colmar, Alsace, where prisoners were assigned dangerous mine-clearance work. Released in 1947, he traveled toward Berlin but was detained again upon entering the Soviet occupation zone. Altogether, he spent approximately twenty-two months in American, French and Soviet custody, finally returning home in March 1947.

Forster resumed his medical education and graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1954. An internship in Passaic, New Jersey, was followed by medical work at Bitburg Air Base in West Germany. He returned to the United States in 1957, becoming a radiologist in Washington, D.C. In 1981, he joined the U.S. Army Reserve’s 97th Army Reserve Command, retiring in 1991 with the rank of colonel.

Wolfram Forster died on 9 April 2026, aged 100, just two weeks after historian Jiri Kluc visited him.