Disappearance of Raimund Speidel’s father and two officers

The disappearance of Raimund Speidel’s father and two fellow officers is a wartime mystery whose consequences reach into the next generation: the men were officially presumed drowned, while their family let the story settle into silence. Years later, Raimund’s search connected their disappearance to Combe Island and exposed the gap between the public record and the account his father had entrusted to a comrade.

Wartime Departure and Official Account

Raimund’s father was stationed with the German occupying force on Guernsey in the Channel Islands. According to the family rumor, he and two fellow officers made an excursion to Combe Island after it was known to have been evacuated. Raimund did not know why they went or whether their commanding officer authorized the trip; he suspected that it was unauthorized.

The records he eventually found gave the disappearance an administrative shape without explaining it. The three young men had gone absent without leave, taking a thirty-foot sailing boat with an engine. They never returned and were posted as missing, believed drowned. An investigation revealed their unauthorized absence, but, as far as the account establishes, did not resolve what happened to them after they set out.

A Secret Account of Their Purpose

Raimund’s later inquiries uncovered a fellow officer to whom his father had confided under a promise of secrecy. According to that officer, the men intended to raise the German flag on a small island off the Cornish coast, probably to demonstrate that it could be done. Raimund concluded that Combe Island was the only possible island fitting the account and made it his first choice for investigation. The proposed flag-raising therefore offered a possible reason for the journey, but not an explanation of the men’s fate.

The account did not establish whether the plan had official approval. Raimund had already suspected that the excursion was unauthorized, and the records’ absent-without-leave designation supported that suspicion without proving the circumstances of the trip. The distinction matters: the secret testimony gave the disappearance a purpose, but left its outcome unresolved.

Family Silence and the Search

The disappearance had been absorbed into a family history already strained by his parents’ failing marriage. Raimund’s mother came from a distinguished Prussian military family, which regarded her marriage to his father as a misalliance. His father’s service with the occupying force on Guernsey was itself no source of pride to them; they had wanted a more distinguished regiment and a more important role. After the men vanished, the family accepted a convenient death on active service rather than a marriage ending in divorce or ignominy, even though the disappearance brought none of the military glory the family valued.

Raimund was told little about his father as a child and learned to expect that questions would be unwelcome. The silence acquired a new urgency when his twelve-year-old son asked about his grandfather and resented that the details of the man’s life seemed unrecorded and unspoken of, as if disgraceful. Raimund promised to discover what had happened, making the investigation a response not only to an old disappearance but also to the inherited absence of an honest account.

The Route to Combe Island

Official sources offered little help. Raimund first came to Cornwall the previous year, but did not then visit Combe Island. A retired fisherman, well over eighty, supplied some information, though Raimund found people suspicious when he asked about the past, as if the war had never ended. He also felt that German inquiries about the Hitler era could meet a continuing national defensiveness, a reaction he described with bitterness.

Raimund knew that Nathan Oliver had been born on Combe Island and visited it quarterly; Oliver had disclosed this in a newspaper article in April 2003, which also drew attention to his Cornish boyhood. That information helped direct Raimund’s inquiry to the island. It brought him closer to the location associated with his father’s disappearance, but the account leaves the central historical question open: the men’s suspected purpose could be reconstructed, while what became of them remained unknown.