Ok, long story short, but still not that short. My grand-grand-father, who was born in the region of current Lativia and served under Tsar, but was of German heritage has most likely died during the end of the second world war in 1945.

When the war started in 1939, he had lived in Danzig (Gdansk) where he found refuge after the 1917 revolutions took place in Russia. In 1939, he decided to flee the city upon the news of Nazis approaching, since his wife was Polish. They escaped to Riga as he had some family there. In 1940 the Soviet Union has de facto annexed the baltic states and he had to weight the evil of staying in the Stalinist Russia where given his loyalist heritage he would most likely be executed, against the evil of coming back to the Nazi State. He had chosen the latter and once again he was on the run (with his wife, daughter and three sons) back to Danzig. When they arrived in Reich my grandmother and her brothers were given careful official examination of their racial profile (sic!) and luckily for them, they were determined to be Aryan (my grandmother has blue eyes and very light blonde hair). The family was given some category of German Citizenship, but it meant that my grand-grand father had to be conscripted into Wehrmacht. He was sent to the Eastern Front after Operation Barbarossa took place.

There the memories of grandmother get somewhat unclear. She claims that he was a POW in the Soviet Union, but thanks to his native-like Russian was able to escape all the way from Siberia and get through the frontline back to Germany. Supposedly, he wrote down every detail of his master escape but his wife burnt it all up when the communist regime was established in Poland out of fear to be arrested (wow, it could have been a great read). My grandma recollects that the last time she had seen her father was during the Soviet siege of Danzig in 1945. She claims he got a very short military pass and was in the great rush because he was afraid he would be treated as AWOL if he is not back in his unit on time. That is the very last piece of information about my grand-grand-father that our family possesses.

My grandmother was 10 when her father disappeared, he was absent for most of her extremely stressful childhood. She does not know where and when he died. She is 85 now and I really feel the obligation to get some information about him before she passes away. I have read that the German Federal archive has some form that allows inquiring for specific people. Maybe some people in-here do have experience in gathering such information. Where should I start the search? Thanks in advance for any kind of help and for even reading this very post.