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Guest Speaker – Jean-Loup Gassend

“Identification of a missing Second World War soldier” 

19 year old Enno Strobel was reported missing in action in Southern France after an encounter with US troops in September 1944, and never heard of again… Untill 80 years later it was noted that there was a person named Eno Strubel buried in the German cemetery for south-eastern France. An investigation determined that Enno Strobel had probably been captured severely wounded by US troops.

After he died of wounds, he was buried in the nearest American cemetery, but American troops misread his name, and buried him as Eno Strubel instead of Enno Strobel. This typo was enough to make the body non identifiable when it was handed back to Germany after the war.

Once the possible link between Strobel and Strubel was established, a scientific method of identification was sought, to try to prove that both men were one and the same person. 

This presentation will show how this mystery was solved by science.

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Jean-Loup Gassend was born in Ottawa, Canada, from a Canadian mother and a French father, and grew up in both Canada and France.

He has been fascinated by the history of WWII since childhood and visited the Canadian War Museum numerous times. He now works in Switzerland as a forensic pathologist, doing autopsies in cases of suspicious deaths under investigation by the police. In Europe he has been involved in searching for the bodies of missing WWII soldiers in several countries during his free time.

He has authored the book “Autopsy of a Battle”, a very detailled oral history about the liberation of the French Riviera in the summer of 1944. He has also published his research in video format on the youtube channel CrocodileTear.