While it’s certainly not one of the biggest mysteries of the Second World War, identifying the owner of a decaying wallet recovered from the crash site of a Wellington bomber certainly was important to one archeologist in the Netherlands. He dug deep to identify the owner of the item and then reached out to the surviving relatives of the deceased flier. After 70 years, the wallet will soon be back in the hands of the man’s surviving family members who still live in his same hometown of Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Kathy Yanchus, a reporter for that town’s newspaper, The Burlington Post, recently wrote an article about the wallet, the bomber and the long lost bombardier.

Sergeant Dennis Haig Kurtz, along with the rest of the crew aboard RAF Vickers Wellington HF852 were on their way back from a nighttime bombing mission over Dusseldorf, Germany when their plane was attacked by a German night fighter. The enemy aircraft riddled the twin-engine bomber from RAF 51 Squadron with machine gun and cannon fire until it slid from the sky and crashed, scattering debris across the darkened Dutch countryside. Kurtz along with the rest of the crew were listed as missing. All of them had perished. It was August 1, 1942.

According to the Post’s article, more than 55 years later, a Dutch farmer working in his fields uncovered some small bits of wreckage from the ill-fated aircraft. It was by no means a rare find — crash sites from the Second World War are quite common in Europe. What made this debris different however was the fact that a personal object from one of the lost airmen was also recovered – a wallet. Five decades in the soggy Dutch countryside had taken its toll on the item. Yet it still offered some remarkable clues: In addition to some coins and fragments of some old bills, the wallet also contained the remains of a drivers’ license with only the name “Dennis” still legible on it.

The wallet remained little more than an oddity until it fell into the hands of aviation archeologist Thijs Hellings who spent the next few years trying to track down the identity of its owner. Hellings is part of a European organization that recovers artifacts from the lost wreckage of downed warplanes.

“Our main goal is to document them, find out which plane crashed where and how and then we go further and try to provide family members with detailed information of the circumstances of the deaths… of their relatives,” Hellings told Kathy Yanchus of the Burlington Post in an interview for the story. “Even after all these years, family members are keen and moved to tears to find out what happened to a relative that went missing.”

After further excavations of the crash site and the discovery of more details about this particular Wellington, Hellings was able to track down the aircraft’s original squadron and thanks to the wallet’s contents eventually the identity of the owner. Kurtz was the only crew member with the first name “Dennis”. It was that one small legible detail that made the difference.

After tracking down and contacting the relatives, Hellings has arranged to send the wallet back to Burlington and into the hands of Kurtz’s nephew, now 75.

To read the full story, visit the Burlington Post’s website.

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