[1] Poeppel was born in Schivelbein, Farther Pomerania (today Świdwin, Poland) and passed his Abitur at a Napola institution in Berlin in 1939.

[2] That year he passed his Abitur, Poeppel joined the Wehrmacht as an officer cadet and served in the Artillerieregiment 32 throughout the Second World War.

[5] As such, the "reformers" argued that the Bundeswehr should not be venerating men such as Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Admiral Günther Lütjens as heroes.

[3] Poeppel was never prosecuted because German law maintained a distinction between murder and being accomplice to murder-the latter defined as killing someone while obeying orders in the service of the state.

[7] In 1968, the Bundstag passed a law that retroactively declared the statute of limitations for being an accomplice to murder as expiring within 15 years of the crime.

Their son, Burkhardt, also became a Bundeswehr officer; their daughter, Susanne studied for an advanced degree at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Bonn.