[2][3] In 1898 Luitpold Steidle was born into a Catholic family in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, which less than thirty years earlier had been incorporated into the German Empire.

He immediately resumed his education, from 1918 attending what was then known as the Technical High School (College) in Munich, where he studied Agricultural sciences.

He worked briefly as an insurance agent during 1934 before rejoining the army at the end of the year, recovering immediately the officer's rank that he had held when decommissioned in 1918.

While in captivity he was a founder member of the German Officers' League (BDO / Bund Deutscher Offiziere),[1] an organisation created under the presidency of Walther von Seydlitz to promote an accommodation between the Soviet Union and Germany in order to avoid the destruction of the latter after further bloodshed.

In the meanwhile, as the BDO's Vice-president (and one of its most persuasive speakers) Luitpold Steidle was sentenced to death[1] in absentia by the German state, as he describes in the volume of his memoirs that covers this period.

[4] Till the end of the war, during his time in Soviet detention, Steidle served as representative of the National Committee for a Free Germany.

[1] In 1946, as a Roman Catholic, he joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU / Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands) in East Germany, although it was already becoming apparent that for the foreseeable future the CDU, like the country in which it operated, was destined to operate separately from its West German namesake.