Source: The Local
Holger von Neuhoff of the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg said: “This is certainly the first time such an old message in a bottle was found, particularly with the bottle intact.”
Researchers then set to work identifying the author and managed to track down his 62-year-old granddaughter Angela Erdmann, who lives in Berlin.
“It was almost unbelievable,” Erdmann told news agency DPA. She was first able to hold the brown bottle last week at the Hamburg museum.
Inside was a message on a postcard requesting the finder to return it to his home address in Berlin. “That was a pretty moving moment,” Erdmann said. “Tears rolled down my cheeks.”
Von Neuhoff said researchers were able to determine based on the address that it was 20-year-old baker’s son Richard Platz who threw the bottle in the Baltic while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913.
Categories: Europe, Europe and Australia, European Union, Germany