Otto and Gertrud Baltutt

Hermann Otto Baltutt and Gertrud Jakumeit were married on 27 October 1934 in Memel, East Prussia, Germany.

As a historical note, at the time Memel was not actually part of Germany. Under the Versailles Treaty of 1918, which ended World War I, Memel and the surrounding region (known at the time by its Lithuanian name, Klaipėda) had been detached from Germany and made a protectorate of the Entente States. This entity was the coalition of countries led by France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria during the First World War. The French served as the provisional administrators of the region until 1923, when Lithuania forced the withdrawal of the French and annexed the region. By the time Germany reacquired Memel as part of its formal territory in 1939, Otto and Gertrud had long since moved to Germany's state of East Prussia.

The reason for the Baltutts' move was that Otto had enlisted in the German Army shortly after their marriage, and his subsequent assignment to the military post at Gilgenburg in the Osterode District (or county) of East Prussia. He served his entire approximately four-year enlistment at Gilgenburg, and this was where the couple's first two children, Edith and Rita, were born. By the time their third daughter, Irmgard, was born in December 1938, Otto had been discharged from the Army, the family had moved to the District capital of Osterode, and he had taken employment as a machinist at a factory in Königsberg (now in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad), the capital of East Prussia, 74 miles north of Osterode. This distance necessitated that Otto spend his work weeks in Königsberg, so he was home only on weekends. It was while they were living in Osterode that their fourth daughter, Waltraut, was born in 1940.