Greetings all,

I am currently trying to conduct some research on my grandfather who recently passed away. I am sure that he served during the Second World War, and was born in Comloșu Mic (or Ostern), Romania. I have his name, date of birth and so on, but no further information about his service, other than that he had previously spoken of being "in the army", and had fled to Britain at some point during or after the war. I do not know whether he was captured, demobilised or deserted, but am of the belief that he was an infantryman rather than any type of specialist.
Being a German speaker in a Germanised part of Romania I have not rejected the idea that he may have served in a Romanian SS unit, or even in the Wehrmacht. As a result my research is probably going to take a two-pronged approach; as well as requesting information from Romanian military archives I will see if the German military archives can provide any information.

I'm planning to contact these chaps; http://www.mapn.ro/index.php, but my real question is whether anyone has actually had much success tracing information through them? I'm not holding my breath, but would be ecstatic if I could get a service number, unit and dates of service (as I could then potentially trace some engagements he may have experienced and so on), and pretty much as delighted as I can be if I can find details of awards and service medals that he may have been entitled to (not that I expect that these can be claimed).

Experiences gaining information would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance.