These men are not like the hundreds of other servicemen and women and their dependents buried here, chief bo's'n mates and brigadier generals and military band masters. These two are buried off to one side, beyond the perimeter path and back near the green-painted wood tool sheds that look like outhouses. One grave for the German Army captain who committed suicide by drinking lacquer thinner rather than return to his fatherland after the war. Not far away, the body of Gluglieamo Olivotto is buried beneath a truncated white marble column base, the grave site surrounded by a low pipe fence painted white. But someone locally maintains both graves.
Someone cuts the grass and occasionally puts flowers at the set-apart headstones.
Manfred R. Wolfenstine, head of the Seattle-King County Military History Society, says he doesn't know who. But when I was still in the Reserves, we had a practice Board of Inquiry on the Marquardt death, which was originally ruled an accident, and that was changed to suicide based on old military records. He noted then that an unidentified woman periodically put flowers on the Marquardt grave and others in the regular military rows nearby. Military records and documents at Wolfenstine's board of inquiry years later indicated that Marquardt had been at Fort Lawton only four months and was resisting repatriation to Germany after the war in Europe ended in May 1945. That October, Marquardt, along with several other German POWs in a painting detail, drank an undisclosed amount of lacquer thinner.