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Walter E. Lauer

American military officer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 3, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Major General Walter E. Lauer was a senior United States Army officer who fought in both World War I and World War II. During World War II he commanded the 99th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. The green troops of the 99th, along with the battle-tested 2nd Infantry Division, held a key sector controlling access to Spa and Liege and large repositories of ammunition, fuel, and supplies. Despite being outnumbered by German forces at least five to one, during the Battle of Elsenborn Ridge they did not yield. It was the only sector of the American front lines during the German offensive where the Germans failed to advance.

Editorial summary

“Walter E. Lauer” enters the record as american military officer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Walter, Lauer and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 111-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Walter, Lauer and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Walter E. Lauer” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Walter, Lauer and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Walter E. Lauer”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Walter E. Lauer primary sources, Walter E. Lauer archive and Walter research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Walter E. Lauer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.