Unknown soldiers usually tend to stay that way, but last week the residents of a small Transylvanian village learned for the first time about the origins and family of a hitherto obscure occupant of their graveyard.

He was a 32-year-old man known to his friends as Fritz who left behind a wife, a four-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son he had never seen. That son eventually grew up to become Gerhard Schroder, the Chancellor of Germany.

Just before Easter the Chancellor's 61year-old sister, Gunhild Kamp-Schroder, received a letter telling her, after 56 years, where their father was buried. Reporters for the tabloid Bild am Sonntag got on the case, travelled to Romania and found the grave, marked with a blossoming cherry tree and a wrought iron cross, in the small village of Ceanu Mare.

"We looked after Fritz for almost 60 years," said Daniel Crisan, the village priest, who placed the cross at the head of the grave five years ago. The grave once had a plaque with the names of the fallen soldiers, but that disappeared long ago, according to 71-year-old Marcu Hadarean, who witnessed the simple burial in 1944 aged 14. "I was about 20 metres away and a Hungarian soldier told me to stand back `otherwise they'll shoot you', so I moved back," he said.

The Chancellor was on his Easter holiday in Venice when the news broke. "I'm happy to have finally discovered where exactly the grave of my father is," said Mr Schroder. "I will visit it soon - in private, as I hope is my right."

Mr Schroder's mother married Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schroder in October 1939, only months before he was called up. "We intended to marry earlier, but we had to prove our Aryan backgrounds and that took some time," said Erika, now 87, last week. Cpl Schroder found out his wife had given birth to their second child in April 1944 by the often unreliable military post. "I am overjoyed for you that this time it was a boy and I will be home in the autumn," he wrote to his wife. Six months later Erika Schroder received another letter by military post, this time informing her that her husband had fallen in combat on October 4th 1944 "for the Fuhrer, the people and the Fatherland". According to the psychologists, everything from Mr Schroder's political drive to his four marriages can be explained by the father he never knew, something the Chancellor rubbished last week. "Psychologists would naturally say that to grow up without a father can have damaging effects later on. But I have never felt that," he said.

After the war his mother worked as a cleaner and Mr Schroder left school at 14 to get a job to support the family, completing his education later at night school. In 1963 he joined the Social Democratic party and as a law student at Gottingen University he participated in the student protests of 1968. He later set up his own law practice in Hanover and was elected to the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, for the first time in 1980.

He was elected state premier of Lower Saxony in 1990 in a "Red-Green" coalition and repeated that success at the federal level to become Chancellor in 1998.

"I was born in 1944 and I never knew my father for he died in the war," Mr Schroder said in 1998. "In plain words as a soldier he was sent to slaughter. He had to sacrifice his bones for the criminal regime of Adolf Hitler."