Bodo von Dehn

Bodo von Dehn (10-09-1894 - 04-03-1971) German chess composer and solver of chess problem

Bodo von Dehn was a chess composer and historian who possessed a wide collection of photos and biographical data about all known chess masters. He composed direct mates and selfmates.

Die Schwalbe (magazine f. problemchess) wrote:

The Baltic German Bodo von Dehn (10.9.1894-4.3.1971) was born 125 years ago in St Petersburg, but lived mainly in Riga before the Second World War. He learnt to play chess at a very young age and soon turned his attention to problem chess. His first assignment was a joint work with Hermann Mattison, which appeared on 12 July 1912 in the Rigaer Rundschau, the newspaper whose extensive chess column he would later head himself from 1933 to 1939. His chess documents were lost in the chaos of the end of the war and his flight, and he himself began a new life in Kiel, where he came into contact with Wilhelm Maßmann and found a job in his office. His task there was to look after the miniature collection, in particular to record new tasks. In addition, von Dehn was in charge of the chess corner of the Kieler Nachrichten, where he also published chess problems. 

The young Kiel maths student Kay Soltsien (now the "longest-serving" German Schwalbe member) got to know von Dehn as a solver of this chess corner, who also suggested that he join a Kiel chess club. In addition to their membership of the club, the two were also connected to a certain extent by the Maßmann collection, which Soltsien converted to a new system in the early 1960s (index cards instead of the original diagram sheets filed in folders). Incidentally, this did not just take place after von Dehn's death (as can be seen from the Wikipedia entry on Maßmann), as Soltsien had long since moved to Munich by then. As there was no temporal overlap between the two in their work on the collection, von Dehn must have ended this activity in 1960 at the latest.