Biography: Sabine Patterson

(Responsible for all the German translations)

McChord in Lacey, WA. They met while he was serving as a “Cold Warrior” in Germany and have been married for 31 years. For about 20 of these years they have lived in the USA including Fort Knox, Ky, San Antonio and Wichita Falls in Texas, Lakewood, a suburb of Denver in Colorado and now in beautiful Washington State. Sabine's German education and profession was in banking, and so during their time in Texas and Colorado, she worked for JP Morgan Chase and its predecessor banks for more than 16 years. 

From December 2006 until September 2016 the Pattersons had the great opportunity to live in Kaiserslautern/Germany where Sabine's husband worked as a civilian RN at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the only remaining American military hospital in continental Europe. Sabine has always been very interested in different cultures and world history, and after a few years of traveling extensively with family through Europe, she found that she really enjoys sharing her passion for German and European culture, history and life in general with visitors from the USA. So during their last 3.5 years there Sabine worked as a free lance tour guide and German language teacher for the USO. She taught groups of 20 American adult students “German for Beginners” while additionally guiding USO day trip tours by train or bus on average once or twice a week. Sabine's repertoire includes close to 40 tours to different locations in Germany, France and Switzerland, of which some of these tours she developed herself. The tour groups usually consisted of between 20 to 50 American active service members of all ranks, military retirees and civilian DOD employees and all their families. She also had the honor of guiding many tours for recuperating service members through the Wounded Warrior Project.

Sabine started volunteering as a docent and guide at the Lewis Army Museum at Joint Base Lewis McChord near Tacoma in September 2018. Since then her large background as an amateur historian in general has grown to include a more in-depth knowledge of military history from the perspective of a person who has never served in the military and had only held a weapon once before becoming part of the crew at Lewis Army Museum.

In June 2019 Sabine's previous tour guiding experience led to her serving as a tour manager with the prestigious Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours company (headquartered in New Orleans, LA) for one of their “D-Day to the Rhine” tours. This 12-day tour took 35 American guests from London, UK, to Wiesbaden/Germany while visiting important WWII sites in England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany including the once in a lifetime commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of the Normandy beaches on June 6.

​

*******Thank you to Sabine Patterson! I could not research without her historical knowledge and ability to read and speak German. I am honored to have a great friend like her. She now resides back in Germany!