Marriages and divorces Löns had married Elisabet Erbeck (1864–1922), a divorced sales assistant, at Hanover in 1893 (engagement 1890, divorced 1901). She had five miscarriages and was committed to a sanatorium. Soon after the divorce, Löns had changed his confession from Catholic to Protestant and married Lisa Hausmann (an editorial assistant, born 1871), also at Hanover. He had a child with his second wife, but their son was mentally and physically handicapped. In 1911, his family left him, after he fired a shotgun inside their home. In the divorce proceedings he had a nervous breakdown. Löns refused to pay alimony and then left without leaving an address, travelling in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In November 1911, Löns considered suicide. In November 1912, he returned to Hanover and subsequently published two more collections of hunting and nature stories Auf der Wildbahn (1912) and Mein buntes Buch (1913), followed by his final novel, Die Häuser von Ohlendorf (1913). Suffering from bipolar disorder, Löns veered between depression and making fantastic plans for the future. First World War service At the age of 48, he volunteered for service with the German Army for the First World War. Due to his ill health and weak constitution, he was rejected initially by the military. It took the intervention of an officer friend of his for Löns to be accepted as a common fusilier by the Ersatzbatallion of the Regiment Generalfeldmarschall Prinz Albrecht von Preußen, also known as 73rd Fusilier Regiment. On 26 September 1914, just three weeks after enlisting on 3 September, Löns was killed in action during an assault on a French position at Loivre near Reims in France. Of the 120 men in his unit, only two dozen survived. Reception in National Socialist Germany Löns' books continued to sell well after his death. By 1934, they had reached an overall circulation of 2.5 million books. By 1938, the Wehrwolf had sold more than 500,000 copies (reaching 865,000 copies by 1945). This made him one of the most successful authors in Germany at the time. Löns had considered himself as a poet of nature and he had argued eloquently for conservationism. He was co-initiator of the Heideschutzpark at Wilseder Berg which later grew into the Naturpark Lüneburger Heide (Lüneburg Heath Nature Park), the first nature reserve in Germany. Löns combined these sentiments, based not least on the of the turn of the century