So, they were having fun, fun, fun on the autobahn!

And doing lots of intel gathering.

East Germany and West Germany after the war were certainly flooded with intelligence agents of different powers. Of course these agents would have elaborate disguises to conceal their real nature. These three intelligent men may have adopted an even more clever disguise, looking like intelligence agents, so that anyone seeing them would assume they were just dressing up to look like agents, so obvious, with suit and ties and cameras and binoculars, just looking the part for fun perhaps, although they really were intelligence agents.

As someone who was stationed in Germany for six years in the seventies I would say these young men weren't engaged in a tourist trip. The fancy cameras, the binoculars and being armed leads to be they may have been on some sort of intelligence mission. If they regularly engaged in such classified missions, they wouldn't tell anyone about them, even close relatives. The story about investigating future brides was a good cover story, but I don't think that alone would result in them being in civies during their service. By the way, Untersuhl was actually in East Germany. The nearest town in West Germany is Wildeck. Between the two left men you can catch a glimpse of Untersuhl and a little further is probably the village of Berka/Werra, now part of the larger municipality of Werra-Suhl-Tal.

1) "The Allied occupation ended in 1949"
I did not know that. So it's the East/West German border.

2) Kodachrome? Not sure. I would guess so from the color preservation. It is a straightforward scan, I did not manipulate the colors. I don't have the slide handy now. Will update when I do. I have only the scanned image and my notes from the scanning session.

3) svenl: "Hesse or Bavaria bordering Thuringia."
That's a bingo! The Thuringia (East German) and Hess (West German) border at Untersuhl is here:

I like Dad's casual exposure of his 'concealed' weapon. (Of course he's facing in the safe direction.)

Update:
The slide is labeled "Untersuhl by Eisenach, East-West German border on Autobahn".

Dad was a corporal in US Army intelligence. He joked that his job was preventing G.I.s from marrying Nazi women. I think that meant he was checking the backgrounds of a variety of Germans the Army engaged with.

He said it was a wonderful job. Four guys had a "liberated" house and a car. They wore civilian clothes, and an American corporal was well paid compared to the locals.

I guess the 4th man took the picture.

Judging by the landscape this is probably somewhere in Hesse or Bavaria bordering Thuringia.

"Being an armed tourist at a border crossing seems a bit odd." As they were part of the occupying forces most regulation didn't apply to them.

So these guys are in Berlin? (A city which, entirely surrounded by communist East Germany, was divided into Soviet and American sectors -- East Berlin and West Berlin, eventually separated by the infamous Berlin Wall.) Or are they hundreds of miles away, at the border between East Germany and West Germany? (Which were not "sectors," but entirely different countries -- the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The Allied occupation ended in 1949, so this isn't "occupied Germany" if it's 1951.) And is this a Kodachrome slide? Who took the picture? What a great photo!

This screams for more details.

What is the model of revolver he is carrying? If one is carrying, I assume all were. Or, is he an officer, the others enlisted, so he is only one armed? Wouldn't make sense to me but maybe it would to the Army. Were he and the others MPs? Was this their normal "uniform" (which I find hard to believe it would be)? Any pictures of the other side?

Being an armed tourist at a border crossing seems a bit odd. Then again, in the late '50s when I was 9, I had tea in a teahouse on a hilltop 100 yards or so from a border crossing between Hong Kong New Territories and China. Nice location I thought. Lots of rice farming on both sides of the border. Very little traffic going through the crossing. My mom and grandmother had a fit when they found out.