Wikipedia: Wilhelm Gustloff/Talk

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Does this article (especially ante my few edits) read to anyone else as if Germany was somehow the victim after Versailles and at the end of WWII...that war that began with the invasion of the Sudetenland? I think it is important to note that one of the results of the second world war was the displacement of many ethnic Germans from the east, but I think this article lacks context.... off to learn more from more sources...J Hofmann Kemp

"too overwhelming..." for what? Not a complete sentence as it stands. Are you using 'Deutsche Reich' to mean the eastern territory? It's unclear.

Did WW II begin Sep 1 ,1939 ? Did it begin at Versailles ?

Read the notes on that in article WW II . You say , did it begin with the invasion of the Sudetenland ?

I ask, what about the "Declaration of War against Germany by Judica of the World unite... " published March 4, 1933 in the Daily Express :

I welcome it if that someone explains this.

: would you please tell us in what city the 'Daily Express' was published? 'Daily Express' is not an uncommon name for newspapers in English. Also, who was the world force of 'Judica,' whatever that was, to declare war? War is usually declared by sovereign nations against other sovereign nations; otherwise we call it "terrorism." You have inserted this fragment in MANY entries over and over. Please offer a source for it. --MichaelTinkler

             To Michael Tinkler ,

           when you use the search engine www.webtop.com and type in :judea declares war on 
           germany , daily express, you will find an article by the shofar archives on this.
           daily express was ( and still is) apparently a newspaper in London. There are other
           search engines, such as alta vista and other sites, which show the newspaper article

 I only found this recently and am astonished at the nearly 70 years of silence surrounding it . You are now telling me  this 1933 act  has been terrorism .

I was curious so I read the article -it is about a bunch of different groups of Jews trying to orgainxe a boycott of German goods. No "War" except the title, no "Judea" except the title. Just some newspaper exaggeration. No one shooting anyone. And what does this have to do with a boat being sunk at the end of the war 12 years later? --rmhermen

Deutsche Reich is the official name for Germany as of 1871. People that lived within the Deutsche Reich were/are citizen of the Deutsche Reich or "Reichs-Deutsche". Germans who lived outside the boundaries of the "Deutsche Reich" are "Volksdeutsche" or ethnic Germans .

: Yes, that was the official name in German. This version of Wikipedia is in English. Good style might include the German translation in parentheses after the first occurence of the English term only, and the non-English words should be in italics: "The German Empire (Deutsche Reich) was made up of territory ..." "Ethnic Germans outside the German Empire (Volksdeutsche, in German)..." --MichaelTinkler

Oh...THAT Daily Express. Although it's not a tabloid like The Sun, the Daily Express both now and in the past has often published with a definite political viewpoint. Few of its articles are unbiased and most of its headlines written to arouse some sort of passion. Before the war, I am fairly sure that it was also one of the more anti-Semetic (in that non-specific way so beautifully pictured in "The Remains of the Day") papers in Britain.

Also, I am agreeing with Michael Tinkler that the German phrases should be cleaned up and English used as the main language in the English-language Wikipedia.

Finally, I want to again mention that this article needs to be written in a less biased form. At present, it appears to be a backhanded apologia for Germany. At the least, it seems to equate the circumstances of the Germans in Eastern territories forcibly taken by their governments in previous centuries and forcibly settled by them with those of other "ethnically cleansed" populations. To this point, although I have heard of the expulsion of the Volksdeutsch from East-Central and Eastern Europe, I have never heard that there was any type of planned genocide carried out against them. J Hofmann Kemp

   To Michael Tinkler

and J Hofmann Kemp

     Thank you for reading the article and for your input .

I added an article on refugees , to J H Kemp's attention . There were 9 million Volksdeutsche

                             plus    9 million Reichsdeutsche who were expelled.

Volksdeutsche are people , who were not citizens of the Deutsche Reich-Germany , but were in earlier years Germans of the Holy Roman Empire.

Perhaps if this so called expulsion would not have been so minnimized ,as you demonstrate, all these millions and millions of refugees throughout all the world would not have to be.

                                                                H. Jonat

: a style note -- if you begin a paragraph or new line with a space (an empty character) the line will print in smaller font and indented. It looks bizarre! It would help if you hit the PREVIEW button, clean up any typographical oddities, then SAVE. --MichaelTinkler

Right -- Please try to understand the objections here:

None of the articles referring to the expulsion of the Volksdeutsche and/or the lands from which they were expelled is well-written, period. By well-written I mean that there should be some logical cohesion, as well as proper linking. Also, this should include an "English as primary language" approach, except in those cases where Latin is more commonly accepted.

No one disputes that many ethnic Germans were expelled from territories they had inhabited for up to three hundred year. No one disputes that this was tragic for the people involved, as well as for their families and descendants. The problem is that these articles reflect a bias towards the victimization of the Volksdeutsche without referring in any way to the fact that the lands they occupied were taken by force or treaty, and that they were settled in those lands to help support an imperialistic effort. The Volksdeutsche were seldom native to the regions in which they lived and from which they were expelled. To make these articles more well rounded, that needs to be said.

Having spent almost as much of my almost 39 years in an academic environment as Michael Tinkler has, some years of it in Germany and about 13 years focused on studies that revolve around many of the issues of Germanic history up to the 10th century, I am repeatedly shocked by what I have read. What is displayed here as history was considered valid in the 19th century. It was valid because it was history written to justify the growth of the German Empire by proving that all of Europe was really inhabited by descendants of the Germanic tribes; ergo, it was the Empire's duty to reunite these peoples. I know of no contemporary scholar who believes or supports this view.

So -- would Mssrs. Jonat, Joachim, et al. please contribute articles that enrich our knowledge by showing us the whole story? Thanks. -- [[J Hofmann Ke

 You are the experts in style and computer writing and I gladly let you enrich the stories.

I leave the cleaning up of the text also to you.

I am using 15th , 16th , 17th century maps to look at places and names . I am using Claudius Ptolemy : The Geography, Dover Publication original written ca 150 AD and Tacitus Agricola and Germania , written 98 AD, tranlation Mattingly .

I am looking at www.familysearch.com (LDS) for places , actual films of actual church records . They are all original records, if duplicates, it state so.

Please take the time and look up the church records for places like :

      Bromberg , Posen , 
      West Prussia : Thorn , Konitz , Culm , Dirschau , Elbing, Danzig
      East Prussia : Frauenburg , Braunsberg ,Heilsberg etc

I do not use any 18th or 19th century histories .

I am looking at an actual history record by the Holy Roman Empire from 1600 available on internet .

Please contact me if you would like to look at it also.

I also ask you to please read again the difference between Reichs-Deutsche and Volks- Deutsche . In you note above you still talk of Volksdeutsche only. You are completely overlooking the Reichs-Deutsche .

(Taking your comment on Volkdeutsche I have to surmise that almost none of the US inhabitants are actual native , none of the Mexicans are actual native , other than the Indians and most of the English are actually none-native.

So what kind of logic are you using ?

I would like to know , where you did your studying , what country ?

I came to live in California and with Genealogy Studies I am constantly asked any of these questions pertaining to history , why - how - when ,into every little detail. The older population , that is doing the genealogy research , knows absolutely zilch and never had any classes teaching them a n y of the European history , other than WW I or WW II connected so-called history (propaganda).

 I concern myself with the truth.

                                           H. Jonat

Hi H. Jonat. I have looked at your homepage http://www.crystalbay.net/prussia-baltic/ (it is yours, right?) and the various entries you have added to Wikipedia. And I have no doubts that you are very concerned about stuff related to Prussia in the past. But like Michael Tinkler and J Hofmann Kemp I also find your entries rather biased. I know that Wikipedia is self-correcting in the sense that someone else can allways edit your stories. But it would be a great help if you tried to write the whole story from the beginning. --css