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

MichaelTinkler offers:

The study of 'History' is more complicated than family names in written records. I have a great deal of respect for the practice of genealogy (my mother is a serious amateur genealogist; she is not interested in working on any other families so she sees no need to become a certified professional genealogist), but genealogists must be (and generally are) aware that church records have a severe weakness - personal names are as readily changed as clothing. In the 19th and the first two thirds of the twentieth centuries archaeologists who excavated graves and grave goods made many assumptions about the ethnicity of those buried in the graves based on jewelry found with the bones. No one ever seems to have considered the (surprisingly simple) question of fashion - could it be possible that in the past people wore jewelry not related to their ethnicity, but that of a more powerful or a more novel ethnic group? The answer given by contemporary archaeologists and historians is "Yes. That happened." Archaeologists have reexamined many old recorded digs and discovered many graves with MIXED styles of jewelry. Just as people marry across ethnic lines, they wear jewelry without regard to later archaeologists. The study of ethnicity in the medieval and early modern period has been completely revolutionized in the last 25 years by this kind of thinking. Older published sources are not to be relied on for that. Family names are very unstable, too. If your parish priest is German, he may write down your name the way a German would spell it. He may translate your name into a German occupation-name. You, of course, may be ethnically something else and choose to speak German and raise your children speaking German. Linguistic identity and ethnic identity are very unstable.

Old maps: old maps frequently represented the wishes of rulers rather than reality. Old maps cannot be used uncritically - who commissioned the map? Who made the drawings? Who published the map? Who REPUBLISHED the map, and was it still accurate, or was it just a lazy publisher? Aerial views of cities published in the Renaissance (Duerer, for instance) are almost entirely imaginary - remember, they could NOT work from an aerial photograph, but HAD to work from imagination.

I put up a note about why one cannot trust Tacitus on the German information in general - he was not an anthropologist; he did not speak any Germanic language; he was using the Germans as a counter-example to what he saw as the decadence of the Romans. If you think of Rousseau's 'noble savage' you won't be far off of Tacitus's ideal German. A 17th century history of the Holy Roman Empire is interesting, but not useful for a 21st century encyclopedia. J. Hoffmann Kemp may be able to suggest a more contemporary German language source for you to work from.

Just some pointers to why J. Hoffmann Kemp and I are busy revising your entries - we are working from the paradigm of modern scholarship. --MichaelTinkler

Thanks, all! My own answers below (not nearly as good as Michael Tinkler's) in Italics:

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 think that this is what we call in English a "cop-out." If you are going to contribute articles, then i think you are obliged to make them readable and useful.

I have no objection to your sources, only the way in which you misuse them. If you are using maps from different eras, then you are obliged (if you believe in scholarly integrity) to explain that your evidence pertains to a different time period. The fact that, for example, Strasbourg/Strassburg? was a Frankish city that at times was included in the HRE in no way makes it German or its inhabitants Germans, although many were of German origin. In fact, there are many people living in Alsace-Lorraine (formerly Lotharingia) with German last names who consider themselves French.

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 not sure what you want me to look at. I don't see any actual records, only listings of what records are available and the different place-names for cross-reference for each town

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 am sure many of us would like to see this. Could you please paste the url here? Again, I urge you to use your evidence in context. The HRE in the 16th c. was very different from that in the 12th. Also, if I remember correctly, the Emperors in the 16th century were not even necessarily German -- weren't Maximilian and Charles V both Burgundian and related closely to the rulers of Spain? Much of what you seem to believe about the HRE was its own propaganda. The HRE was not one coherent Empire, ruled by one person. There were imperial lands throughout the Empire, but the Emperor certainly did not have practical authority over the kings and princes who ruled within that Empire -- unless they chose to allow that authority.

So what kind of logic are you using ?

You surmise correctly. And there is much scholarly debate over whether even Native Americans are native -- or which groups are the most native. I think most scholars agree that the inhabitants of modern-day England are the result of centuries of interbreeding of each wave of invaders or migrants, so that genetically, the English are Celtic, Roman, and various types of German.

I have read and understood the differences between Volksdeutsche and Reichs-Deutsche. I have addressed the issue of Volkdeutsche in greater depth because your adherence to the term is problematic in an historical sense. Even if you are not utilizing 18th and 19th century sources, you are making assumptions that are no longer considered valid by most of the scholarly community. German scholars have long been at the forefront of Place-name studies (Ortsnamenkunde), but recent scholarship has shown that too many assumptions have been made. For example, the article on the Bavarians assumes that the Bavarians are descendants of the Boii and/or the Baioariorum. Hoever, in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, we can clearly see that the Bavarian Agilolfing dukes belonged to a leading family with its roots in Alsace/Elsaess? -- which, according to your methodology, would make them Suebi! Moreover, the Agilolfinger were also tied closely by marriage and blood to the Pippinids, whom we also name the Carolingians, which would indicate that they were Franks.

My point is and has been that none of the evidence provides clear answers, only more questions.

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

I have studied at two US universities, the Universitaet Augsburg, and done doctoral research at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Archiv fuer Landesgeschichte in Hessen (Marburg). I agree that many Americans are ignorant of European history. I am not necessarily one of them.

What, in your opinion, is an example of this propaganda?

 Last question - answer first -

just go into a Barnes & Noble or any other bookstore and look at the history section.

It is full of books flashing Hitler, Nazis, etc etc

Go try to find some German History books which cover the last 2000 years , other than the Nazi time.

This leaves me with the conclusion that Americans are totally obsessed with Hitlerism and bombing civilians , making wars. Americans love a good war.

Unfortunately Professors ,of whatever field , seem to be the only ones, who have any knowledge of history. The average person does not.

To the matter of the imperial record of 1600 let me give you the website to look at. You can also order a copy, I believe

       Please look at the emperors, kings, princes  etc of the empire
       That will take time , but it will answer your text above .

It will also show you that the government of Europe was united and totally different or whatever you may want to call it , using the 20st and 21st century difference of approach of nationalism .

Unfortunately it seem that so more knowledge the Professors aquire , so wordier explanations get , so less the average citizen can keep up.

After all is, history only there for Professors or is it there for everyone ?

In the meanwhile I have a husband , whose bones cannot be laid to rest in his homeland the city of Elbing. I have the knowledge , that his grandfather Paul Haase , baptized in the Catholic St. Nicolai church in Elbing is still laying out in the field at the creek of their property in Behrendshagen near Elbing (today in Polish Jagodnik). He stayed behind when the Soviet Army went through. My mother-inlaw with her four children ages 9 years to 9 months were supposed to be transported on the Wilhelm Gustloff , but wound up on the whaleboat Walter Rau instead.

I have the knowledge that Hannelore Poek (maiden name) , born near Elbing, remained in Behrendshagen (today Jagodnik).

She asked me a year ago to find some, any personal records for her . All birth certificates etc were taken from all the refugees/ expellees and from the 1 1/2 million Authochtones who after 1945 managed to stay in their homeland , despite everything.

If I seem a little oneside, then ask yourself , could that have anything to do with governments and the press (including Encyclopediaes) beeing totally othersided for 80 years ???

I appreciate all your comments. Thank you every one !!! H. Jonat

 For a look at the Holy Roman Empire in 1600

http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/eico.html