History Thread!

[The guy from the Vale]

@Pony Queen Jace prompted me to write this piece about my family history. I figure it fits far better here than in the US politics thread, with which it is only connected by the thinnest of tangential threads. The original question was about German sentiment on the territorial losses after WWII. Anyway, on to the story.

 

My maternal grandfather was born in the mid-1920es in Southern East Prussia, somewhere between Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and Danzig (now Gdansk). He was the second child of what would become seven. His father, a devout member of the Prussian section of Open Brethren, joined the NSDAP in 1933 and encouraged his children to join the Hitlerjugend. In his memoirs, my grandfather chillingly describes his pride as a teenager in rising through the ranks of the HJ. In 1939, his father, a carpenter, was given a position as civil engineer for a newly conquered Polish-Pomeranian town that had, before WW1, been German. So they moved there. His older brother joined the Wehrmacht at the age of 18, and fought on the Eastern front for several years. My grandfather got an apprenticeship as a carpenter, but had to finish school early when he was drafted at the age of 18, too; because of his background, he was made a pioneer. He, too, fought on the Eastern front, in contrast to his younger brother, who was drafted to the air force. (Tangentially related: this granduncle of mine became a British POW, met a nurse from Indiana while a POW, married her, and ultimately went to Alaska to be a missionary to the Inuit... where he ultimately died in a plane crash. Planes and their crashed shaped his life.)

In January 1945, while still a teenager, my grandfather was shot in the knee. There was no way to treat his wounds in the Courland Pocket, and so he was shipped to Danzig with one of the last ships going out of Libau (now Liepaja, Latvia). However, the hospital was massively overcrowded due to the collapsing Eatern front, and so his wound kept being untreated until the advancing Russian forces led to the evacuation of the hospital in early March, and so he was handed through various hospitals until early May. Only after the German capitulation, four months after being wounded, were there the resources to treat his injury in Lüneburg. In the meantime, the wound had festered and he was likely to die of sepsis. Amputation at the hip was the only way to save his life.

Through some luck, he managed to find his family, who had had to flee from Pomerania - they were living only fifty kilometers from his hospital. Only his older brother was missing - his fate remained unclear until a few years ago, we learned he had died on the Vistula Spit, less than 100 km away from his birthplace. My grandfather went on to get a civil engineering degree, seeing how he couldn't work as a carpenter any longer with only one leg, married a nurse who had also fled (though from Silesia, not Pomerania), and started working at a government job. He resented Brandt for officially ceding his birthplace and the place of his youth to Poland in 1970. My mother still remembers him ranting the slogan "Dreigeteilt niemals!" (Never tripartite, referring to West Germany, East Germany and the Polish territories) at that time.

Shortly after his 80th birthday, my aunt accompanied him on a trip to Poland, to the places of his youth. Few places still looked the way he remembered them. But the places he could recognize were populated by younger, Polish children. Only then did he realize that this wasn't his home any longer - it was theirs. He kept on living for close to another decade until he died on the seventieth anniversary of the loss of his leg in May 2015.

[Jace, Extat]

2 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

@Pony Queen Jace prompted me to write this piece about my family history. I figure it fits far better here than in the US politics thread, with which it is only connected by the thinnest of tangential threads. The original question was about German sentiment on the territorial losses after WWII. Anyway, on to the story.

 

My maternal grandfather was born in the mid-1920es in Southern East Prussia, somewhere between Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and Danzig (now Gdansk). He was the second child of what would become seven. His father, a devout member of the Prussian section of Open Brethren, joined the NSDAP in 1933 and encouraged his children to join the Hitlerjugend. In his memoirs, my grandfather chillingly describes his pride as a teenager in rising through the ranks of the HJ. In 1939, his father, a carpenter, was given a position as civil engineer for a newly conquered Polish-Pomeranian town that had, before WW1, been German. So they moved there. His older brother joined the Wehrmacht at the age of 18, and fought on the Eastern front for several years. My grandfather got an apprenticeship as a carpenter, but had to finish school early when he was drafted at the age of 18, too; because of his background, he was made a pioneer. He, too, fought on the Eastern front, in contrast to his younger brother, who was drafted to the air force. (Tangentially related: this granduncle of mine became a British POW, met a nurse from Indiana while a POW, married her, and ultimately went to Alaska to be a missionary to the Inuit... where he ultimately died in a plane crash. Planes and their crashed shaped his life.)

In January 1945, while still a teenager, my grandfather was shot in the knee. There was no way to treat his wounds in the Courland Pocket, and so he was shipped to Danzig with one of the last ships going out of Libau (now Liepaja, Latvia). However, the hospital was massively overcrowded due to the collapsing Eatern front, and so his wound kept being untreated until the advancing Russian forces led to the evacuation of the hospital in early March, and so he was handed through various hospitals until early May. Only after the German capitulation, four months after being wounded, were there the resources to treat his injury in Lüneburg. In the meantime, the wound had festered and he was likely to die of sepsis. Amputation at the hip was the only way to save his life.

Through some luck, he managed to find his family, who had had to flee from Pomerania - they were living only fifty kilometers from his hospital. Only his older brother was missing - his fate remained unclear until a few years ago, we learned he had died on the Vistula Spit, less than 100 km away from his birthplace. My grandfather went on to get a civil engineering degree, seeing how he couldn't work as a carpenter any longer with only one leg, married a nurse who had also fled (though from Silesia, not Pomerania), and started working at a government job. He resented Brandt for officially ceding his birthplace and the place of his youth to Poland in 1970. My mother still remembers him ranting the slogan "Dreigeteilt niemals!" (Never tripartite, referring to West Germany, East Germany and the Polish territories) at that time.

Shortly after his 80th birthday, my aunt accompanied him on a trip to Poland, to the places of his youth. Few places still looked the way he remembered them. But the places he could recognize were populated by younger, Polish children. Only then did he realize that this wasn't his home any longer - it was theirs. He kept on living for close to another decade until he died on the seventieth anniversary of the loss of his leg in May 2015.

That's some real shit right there man. Thank you for sharing. I've read about the evacuations from places like Memel and the human suffering is no less for the fact that it was Nazis at the top of the food chain.

[Astromech]

19 hours ago, Yukle said:

 

Loosely connected to that, but in the same geographic region, I read a few chapters in my various books about the Mexican-American war. I knew that the areas of the USA with Spanish names were legacies of this war, but when you actually look at a map, Mexico lost half of its land to the war!

I also wonder if Texas had any plans at all about remaining independent, given how readily and rapidly they joined the union. It would have been a dangerous gamble to be a buffer state between two countries aiming to continue their expansion.

I then went on to read about the California good rush. You could pretty much count on one hand the miners who made any wealth from it, but the merchants, artisans and shippers made a fortune. As did the madames; apparently significant numbers of early saloons were setup by savvy women who noted the gender imbalance in mining towns, and decided to meet the demand for... “companionship”  Which is only partially a euphemism - prostitutes charged men to just sit down and have a conversation with a woman, as for many it had been months since they had been able to do that.

Funny you should mention these two events in Western U.S. history. I've had H.W. Brands Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence - And Changed America, and The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and The New American Dream on my TBR list for a  while now and have been leaning more and more towards to starting the latter.

 

[DMC]

On 2/24/2018 at 5:26 PM, theguyfromtheVale said:

The original question was about German sentiment on the territorial losses after WWII. Anyway, on to the story.

That was a really cool story man, thanks for sharing.  My dad's dad was USAAF.  I don't know what he did, and he died around ten years ago.  Those memories are gold.

[Yukle]

On 2/25/2018 at 9:26 AM, theguyfromtheVale said:

@Pony Queen Jace prompted me to write this piece about my family history. I figure it fits far better here than in the US politics thread, with which it is only connected by the thinnest of tangential threads. The original question was about German sentiment on the territorial losses after WWII. Anyway, on to the story.

 

My maternal grandfather was born in the mid-1920es in Southern East Prussia, somewhere between Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and Danzig (now Gdansk). He was the second child of what would become seven. His father, a devout member of the Prussian section of Open Brethren, joined the NSDAP in 1933 and encouraged his children to join the Hitlerjugend. In his memoirs, my grandfather chillingly describes his pride as a teenager in rising through the ranks of the HJ. In 1939, his father, a carpenter, was given a position as civil engineer for a newly conquered Polish-Pomeranian town that had, before WW1, been German. So they moved there. His older brother joined the Wehrmacht at the age of 18, and fought on the Eastern front for several years. My grandfather got an apprenticeship as a carpenter, but had to finish school early when he was drafted at the age of 18, too; because of his background, he was made a pioneer. He, too, fought on the Eastern front, in contrast to his younger brother, who was drafted to the air force. (Tangentially related: this granduncle of mine became a British POW, met a nurse from Indiana while a POW, married her, and ultimately went to Alaska to be a missionary to the Inuit... where he ultimately died in a plane crash. Planes and their crashed shaped his life.)

In January 1945, while still a teenager, my grandfather was shot in the knee. There was no way to treat his wounds in the Courland Pocket, and so he was shipped to Danzig with one of the last ships going out of Libau (now Liepaja, Latvia). However, the hospital was massively overcrowded due to the collapsing Eatern front, and so his wound kept being untreated until the advancing Russian forces led to the evacuation of the hospital in early March, and so he was handed through various hospitals until early May. Only after the German capitulation, four months after being wounded, were there the resources to treat his injury in Lüneburg. In the meantime, the wound had festered and he was likely to die of sepsis. Amputation at the hip was the only way to save his life.

Through some luck, he managed to find his family, who had had to flee from Pomerania - they were living only fifty kilometers from his hospital. Only his older brother was missing - his fate remained unclear until a few years ago, we learned he had died on the Vistula Spit, less than 100 km away from his birthplace. My grandfather went on to get a civil engineering degree, seeing how he couldn't work as a carpenter any longer with only one leg, married a nurse who had also fled (though from Silesia, not Pomerania), and started working at a government job. He resented Brandt for officially ceding his birthplace and the place of his youth to Poland in 1970. My mother still remembers him ranting the slogan "Dreigeteilt niemals!" (Never tripartite, referring to West Germany, East Germany and the Polish territories) at that time.

Shortly after his 80th birthday, my aunt accompanied him on a trip to Poland, to the places of his youth. Few places still looked the way he remembered them. But the places he could recognize were populated by younger, Polish children. Only then did he realize that this wasn't his home any longer - it was theirs. He kept on living for close to another decade until he died on the seventieth anniversary of the loss of his leg in May 2015.

This is my favourite post on the whole thread. It's so personal and poignant, thanks for sharing.

[AncalagonTheBlack]

For those bored with Eurocentric history ,here's my favourite professor from Oxford,Peter Frankopan, giving a talk in Chennai.I highly recommend his books if you're bored with Rome,Rome and more Rome!

Eastern Sunrise: A New History of the World - An Illustrated lecture by Peter Frankopan

 

[Yukle]

16 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said:

For those bored with Eurocentric history ,here's my favourite professor from Oxford,Peter Frankopan, giving a talk in Chennai.I highly recommend his books if you're bored with Rome,Rome and more Rome!

Eastern Sunrise: A New History of the World - An Illustrated lecture by Peter Frankopan

 

Sorry! Partly my fault there. That's my area of study.

I've opened up a tab for this! I want to watch it!

The only part of Indian history I've read much about is the Mughal Period. I can't remember why, but I do remember the readings. It was fascinating.