Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery

Hello everybody.

I have always been quite interrested in my heritage and in regards to that i have very conflicting evidence and pointers as to what i can regard myself as. My grandmothers family seems on the surface to be german, spoke german, german names. The information i got was that they were from West Prussia. I have done research and taken my family tree beyond my grandmothers parents to see if that was true.

What i can see is that, my grandmother was born outside Gdansk in 1933, which was called Danzig back then. She was born "Irmgard Eichler" What then suprised me greatly was that her parrents had adopted the name Eichler. But actually their birth names were very different.

Their names seems to be german first names but with polish sounding last names??? whats going on there?

Their original names were:
-August Dombrowski
-Luise Lorbitzki

They seem to have been from around Tczew and Malbork, kujawsko pomorskie kinda region i think its called.
When i go one line further back last names are again polish sounding to me:
-Dombrowski
-Lorbitzki
-Jaknbowski
-Schmuschinski

But again with german first names, like Agnes, Anna and Johann.
Also what is interresting is that they are Catholic and not protestants!!!!!

What are the history around this? Why german first names? Was this common back then and do you think they were poles ethnically based on this information?

They could be Kaszub (as Gunther Grass said "too Polish for the Germans and too German for the Poles", although it's worth remembering that distinctions based on today's nation states and ethnicities were once far more blurred than they are now.

That area once had it's own Baltic identity, something which largely died with the post-war expulsions and artificial homogenisation.

Maybe not common, but certainly widespread. I would see it simply as an adaptation to the circumstances - same as the Poles who moved and settled in the west of the German Empire. Being ethnically Polish? Likely that they were at some point, but judging from the information you gave they were "prussianized" or "germanized" over the centuries.

Grass though was technically "half-Kaszub", since his father was an ethnic Aryan German, hence his conscription into the Hitler Youth, albeit not voluntarily:-)

"Conscription" and "voluntary" are mutually exclusive. The kids had to join the HJ or BDM, respectively.

That's typical german names...at least every third full blooded German has a "ski" in his name, heh:)

You mean like Pope Benedikt?
Not everyone jumped on the NS bandwagon.

Being forced to join the organization didn't mean you agreed with Nazi ideology. The children were 10 when they became part of the so-called "Jungvolk", and 13 when they became member of the Hitlerjugend. Too young to be interested in politics.

Yeah...in the GDR everybody was forced to join the "Pioniere" and later the "Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ)"...if that all had become true commies later the GDR would still exist!

Exactly

No mystery at all if you follow globally available internet information.

If you are white European ...

First you was nothing. Then something. Then cosmic dust. Then sun. Then earth and water. Then, let`s say, amoeba. Then monkey. Then Black human. Then White human. Then Serbian (ie Sarmatian). Rest is history and combinations.

And ask your grandmothers.

To my certain knowledge, folks, neither the Junge Pioniere nor the Boy Scouts were inculcated with racist ideology!
Once the poison of hatred has entered the blood stream, it takes a man or woman with the strength of G-d Himself and the patience of Job to rise above it and see life clearly as it is, untainted by

Nazi prejudice.

Ya think the Hitler Youth were just about hiking through the woods, pickin' wildberries, and singing songs??! Check out the stuff they were singing, and then come back and tell us whether "Die Fahne hoch.." is just good, clean innocent funLOL

If your theory would be correct, the fall of the Berlin Wall would have never happened.


I believe you were indoctrinated quite thoroughly yourself, my friend. Did your parents teach you that each and every German and Pole - no matter how old - had the hate towards Jews injected into their blood stream, as you say? No cure? Once infected, always infected?


That's the "Horst Wessel Lied". Not too much to do with the HJ or BDM.

Yup! He was probably told that modern Germans are still abit Nazis and always will be....they need to be watched!

You're definately not a Nazi.
But a small and scary proportion of Germans and especially Austrians are....The Austrians and Prussians were always the main problem....
But this is a cause for concern.
As in many countries at present,the rise of the left is largely causing this backlash.

Why is this a concern? Because it's in Germany and Austria? How about the UKIP, the Lega Nord, Front Nationale, Golden Dawn and all the others across the continent? I believe that the Germans will be the last ones in Europe who will fall for the brownshirts.

Is it just me or a the only real nazis left in the uk these days?

The thread was about Germany,so I addressed the subject.
The rise of the right is happening,in varying degrees all across the "Western World" and is largely fueled by the existence of th PC,"Progressive" Left.

Largely because the hobby horses of mainstream politicians no longer resonate with voters and the politicians aren't going to change just because the dumb elctorate is too stupid to understand their greatness.

This creates a vacuum into which populists of various stripes can flourish.
Too often established politicians try to lead when they should be following and we're seeing the result.

Spot on.

Quite the contrary, guys!

First off, TheOther, we are all quite aware that resistance occurs, such as the Fall of the Wall in '89, when enough right-thinking people band together to defeat evil and are able to pull it off. It sounds simpleminded, yet it's so.

Moreover, I wasn't "indoctrinated" to believe that a leopard never changes its spots. All I'm saying is that the change doesn't, indeed cannot, occur over night. I'm talking decades, maybe generations.

Your theory was that once the Nazi ideology had been implanted into the heads of kids as young as ten, they were lost forever. That is simply nonsense because - as the people in Poland and East Germany have shown in 1989 - people might conform with the system on the outside, but deep down inside they are opponents or simply unhappy with the current system. Fascism or communism - doesn't matter.


Here it is again: collective guilt over generations. Forget about it, Lyzko. As much as I understand where you're coming from, that won't happen. A five year old at the end of the war is NOT an evil Nazi, no matter how you want to put it. He or she is not responsible for what their parents did; nor are their children or grandchildren.


There's a big difference between American Jews and those who live in Israel: the Israelis are much more relaxed and open when it comes to Germans and Poles than the close-minded Americans will ever be. Don't say it isn't so, just ask someone from Israel.

As an ex GDR Ossi I probably are some kind of hybrid...the genetically inherited Nazism + the indoctrinated communism = Nanism????

My children will be born Nanists of course also...they will never have the chance of independent thinking...poor sods.

(or does communist indoctrination of the parents annuls somehow the genetically inherited fascism from the grandparents in the later babies??? Hmmm......)

LOL! Is your name Adolf Marx by any chance?

Yeah...and my first words were "Heil Mama" shortly followed by me humming the "Internationale"..

The Israeli Jews also depend considerably on The Federal Republic for their Mercedes, fire trucks, and numerous technological advances.
If I depended daily on meat and potatoes stuff for my subsistence, even if it came from an erstwhile enemy, guess I'd be "relaxed" too!

:-)

My point again is simply that what many of you people pop psychologically blithely deem American-Jewish paranoia, is just what I would call being realistic, that's all.

Jews never chose their role as victims (collaborators in far too many instances for comfort), nor did post-War German generations having nothing to do with Hitler or the Holocaust choose to be born in the shadows of such a twisted past.

That's simply the way things worked out, no more, no less.

You are talking crap!

And if only because you need an official ID for your belief.
But what about all the millions of immigrants now with a german ID, many of them immigrating from former occupied countries, their children being born here = guilty by being german nationals?

You have attacked me for being Nazi the moment you knew I was a German from Berlin with your stupid essays through the forum mail. Would you had done the same with me being USian or Canadian or Brazilian or whatever? Not knowing or caring if my parents where full blooded Germans just having emigrated after the war?

I very much doubt that! The difference is all in your head.

You are a little bigot and xenophobe, not more not less. Please **** off!

I disagree with you. The attitude towards Germans and Poles is a lot more negative amongst middle-aged and older American Jews (especially from FL and NYC) than it is amongst Israelis. This topic came up a few years ago already, if I recall correctly.


They mostly depend on financial and military aid from the USA... :)

...and their ability to see ahead and act on it. 1967 and 1973 come to mind. Israel knows how to fight and win. The US is still trying to figure it out.

Bratwurst Boy, I certainly wasn't attacking you for being a German. Utterly ridiculous assertion, merely a sign of latent paranoia on YOUR part, not mine!!

I never attack Tacitus on this Forum, also a German, because his arguments/posted messages are always broad-minded, intelligent, logical, and informative, rarely (if ever) yielding to the excesses of temper.

If I "attacked" you, then it surely wasn't for being German, rather for sometimes being a horse's ass!!
:-)