Talk:Felix von Luckner

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A friend told me Felix was also awarded the Victoria cross, thus making him unique by having receieved medals from both sides for the same war.

Can anyone corroborate this?

I have seen him in a robe that looked like a Templars, A big Templar-like cross on the side. I can attest that he was incredibly strong. He cave me a bent coin, and it was years later that I understood the "magic" : He had bent it with his fingers when handing it to me in Malmö.

DanielDemaret 13:47, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Felix certainly doesn't appear on the list of Victoria Cross winners, and I can think of no reason why he should have been awarded one. It is, however, by no means unusual for someone to be decorated by both sides in a war, particularly if they were spies or double agents, Juan Pujol Garcia ("Garbo") for example, got both the Iron Cross and an MBE. -- Arwel 02:06, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Just another family fable then. We have too many of those :) DanielDemaret 11:05, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Apparently, there's some disagreement if he ever received the Blue Max as well.Opusaug 18:03, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, yes, it looks fairly convincing that someone misinterpreted the other cross he wore at his neck for the Max. I'll just take that sentence out - we can always put it back if it turns out he did have the Max after all! -- Arwel (talk) 19:01, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

The Robe with the cross mentioned above may have something to do with the fact that Felix von Luckner was a member of the freemasonry-lodge "Zur goldenen Kugel".83.71.26.153 07:07, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

The Life Savior

I'm from Germany and I must say that I am terribly disappointed with this article. Here's why: During the Nazi regime, some Jews managed to live in hiding in Berlin. One day in 1943, Rosalinde Janson, a jewish woman whose parents were already deported to Auschwitz, lost her hiding, as the building was destroyed in a bomb raid. Luckner, who had visited the city, bypassed a scene where passports of people killed in the air raid where laid out on the street together with other stuff. He passed that pile and for a reason he could later not explain took one passport that was issued to a woman with the name of Frieda Schäfer. A short while later, Rosalinde Janson saw him, and in her desperation revealed her identity and her need for immediate help. Maybe she recognized him, as he was extremely popular in Germany. He has never been a Nazi, but it appears that he to a certain extend profited from the regime and its admiration of war heroes. Anyway, when approached by Rosalinde Janson, he immediately gave her the pass (and by this a new identity) and he even did something that probably was of even greater importance. He took her to Giesebrechtstraße 11, a side street of Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, where the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (SS main security service) had installed a secret Gestapo brothel with all rooms wired to listen to foreign diplomates talking when they started to brag after that had drunk and felt comfortable with a girl. The brothel of course was known to quite some people, however hardly anyone will have known that it was installed by the SS. Anyway, Luckner took her there as he obviously was on good terms with the landlady and arranged that she got a job in the kitchen. Most probably, her jewish identity had not been revealed then. Rosalinde Janson (or Frieda Schäfer now) survived the war and later went to New York. Here is where she met Luckner again in the fifties when he was guest in "That's your life" and was presented with her. For reasons unknown to me, the Yad Vashem comittee saw reasons not to declare Luckner one of the savior of jews. For Rosalinde Janson he surely was. Bodo. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.159.246.12 (talk) 01:35, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Statistics

A statistic about all the ships Felix von Luckner actually sank wouldn't be bad...

--Malbi 13:16, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

• • Something like this can be found here: SMS_Seeadler_(Windjammer) User:DanielDemaret June 10th 2006

Seeadler

His ship was a beauty. I bought it as a kit when I was a kid, and built it. If one can not find a fair image picture for the ship, perhaps one could build the kit again, and take a snapshot of it :) DanielDemaret 22:30, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Strength

How came this man was so strong? -The Bold Guy- 12:13, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

He ate his vegetables every day. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.209.12.67 (talk) 05:29, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Early life

The section about his early life is poorly written, adding to my suspicion that there's probably nothing citable about him Alastairward 13:44, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Von Luckners Cove

There is a beautiful bay at Red Mercury Island, off the coast of the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand, called Von Luckners Cove. This bay is supposedly where Felix stayed after his escape from Motuihe Island. Was he by himself? How long was he there? Was this before the capture of the Scow Moa? Or is the text Kermadec Islands a misprint of Mercury Islands perhaps? 122.57.114.49 (talk) 13:11, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Honolulu Mystery

This is from pages 35-37 of Count Luckner the Sea Devil from 1927. Does anyone have any insight into this? -- Limulus (talk) 10:16, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

In Honolulu I came upon a mystery, a fantastic mystery. It sounds unbelievable. I, myself, cannot explain it. Someday I hope to meet someone who can. One of the cabin boys aboard the Golden Shore was a German named Nauke. He was a violin maker by trade who had lost all his money and put to sea. We became fast friends. At Honolulu, Nauke invited me to go ashore with him. He brought along a can of condensed milk, a delicacy he knew I liked. We went sightseeing, and one of the sights was that of royalty. We stood outside of the palace grounds and watched the Hawaiian potentate while he had tea. He sat in a reed chair, and a couple of his wives stood beside him. A well-dressed gentleman who seemed to be on a stroll came up to us and began to talk to us in English.

"Don't waste your time on anything like that," he said. "Why not see the hula-hula dance?"

Nauke and I said all right, because the hula-hula was just what we did want to see.

The gentleman asked whether we had any better clothes to wear, to which we responded that we had not.

"It doesn't matter," he said, "I will provide you with a suit each."

He took us to a carriage drawn by four mules, and we all got in. I remarked to Nauke that the gentleman seemed to be a man of means. The gentleman turned his head.

"You mustn't talk so much," he said in German.

We came to a sugar plantation outside the town. The carriage stopped. Our host led us to a field path, until finally we came to a European house that had an air of distinction. Young colts grazed within a fence. Through the large windows of the stately villa I saw a row of large black tables such as are used in Germany, in a lecture room. Our host told Nauke to wait outside, and got a piece of cake for him. I whispered to Nauke not to go away.

I felt very strange on entering the house. The man showed me into a room next to the hall with the many tables. He was about to lock the door. I asked him not to. In the room was a long black table like those I had seen in the other room. The man said he was going upstairs to get a measuring tape. While he was gone, I noticed that under the table were two long narrow boxes with heavy locks on both sides. What if I should end up in one of those boxes! But I was confident. What had I learned boxing for?

The stranger returned with a tape. He measured my arm. Unlike a tailor, he measured from wrist to shoulder instead of from shoulder to wrist.

"Thirty," he announced, repeated it once, and muttered several other numbers between his teeth.

He pulled my coat halfway down my back, thus hindering my arms. He remarked that the light was poor, and turned me so that my back was toward the outer door. I could hear a creaking that told me that someone was moving behind that door. I noticed on the floor below the lower part of the table a disorderly pile of old clothes which looked as though they might be sailors' togs. The gentleman took off my belt and laid it on the table. Attached to the belt was my knife case. It was empty. I wondered where my knife might be. I remembered having it that morning. I had peeled potatoes with it. My blood froze as between empty bottles on the window sill I saw a chopped off human thumb with a long sinew attached. The gentleman was about to let down my trousers, which would have kept me from running.

I jerked my coat back into place, knocked the man down with a heavy blow, grabbed my empty knife case from the table, kicked open the nearest door to the open, and jumped out, shouting for Nauke. He appeared, still munching his piece of cake. We ran out into the plantation and threw ourselves down among the cane. There was the sound of a whistle and of galloping horses and running men. They were hunting for us along the roads. We groped our way among the fields, and, after losing our way several times, finally reached the beach.

We looked up an English-speaking policeman and told him our story. He shrugged his shoulders and said it would take a special force of detectives to discover how many sailors had mysteriously disappeared on the islands. Our captain merely remarked that we deserved a good thrashing for going ashore. We sailors on the ship laid a plan to take the plantation by storm on the following Sunday. But on Friday a quarantine was proclaimed, due to some infectious disease that was spreading, and the raid was off. In later times, I often inquired about the strange circumstance, and heard tales of white sailors disappearing on the islands, but never a solution of the mystery.

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Discrepancy between German Wiki and English language Wiki

This version is a very enjoyable read however it seems to reflect mainly the romanticised version of Luckner's life and times. The German version that references more hard sources than the English language ones includes material claiming different numbers of captured ships as well as other accounts of the events with the Seeadler, a considerably more sceptical account of his Nazi period and a sourced reference to being tried for assaulting his underage daughter from first marriage and intercourse with girls aged 8 and 11 (i.a. published in Spiegel but the accounts of the court case are public). A lot of information is drawn from a German language biography published in 1997.

In short the EN article really needs a critical analysis regarding the facts mentioned, substantial additions regarding his post WWI life and some uncomfortable truths about the man. 11:23, 29 July 2020 (UTC)~