The fascinating life of Felix von Luckner
As I've written about before, one of my guilty pleasures - okay, it's really a bad habit - is skipping from page to page across the Internet. The worst single site to undulge myself this way, without a doubt, is Wikipedia, where I can refresh my memory of things I know, and learn new things about what I don't. I used to do this for hours when I was a kid using a standard encyclopedia, following the "see also" references at the end of the articles to related articles in other books. Wikipedia's constant hyperlinking throughout an article make this a perpetual pastime if you allow it to burn through your day. Unfortunately, it's quite easy for me to lose track of hours this way, especially in the biographical and history-related articles. Since anyone (with any agenda) can edit articles, it's information is always suspect (such as this manufactured twisting of a simple misstatement by Bill O'Reilly), but damn it's way too interesting, and in my own perverted mind quite fun.
Today's argument at Ace of Spades over the revelation by Nobel prize-winning German author Guenter Grass that he once served in the Waffen-SS, led me to look up the organization's entry. I then clicked the link to compare it to the entry for Wehrmacht. I perused a few of the listings for prominent members of the German military, and found out that while Erich von Manstein eventually reached the rank of Generalfeldmarschall, he was fired by Hitler for insubordination, and sat out the end of the war. I contrasted his refusal to join in the assassination attempt on his boss with the suicide of Erwin Rommel. Rommel (I hadn't known) was a recipient of the Pour le Mérite, an old Prussian military award I've always had a fascination with. Established by Frederick the Great, during WWI it was famously awarded to Max Immelmann, where it got the nickname "The Blue Max". Other recipients included Manfred von Richthofen (the infamous "Red Baron"), and Hermann Göring.
One man also attributed by Wikipedia to be a recipient was Felix von Luckner, but it is doubtful he was, since he was not repatriated to Germany until after the downfall of the Empire.
That should not detract from von Luckner's accomplishments, however. If even half of what Wikipedia says about him is true, he was a remarkable man. Most notably, he captured and sunk a dozen ships during the war, while only losing a single life - on either side - and that death was apparently from a secondary explosion, not from direct fire. At one point, his ship was wrecked on a reef, and he sailed thousands of miles in an open boat in an attempt to capture a new vessel. He was taken prisoner, but tried to escape. After the war, he was awarded honorary citizenship by several American cities. A dedicated Freemason, he would not cooperate with Hitler's Nazi party, and in 1943 he saved the life of a Jewish woman. He negotiated the surrender of the city of Halle, and in 1959 was featured in an episode of This Is Your Life.
Read von Luckner's whole entry and you're left wondering how much of it must be embellished, it reads so much like a tacky novel. But quite often, truth is stranger than fiction, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.
