Month: June 2021

Natural Splendour of the Arrow Lakes

/ Peter Klopp / 15 Comments

Wednesday’s Photos

The Joy of Raised Garden Beds

About a month ago, I took you on a tour around our yard where flowers played a dominant role and the garden was a little add-on section of my post. Today I present to you the raised garden beds which generated quite a bit of interest. As a retired school teacher, I enjoy the simplicity and reduced work load when growing our vegetables and strawberries in the raised beds. The boxes are very simple to construct from rough cedar boards. I used plastic sheets to cover the ground so I won’t have any problems with weeds. I got the black earth from a nearby garden centre. Bush beans, lettuce, carrots, and strawberries are our favourite fruits and vegetables. Enjoy.

Walter Panknin (1898 – 1977) and His Family – Part 13

/ Peter Klopp / 12 Comments

The Vienna Slivovitz Hunter

Being cut off from his unit in Zavidovici, Papa returned to Vienna to report for military duty and to prepare a newly formed battalion to defend the city. Fortunately for him, there was not much action during the next two months except for the endless allied bombing raids on the capital of Austria. Since there were virtually no German fighter planes, American bombers brazenly made daily attacks in broad daylight on the beautiful city on the River Danube. With the regularity of a clock, they flew in from their air bases in France.

Vienna Amusement Park Prater in the 1930s – Photo Credit: pinterest.com

Ignoring the lethal blows to entire neighbourhoods, Papa remarked in one of his letters employing his peculiar kind of sarcasm that the Americans were knocking down one café after another. He would soon have none left to go and enjoy with a colleague a game of chess while sipping coffee and tasting delicious Viennese pastry. Knowing that the war would soon be over and all his money worthless, Papa spent his off-duty time scouring the local liquor stores for the liquid gold, his cherished slivovitz. He perceived it to be more valuable than the war-tarnished currency of the German Reich. On his final official leave at the end of February, Papa had assembled a dozen 1-litre bottles of his favourite plum brandy, for which he had a wooden crate especially built for the transport on the train to Gotha. However, he did not quite satisfy the desire for this precious drink. Indeed, he had also considered its trade-in value for scarce essential items later down the road. He managed to scrounge up a keg containing about 10 litres of slivovitz, which he stuffed into a huge rucksack.

Vienna Coffee House – Photo Credit: unsplash.com

With all these goods unavailable in Gotha and a suitcase full of foodstuff for the family way back home, he had to struggle to make his way to the railway station with a rucksack on his back, suitcase on the one hand and a small cart loaded with a box full of bottles on the other. People must have watched in amazement the most peculiar sight of an army officer that Papa offered to the curious Viennese onlookers. He was homeward bound and did not care much about the image that a German army officer was supposed to present to the public eye. Despite constant propaganda promising final victory, Papa and everyone else knew that the war was lost and that it was time to think of survival and to ignore how ridiculous one might look when plodding along with a load of valuables on the sidewalks of Vienna.

Natural Splendour of the Arrow Lakes

/ Peter Klopp / 15 Comments

Wednesday’s Photos

Wildflowers at the Lookout

Last week I postponed the presentation of wildflowers that were blooming at our lookout south of Fauquier BC. Now that the summer has officially started and a major possibly long-lasting heat wave is upon us, I would like to share with you the images of the wildflowers I captured on June 10. I do not know the names of the flowers on pictures 2 and 5. Perhaps the two Steves who have an outstanding knowledge of wildflowers can help me with the identification. The first photo with the daisy also shows the Arrow Lake in the background giving a clear idea of how high the lookout is above the lake. I discovered the bee on the tigerlily only after processing the image. Enjoy.

Walter Panknin (1898 – 1977) and His Family – Part 12

/ Peter Klopp / 17 Comments

Fate or Coincidence?

But more important was the second reason for letting me dwell on the dark side of the postwar Yugoslav history. When Germany was losing the war on all fronts, Papa had been granted leave because of his twins’ birth. He would have most certainly died if not on the atonement marches, then most certainly later, executed as an officer of the much-hated German army.

Mutti Panknin with the Twins Walter and Gertrud

When Papa told me his survival story on one of our walks in the lush Gruga Park near Velbert in July 1968, I could not help but notice the similarity between the miraculous escape from death between Biene’s Papa and our family. Was it a coincidence? I remember well my thoughts on the strange circumstances under which Biene and I met at Lake Baldenay and how, against all odds, our relationship developed into a lifelong union. Some may claim that everything in life is coincidental. But as for me, I take comfort in the way God, through our faith, provides the means to go beyond a fatalistic attitude and offers deep spiritual meaning to life even in the midst of death.

Proud Papa Panknin

The twins Walter and Biene were already more than two months old when Papa was finally able to hold them in his arms. When looking at the photograph of the proud father looking down on his precious brood, I had a rare glimpse of true happiness at the sight of new life that transcends all human tragedy. Despite the spectre of death and destruction at the front lines and the constant bombing raids, Papa, for that short moment in time, seemed far removed from the ravages of war and the worries of an uncertain future. His smile reflected a genuine picture of paternal pride, which prompted him to muster his inner resources in the battle of survival during the final stages of WW2, no longer just for himself but more importantly for his wife and children. The one-week leave and his visit at Gotha with Mutti, his two babies, Grandma Gertrud from Berlin and his adopted daughter Elsbeth came to an end much too soon.

Splendour of the Arrow Lakes

/ Peter Klopp / 26 Comments

Wednesday’s Photos

Two Moose Having Breakfast

Last Sunday my wife and I went to our favourite outlook to capture a few wildflowers. We were very happy with the results and were eager to rush home to view and edit the photos for publication. On our way home, we drove by the nearby duck pond. To our great surprise, we spotted two moose leisurely munching away at the delicious leaves. It was unbelievable luck to see them so close and to have my movie camera with me as well. So I decided to publish the video instead and leave the wildflower photos for next Wednesday. Enjoy.

Walter Panknin (1898 – 1977) and His Family – Part 11

/ Peter Klopp / 20 Comments

A Gruesome History Lesson

No Photos Here – Let The Words Suffice

In response to the wartime atrocities committed by the Nazis, the partisans stilled their thirst for revenge first on members of the Waffen-SS. According to a report, on Pentecost Sunday, 450 soldiers were shot near Reichenberg, their arms tied together with telegraph wire in groups of six, all shot in the back. At the capture of Krusevac, 2,000 soldiers of the “Prinz Eugen” division were murdered. In Reichenegg, the partisans forced POWs into a bunker and dynamited it. When the stench became too intense, survivors had to cover the bunker with dirt. At Susegrad, partisans undressed 90 soldiers and chased them into the Sava River. Whenever possible the inmates buried the dead and marked the graves with stones or wooden crosses. In 1948, after the last POWs had left the provisional camps, locals dispersed the rocks, gathered the crosses and burned them.
Most of these former regular Wehrmacht troops perished in postwar Yugoslavia in three stages. As already mentioned above, during the first stage more than 7,000 captured German troops died in Communist-organized “atonement marches” stretching 1200 km from the southern border of Austria to the northern border of Greece. During the second phase, in late summer 1945, many German soldiers in captivity were summarily executed or thrown alive into large karst pits along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. In the third stage, 1945-1955, an additional 50,000 perished as forced labourers due to malnutrition and exhaustion.
The total number of German losses in Yugoslav captivity after the end of the war including ethnic “Danube German” civilians and soldiers, and “Reich” Germans, may therefore be conservatively estimated at 120,000 killed, starved, worked to death, or missing. One may wonder why I would go to such length to describe the gruesome details of past events in an area of seemingly minor importance to us. There are two reasons. Firstly, I noticed so many similarities in the brutal treatment of the German civilian populations in East Prussia and Pomerania, where my parents and grandparents had their roots, and Yugoslavia, where Biene’s Papa spent most of the war years. I found it appalling that so little can be found in today’s historical literature about these events.

Additional information on the treatment of other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleiburg_repatriations