Talk:Alfred Zech

A fact from Alfred Zech appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 8 June 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that Alfred Zech received the Iron Cross when he was 12 years old? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2018/June. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Alfred Zech.

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As this is in the current DYK, I provisionally fixed this fast. Somebody please find out when Goldenau was really taken by the Soviets, because April 1945 is clearly wrong. April 20 was, according to the unanimous sources, the day of the awarding of the Iron Cross, not of the incident as claimed in the previous version. Also 'German general appeared at the family farm several days after the incident' seems dubious, as this was during a fast-moving Soviet offensive, a few days after the incident no German general would have been able to safely set a foot there. Seattle Jörg (talk) 06:21, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's possible he misremembered or lied, which is why this portion of the article is intentionally and carefully qualified "According to Zech". In consideration of OR, analysis as to the veracity of his claims will probably need to be saved for submission to a research journal or popular magazine, though, instead of being explored here, even if that may not be the most satisfactory outcome. Chetsford (talk) 06:43, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Why is the article under the name "Zech" when all the sources refer to him as "Czech" and AFAICT none of them use the other spelling? Gatoclass (talk) 14:46, 10 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The original Scherl Bilderdienst caption for the photo uses the name Zech and, since Zech is an existing German surname and Czech is not, I figured it was a reasonable assumption that the English-language sources were a continuation of an original spelling corruption in the AP photo in which he originally appeared (e.g. reporting Connor Pain as Connor Spain). Our pre-existing articles in other languages use a mix (Zech nl:Alfred Zech and Czech fr:Alfred Czech) and some offline sources I didn't use (the Guido Knopp documentary "Hitler's Children") also use the two spellings interchangeably. That said, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to flip the two and make Czech the primary, since COMMONNAME would seem to support it at the least. Chetsford (talk) 18:42, 10 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There is a photo of Alfred Czech's grave at the Kleingladbach cemetery (tracesofwar). The date of birth and death are correct, and the spelling is Czech. It is conceivable that this name seemed too Slavic in 1945 (there are enough examples of renaming Slavic place names in Wartheland and elsewhere) and it was somewhat "Germanised" into Zech for the news. Of course, it could simply have been an acoustic error, since both names sound the same.--2003:F4:E717:F241:1DD7:82E7:6AC8:3E3C (talk) 22:29, 24 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]