Burchard Flakowski

[Franek Grabowski]

Originally Posted by RT

Very interesting, many germans hv the final "ski", is this "ski" rein polish, or some dialectal form for example Silesian or....

rémi

It could be estimated that about 50% of Germans have Slavic origin, mostly Western Slavic and Polish. In most cases their "ski" names indicate Polish origin. Silesian dialect is just Polish with plenty of German words, so Silesian names would be either Polish or German, but there is nothing between.

Originally Posted by ChrisM

Thanks very much for that, Franek. I now have an idea of the true origins of the name. As far as I can tell, it seems a fairly unusual one, or at least in Luftwaffe circles.

What I was doing in my summary of Flakowski’s life was to repeat a "joke" which might have originated from the man himself or was the creation of the American interviewer, Harry Flannery. Flannery says: "My man…..was Captain Burchard Flakowski. The name was an unusual one for a bomber pilot since flak in German means "anti-aircraft" and the ski on the end of a name means "son of". Thus the name of my interviewer was, appropriately enough, translatable as: Burchard, son of Anti-Aircraft."

Perhaps "nearly translatable" would have been a better way of expressing it!

Chris

It would not surprise me if Flakowski did not know what does it mean himself. Plenty of Germans with Polish names neither know their meaning nor how to pronounce them. It is also obvious that he must have been a subject of several jokes because of his name, and it is possible he just told it as a joke but it was miswritten by interviewer as an authentic meaning.
Flakowski is not a very common name ion Poland but you can find it on a google. Grabowski is a very popular name, but I am not awared of any Luftwaffe member of this name.