"European Tourist"
So I was looking into a disaster where a tour ship hit an oilrig in the English channel.
A "European tourist" is credited as taking charge in the chaos and leading people to safety.
It was a fairly standard story, but what annoyed me the most was that it said they got the tourist's name, but they refused to publish it.
I thought that maybe he didn't want people to know, but it seems he was very eager to be known and yet the newspapers made a choice to deliberately not give this guy any fame.
I thought that was disgusting so I thought I'd try to find out who it was.
This turned out to be a huge pain in the neck, because every source told the same story, they knew exactly who it was, but they all refused to divulge the information, despite the man himself wanting to be known.
I found out fairly quickly that he wasn't European at all and was in fact an American man from Wisconsin.
The news had made a false report, but the official sources had more detail.
It took me ages to find it, but I found the guy responsible.
A "Mr. Hitler".
Well that explains a lot.
Poor guy getting stuck with that surname.
Apparently, his family is from a completely unrelated branch of the family tree to that of the former leader of the Nazi party.
After World War 2 they emigrated to the states to avoid angry misinformed mobs in Europe.
Of course that was back in the 40's and this guy was several generations down the line and a proud American man with not a hateful bone in his body.
His family had been attacked many times in the US by mobs that thought they were related to the Nazi guy.
Because of that most of the family had changed their name either via deed poll or marrying into another family and adopting their name.
This larger than life American however refused to back down and abandon his name since apparently his part of the family were actually prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and many people who were captured had to abandon their Jewish heritage to escape their imprisonment and this American being part of the land of the free refused to give up his Jewish ancestry.
Yep, Hitler is a Jewish name, how ironic.
So you can see why he want to tell people this story, but I think the news did the right thing, by not publishing his name.
His family who are treated okay in their local area might be attacked by mobs from further afield.
It wasn't enough to make a video on, but I thought Tumblr might want to hear the story.
