"Hofschroer sectioned for life" Topic

According to this rather dodgy source:
link

Anyone know more? Last I heard he'd been extradited to Austria to face criminal charges for threatening a judge.

Of a piece with his historical claims, it must be said.

I got better things to worry about.

Wow!

"section" is British for "commit (someone) compulsorily to a psychiatric hospital in accordance with a section of a mental health act." According to Google.

Yep, dodgy source is right!

And the claim he has a million supporters?! So, presumably his Grandma, that's one, then you could add the dog and the count is two ….. we're just short the other 999, 998 or so!

At Hofschroer's paedophile porn trial, his brother testified IIRC that their mother's house was being sold to pay for care home costs.

Hofschroer decided this meant the police were stealing her house, and went on to accuse the police, his brother, local social services, the judge in the libel action he lost, and rival historians of planting 7,000 paedophile porn images on his computer.

We only have Hofschroer's word for it that his mother understands or supports what he has been doing. So I'm not sure we can include her among his million supporters, given how stable and reliable his view of the world is.

He has set Napoleonic scholarship back by about 100 to 150 years.

"section" is British for "commit (someone) compulsorily to a psychiatric hospital in accordance with a section of a mental health act." According to Google.

Quite correct.

The article, however, says that it is the Austrian authorities that have sectioned Hoffy.

Two thoughts:

(1) Isn't Hoffy a guest of Her Majesty? (Locked up, doing bird or whatever prison euphemism you care to employ).
(2) When was he deported?

Anyway, the correct response to this is Schadenfreude.

He has set Napoleonic scholarship back by about 100 to 150 years.

I don't think he has, really. His interpretations of events can be ignored, as one pleases, but he did good work in translating German accounts of the Napoleonic Wars into English. And IMHO this is the great task: to get the actual accounts out there and available to all who are interested.

@138

He was released with a tag, was staying in Highgate, then allegedly absconded the day of an extradition hearing (to Austria, for similar offences, plus threatening a judge). A child was sexually assaulted nearby the same day, which could be a coincidence, but he was turned in and extradited around the end of last year.
link

@ Whirlwind

Trouble is, how do you know the originals contain what he says they contain?

Republishing, as though new, nonsense from 150 years ago that was debunked 149 years ago is not doing anyone a service.

Trouble is, how do you know the originals contain what he says they contain?

Well, no-one ever knows what the originals contain unless that person reads the originals. But AFAIK there are no cases where Peter Hofschroer has deliberately mistranslated anything – I thought the charge was that he had very selectively quoted to support a pretty contentious case? Anyway, that sort of indicates my point: his Waterloo books are entirely worth the price of the translations from junior Prussian officers, regardless of the time spent on the ancient controversies. That feels like some sort of progress. I think he would have been better off just translating Ziethen and have done with it.

Anyway, the correct response to this is Schadenfreude.

Bless you. (Gesundheit for Jewish readers.)

I find it a tragic story

Hofschroer may be prejudiced and contentious, but I think, at least in his early years, that he did the hobby a great service in forcing people to re-examine their assumptions about the role of the German forces generally, and the Prussians in particular. So, I agree with 14Bore and others that his downward spiral is very sad.

Anyone know more? Last I heard he'd been extradited to Austria to face criminal charges for threatening a judge.

I hear the Emperor spoke personally to Metternich to arrange this. Hoffy's attacks on the French Army went neither unnoticed, nor unpunished.

Fouche personally arranged the details, under the supervision of Talleyrand.

He forced people to re-examine their assumptions by reintroducing discredited disinformation and misrepresenting the record.

He has reintroduced 19th century Prussian lies about when they remembered to inform Wellington that Belgium was being invaded, he has encouraged people to overlook the fact that the Prussians lost every battle they fought in 1815 at which Wellington was not present, and his analysis of contribution to victory is based on an anachronistic geography-based misunderstanding of 1815 nationality.

He fails to note who defeated most of the French army in 1815 and he has failed to cite, ever, a single historian who has ovestated the British contribution at the expense of anyone else's. His own attribution to "Germans" ignores the Dutch and Belgian. His claim that Germans marched furthest overlooks the fact that most of the marching was in retreat and his claims of post-Waterloo contribution fail to note that it was only Prussian plundering that prolonged the fighting – Prussia wasn't at war with France so of you loot their towns as though you are, of course there will be further fighting.

It is all down to Hofschroer that we have mugs who think the French collapsed simultaneously at Plancenoit and Mont St Jean when in they collapsed at the latter first and Welington's line advanced a mile and half, level with Plancenoit, where the French were still holding out.

There should not IMHO be any presumption of trustworthiness in favour of such a fruitcake.

Yesterday "Britain's worst troll", Sabine McNeill, was jailed for nine years
link

for publishing lies online about a supposed conspiracy of paedophiles "whose members were said to include a school head, a teacher, priest, social workers and police."

Regular readers may remember that Hoffy's "defence" at his trial was oddly similar:

He claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy between a fellow military historian who won defamatory damages in a court case against him, the judge in that case and a Duke; and that he had evidence of senior people linked to North Yorkshire Police engaging in al fresco sex with Jimmy Savile on the North York Moors.
link

So is there a connection between these two loons?

Well, yes there is, as it happens. In 2017 Hofschroer failed to turn up to an appointment with the police and instead absconded. He was staying at the home of one Belinda McKenzie, a Hofschroer supporter.
link

The same Belinda McKenzie is today in the same court as the UK's worst troll, of whom she is also a supporter, charged with contempt of court in respect of those proceedings.

So we have Belinda, Sabine, and Hofschroer all chums together. Can we look forward to any impeccably-researched books on the Prussian army by Sabine?

Hofschroer remains locked up for life in an Austrian lunatic asylum. Here's a picture of him in happier times.

Why was this posted? Any need on a wargames forum?

Awfully nasty display of hatred going on, and very unattractive.

Tom

See that little ! in the grey box top right of the posting?

That sends a message to the Editor. Try it

I did so yesterday, but the reply was that this is factual, which of course it probably is, but I still wonder if this is the place for it. The whole thing is so sick, I wonder if best avoided.

The Editor was helpful in the apprehension of the pedophile Barry Edwards.
TMP link
The Hobby doesn't need people like Edwards or Hofschroer. Good riddance.

Not to mention that Hofschroer also had a history on TMP (with many, many sock puppets).

The sole source of all recent (the last 25 years or so) revisionism about how great the Prussian army was is Hofschroer.

The relevance to wargaming is that the company he keeps and the claims he makes elsewhere show that anything he writes about our area should be considered worthless.

If you were to find out that in his personal life the late Colonel Elting believed, oh, let's say that Napoleon was an alien and that the Old Guard were lizards, would you still read his books? Of course not.

So why would you buy history from a man who claims that the police and the judge at his libel trial planted images on his computer, and that social services stole his mother's house, and that he's not a paedophile everyone else is, and that the trial that found him guilty wasn't legitimate? If you've bought any of his books, that's what you have done. All of it is worthless.

This man has set Napoleonic scholarship back 100 or more years, and has profoundly retarded our understanding of the period.

His mate Belinda got 6 months for contempt of court suspended for two years.

Very good point. I take it all back……..it is relevant I fully accept and thanks for making it.

I'm not so sure. Looking at my bookshelf, I have Ospreys on Prussian Line infantry, Light infantry, Reserve and Militia, Cavalry, and Prussian infantry tactics, all by Hofschroer. Lots of useful information. Hofschroer's current mental state is very sad and paedophile activity loathsome, but I don't see why that makes his earlier research worthless. I'll be keeping the books.

Tricky this.

I have just replied personally to Lambert agreeing with him. None of this discredits Hof's research into the Prussian role in 1815 for example. The facts? Well maybe. The interpretation, surely.

The poor chap is now certifiably the victim of a mental illness. One that does not excite public sympathy, in the way that OCD or PTSD might. That is not his fault. He did not chose to be insane. There but for the Grace of God etc…….

He obviously made many enemies on TMP and I am so glad I never crossed paths with him (esp as he is only 40 miles south of me!). I reluctantly push this back to the top, as a topic I wish was dropped years ago.

I don't think the work of any author, be it fiction or factual, be discredited because of what the author/historian does away from it in their lives or later on or for any political views they may hold. A written work will either stand on its own or not, despite the author. It is plain stupid to put down any work that people may have previously been okay with before whatever has happened later on. You don't have to like the author to like whatever had been produced in better times. And he certainly managed to get people debating, didn't he?

"I don't think the work of any author, be it fiction or factual, be discredited because of what the author/historian does away from it in their lives or later on or for any political views they may hold. A written work will either stand on its own or not, despite the author. It is plain stupid to put down any work that people may have previously been okay with before whatever has happened later on. You don't have to like the author to like whatever had been produced in better times."

That chap Hitler did some pretty good watercolours?

He was young and needed the money:

My point exactly. A great work of art – why worry about all those Jews?

The problem is that paranoia (and particularly paranoid schizophrenia) have an unfortunately extremely high co-morbidity with apophenia, the seeing of connections that aren't actually there. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

And apophenia shows up before schizophrenia does. Years before, in almost all cases. Sometimes decades before.

So you really need to read any research put out by someone suffering from those issues carefully! Once the Apophenia really starts manifesting, it shows in a pretty distinctive writing style (think conspiracy theorist websites). But they're still seeing connections between unrelated things long before the conspiracy theorist writing style picks up.

ConnaughtRanger

I'm pretty sure most people attending this site had the intelligence to know I was referring to Napoleonic works, such as the Osprey Prussian titles and the Waterloo books. Perhaps you did not like the books because they weren't about the Brits, so failed to understand my post. And I don't think PH painted any pictures? Never mind, you keep waving the flag.

I don't think there's any suggestion that Hofschroer's work should be discarded as unreliable because he's a paedophile. The suggestion is more that his work should be discarded as unreliable because his mental health problems undermine it. MH issues as severe as his don't suddenly emerge overnight, as far as I know. Hence they may have affected his work 30 years ago (interesting link, LitS – thanks). There is much anecdotal evidence that this is so (Hussey is good on this).

By 1998 he starts to do real damage to the English language canon of knowledge about the era (and also to the civility of discourse). If he says a Prussian cavalry squadron had 124 men he's probably right, but anything beyond that he may well have fabricated or misrepresented.

I will give one example. The idea that at Waterloo the French lines broke opposite Wellington and Blucher simultaneously is Hofschroer's. It's completely undermined by the fact that when Wellington's troops reached La Belle Alliance, a mile and a half beyond his initial line, they were hit by Prussian friendly fire from Plancenoit where the fighting was still going on. I'm afraid Wellington broke them and they gave way at Plancenoit when, and possibly because, the tide of retreat reached them there. Sorry about that, Prussophiles.

The interesting thing is that German historians don't agree with many of his positions. The German wiki page on Waterloo refers to it as Waterloo and only in passing as "Belle Alliance", for example, talks about "the British army" (none of this Anglo-allied stuff we've trained ourselves to say) and in discussing the credit is scrupulously neutral. It attributes the victory to Napoleon's failure to crush Wellington on the 17th, to British courage and skilful dispositions, and to Napoleon's overconfidence.

Hofschroer history (which we should perhaps call "hofstory": agenda-driven purported history of doubtful accuracy that crumbles under challenge) of how great the Prussian army was is regurgitated all over the place, but rarely do you see any effort to reconcile the claims to the actual historical record. I have previously posted stats showing that the Prussian army always lost to the French unless it had greatly superior numbers and / or a more effective Allied contingent on the field, and even then, these were necessary but not sufficient conditions for victory (this has not made me popular).

We now have 20-odd years of Prussian Napoleonic history to rewrite – properly this time, it's to be hoped. We could start by understanding the depth of Prussian reliance on Britain to field, arm and pay an army at all.

"…I don't think PH painted any pictures?" It appears his expertise lay in a different form of the visual arts. But, hey, he wrote great books about the Ever Victorious, All Conquering Prussian Army and uncovered facts that had eluded historians of every nationality and political hue for 150 years?

@ Connaught

Quite. As I wondered above, "why would you buy history from a man who claims that the police and the judge at his libel trial planted images on his computer, and that social services stole his mother's house, and that he's not a paedophile everyone else is, and that the trial that found him guilty wasn't legitimate?"

It seems that to some, while his opinions on everything else are bat5hit crazy, he's totally reliable on the Prussian army, because unlike modern German historians, he's anti-British.

I still have my books from "Mad Hoffy" and while flawed they did at least make me question my assumptions.

My problem remains, dealing with man on forums. Fortunately that experience is unlikely to be repeated.

ConnaughtRanger

The fact remains, if Hitler painted a good picture, not that I am aware if the quality of his artwork can actually be considered as good or not, it would still be a good picture. Unless of course, a good picture is not a good picture, even though it is, because the one who painted it was evil? Same with books, a good book is a good book and you can't just dismiss it because of what the author is or has become. We are talking about the books, not the author. And I'm referring to PH's Prussian Army Osprey titles here, while no one can disregard the fact his titles created interest and debate.
Another way of looking at it is should we dismiss the military skills of Nelson and Lee because they supported slavery? Can't be a good commander if they support such an evil, can they?

Lion in The Stars:

So you really need to read any research put out by someone suffering from those issues carefully! Once the Apophenia really starts manifesting, it shows in a pretty distinctive writing style (think conspiracy theorist websites). But they're still seeing connections between unrelated things long before the conspiracy theorist writing style picks up.

Have you read his 'Wellington's Smallest Victory' tome? That book goes some way to uncover his "distinctive writing style"

Paul :)

(none of this Anglo-allied stuff we've trained ourselves to say)

That is where you lost me.

One of the advances in Waterloo reporting in recent years is the recognition that Wellington's army was in fact an Allied rather than a British army. It was composed of commands from the Netherlands, Nassau, Hanover and Brunswick was well as British and British raised KGL units. If someone wants to use "British" as a shorthand for describing the army, I would have no problem with it. However someone who chooses to dismiss the correctness of calling Wellington's army an allied army is demonstrating a strong national bias. If we are to consider the value of a historian's work as suspect because the historian may have mental issues which influenced his work, then shouldn't we also consider an evaluation suspect if the historian shows a strong national bias?

Explain to me why German historians call it the British army, Bill (oh yes they do). And, indeed, why the French call it the English army.

"(none of this Anglo-allied stuff we've trained ourselves to say)"
Some people in this post are being deliberately obtuse. The above quote was quite clearly used to show that "British" commentators invariably refer to Wellington's army as "Anglo-allied" whereas the "Germans" refer to it as "British". Save your cod indignation for a genuine issue.

Practically started this Napoleonic era quest on anything PH wrote so really find this tragic. Until I see the building blocks undermined I will just leave it and move on.