Service Above Self: Reaching across the globe

By Kitt Brand on June 25, 2025.

Yep. It’s true, there are some pretty well-known folks who are or were active Rotarians.

A few that come to mind: Neil Armstrong, whose foot was the first on the moon; Friedrich Bergius, German Nobel Prize winner; Richard E. Bird, North and South Pole explorer; King Charles III, Canada’s King, environmentalist, organic farmer, opponent of genetically-modified foods; Sir Winston Churchill, prime minister who rallied the Commonwealth during WWII; Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse’s father; Thomas Edison, leader in electric power generation, mass communication, sound and motion picture recording; Cyrus Fees, host of Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship; Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario; Gerald R. Ford, U.S. President; Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome; Edgar Guest, American poet; Joyce Hall, founder of Hallmark Cards; Warren G. Harding, U.S. President; Duke Kahanamoku, Father of Surfing; John F. Kennedy, U.S. President; Shoaib Sultan Khan, pioneer of rural development in South Asia; Sir Harry Lauder, vaudeville comedian; Thomas Mann, German novelist, Nobel Prize winner; Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of viable wireless radio; Dr. Charles H. Mayo, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic; Connie Mack, professional baseball player; Norman Vincent Peale, minister, motivational speaker; Emilio Pucci, fashion designer; Sigmund Romberg, opera composer; Harland Sanders, aka Colonel Sanders; Jean Sibelius, Finnish composer; and Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart.

A number have emerged from strife-ridden countries and have joined Rotary International’s focus for promotion of peace: Prince Andrew of Yugoslavia; Richard Louis Evans, Rotary International President, writer, announcer of Music and the Spoken Word; Franz LehÃ¡r, operetta composer, who tried to prevent murder in Auschwitz-III prison camp; Malala Yousafzai, Pakistan’s education for women advocate; Lennart Nilsson, Swedish photojournalist; Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the UN; Earl Warren, Chief Justice of U.S. Supreme Court;

Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President, Nobel Peace Prize; Margaret Thatcher, England’s longest serving prime minister of the 20th century, the Iron Lady. And locally, one to be included in the list of dynamic Rotarians, Uwe Krickhahn, past president of the Rotary Club of Medicine Hat, (twice) with perfect attendance for more than 25 years and counting, currently a member of the Rotary Club of Medicine Hat-Saamis.

Born in Germany in 1934, he immigrated to Canada in 1959 then brought his now wife and helpmate, Anke, to Alberta. By 1964, their hard work, skill and business savvy had created the opportunity to own an authorized Mercedes-Benz dealership. Within five years, he had attracted the attention of Volkswagen and was offered a chance to extend his dealership to include VWs. By 1983, he was a Rotarian, serving as treasurer and editor of the newsletter, then took on his first term as president in 1990 and boldly welcomed women to the Club’s ranks, only one year after Rotary International accepted the change and after a six-month challenge within the Club to change its constitution. (Yes, a few males slipped from the group, such were the days.)

Ever the innovator and “itch-you-love-to-scratch,” he took on the environment. So, you take re-useable cloth bags with you to shop? Thank Uwe. He was noted in 2019 as a key advocate for the City’s banning of single-use plastic bags. It took him 11 years, but he prevailed, catching Medicine Hat up to what was already policy inâ€¦ eek! Bangladesh, 2002; Gabon, 2010; Burkina Faso, Gambia, 2015; Andorra, Belgium, Cambodia, Georgia, 2017; Albania, Anguilla, parts of Africa, 2018. Need more be said? Across Canada and much of Western Europe, such plastic bags have only been banned since December 2022. Uwe Krickhahn made Alberta the country’s leader in such environmental management.

On any given City Clean Up Day, Uwe will be somewhere in his trusty 1983 red truck, providing super-strength trash bags and inspiring some garbage-grabbing crew to action along a highway or byway. In fact, he actually organized the first city-wide clean up in 1990. To this day, families, service clubs, church groups get out and clean up every May. During one litter outing, anonymous participants stashed baggied loonies along one route. Reluctant youth accompanying their parents were instantly revived after discovering a reward amongst the roadway litter.

So, now what is our indomitable, stalwart Uwe up to? Hmm. Well, when he is not on the streets or tasking City officials, he has built approximately 136 Bluebird houses, donating 65 of them to classes at Irvine School. In addition, he has crafted three dozen or more Little Libraries as a donation to the Medicine Hat Public Library for fundraisers, all creations encouraged by Anke.

Profoundly, and internationally significantly, Uwe has constructed a database of villages destroyed when the German civilian population was evacuated from East and West Prussia, Pomeria, and Poland between January and May 1945. Uwe’s database captures information about more than 11,000 locations and populations affected by those events.

The civilian population at that time was under strict German martial law with fatal punishment for perceived infractions. Those in control forbade attempts to escape incoming Russian forces, whose viciousness was legendary. A planned evacuation was delayed and delayed. The German leadership bolted; civilians were on their own. The result was chaos. More than 16 million people from the affected regions fled. Some escaped to the Baltic Sea and were caught in the worst maritime disaster in recorded history, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Heavily overloaded with refugees, this transport was torpedoed by Soviet submarine S-13, killing an estimated 9,000 people. It was not the only escape ship destroyed. The evacuation, which started in winter, led to massive loss and destruction of property and the deaths of at least 1 million people in East and West Prussia alone.

Using a platform called Kartenmeister, Uwe has painstakingly studied more than 1,660 maps of his collection of 2,000 to trace village names and locations, some with a population of only seven people, with some villages dating back 1,300 years.

His effort is staggering, working from large scale maps to very precise ones. He even commissioned development of a formula to adjust for the distortion of having a “round” world on an a “flat” map. This database, created over of 30 years, continues to expand as he scours used book stores, estate sales, and German sources for that next prize that will provide another insight or connection.

His information is available to researchers and heritage seekers to hunt by German name, older German name, county, village next larger town, today’s Polish, Russian, or Lithuanian name. You can access the database yourself on his website at Kartenmeister.

Maybe, like Uwe, you’ll even teach yourself Russian so that your exploration is as precise as his. He has been able to trace one village back to 900 AD. Much of his information is garnered from census data from 1785, 1789, 1820, 1825, 1885, 1905 and beyond. And who has supported this 30-year quest? Anke, of course.

Who knows about this project? Well, close to five million who have accessed his database already, a student assistant at the Chair of International Politics at Humboldt-University in Berlin has sought Uwe out for permission to use his geodata for analyzing Prussian villages.

So, how lucky are we in Medicine Hat to have this environmental irritant, humanitarian, documenter of villages, this Rotarian?

Very.