The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
Non-notable U-boat officer. No independent coverage; sole source for biographical data and military career was a piece of (alleged) unpublished archival material, added by User:OberRanks (now banned for habitual falsification of such sources), hence patently unreliable. Sole claim to notability is that he once served on the u-boat that later became the model for the novel and film "Das Boot", and as such may have been the real-life inspiration of one minor character in it (a connection that appears to be entirely WP:OR too). Fut.Perf.☼11:05, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The only thing I can find other than Wikipedia and Wikipedia mirrors is this, which is behind a paywall so I can only see the first few sentences. But it just looks like it names him as one of the crew of U-96, and I doubt it confers notability. If he really was the inspiration for a character in Das Boot then it's possible that could creep into notability, but in the absence of any source to support it we certainly can't accept the word of someone banned for chronic fabrication of content and sources. (I've removed the mention of him from Das Boot as being unsourced.) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:54, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As an aside, the individual attributions of characters in Das Boot being based on crew members of the real U-96 were all added by OberRanks, totally unsourced. This article comes closest to comparing the inspiration of the book and film, but it says nothing about the individual characters or real-life crew members. I can find no other sources making such connections, so I suspect it's all just OR/fabrication, and I've removed it from Das Boot. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:09, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I found a single source on ProQuest for this person (Article title: Die Schleusen der Erinnerung, Google Translate says this is German for "The locks of memory"). The first sentence in the ProQuest abstract Google Translates into the following: "Regularly planned for this enemy trip was the transfer of the technical responsibility of the Chief Engineer Grade to his successor, Lieutenant (Ing.) Hans-Peter Dengel." Later in the article it says (again according to Google Translate): "Grade introduces the new crew members right at the start: "In addition to Dengel, there is a picture and word reporter, Lieutenant M. A. Buchheim, who is always there, where things are going and where to gather impressions."" The "Grade" here appears to be a person named Friedrich Grade: "Friedrich Grade is the last living crew member of U 96. The centenarian was the second man on board from the commissioning of the boat in the summer of 1940 until the end of 1941, Senior Engineer. In the movie "Das Boot" he was played by Klaus Wennemann. In his training as a technical officer Friedrich Grade had learned from 1935 to keep a diary." Further, it appears from this article that Grade, not Dengel, was the actual inspiration behind the Chief Engineer/Leitender Ingenieur/LI character in Das Boot (the movie), played by Klaus Wennemann. So the part in the article now saying Dengel was the inspiration behind this character seems to be completely false. IntoThinAir (formerly Everymorning)talk00:02, 8 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
