Erik Amburger was born in St. Petersburg on August 4, 1907 and died in Heuchelheim near Giessen in Germany on November 6, 2001. He was a German historian focusing on Eastern Europe. His father was the physician Nikolai Amburgerand his wife was Gerda nee Schottlaender. He attended the St. Catherine Lutheran Parochial School in St. Petersburg from 1914 until 1918. He fled with his mother and siblings in 1918 but his father had to remain and died as a result of an epidemic in 1920. Amburger attended the Cathedral and Nobility School in Reval, Estonia from 1918 until 1920 and then the Humanistic High School / Junior College in Heidelberg, Germany. In 1926 he began to study history in Heidelberg and then in Berlin as of 1927 where he obtained his doctorate in 1933 on the subject of: "Russia and Sweden 1762 - 1772." He could not enter public service because he had Jewish ancestry. He was a private assistant for Karl Staehlin for his publication of "Geschichte Russlands / The History of Russia." He was in the German army, a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union (1939 - 1945). He then resided in Berlin. From 1946 to 1948 he was employed by the Institute of Slavic Studies of the German Academy of Sciences, from 1948 to 1950 the head of the publication office of Akademie-Jubilaeum and from 1950 to 1953 a coworker in the publications issued on Leibniz. He was fired from this position because he refused to move to East Berlin. From 1953 to 1957 he was a scholarship holder for the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft /German Research Society - I think!). In 1957 he got a position at the University of Giessen, initially in the commission for research into agriculture and economic development in East Europe, then since 1960 in the commission for continental agricultural and economic research and since 1968 he was a senior academic consultant. He became a professor at the University of Marburg in 1962 and in 1968 he became an honorary professor in the subject of historical science. He retired in 1972. He was married to the classic archaeologist Eleni Amburger HE RESEARCHED MANY SPECIFIC FOREIGN INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES IN RUSSIA AND IN THE BALTICS including a few Black Sea Germans at the very least. You will have to search the database that you can access (he had almost 100,000 family tree items in his cardex) by GOING TO Erik Amburger - Wikipedia and down to the section on Weblinks and click on Archiv Erik Amburger zu Auslaendern im vorrevolutionaeren Russland (Personenkartei). You can also click on Digitalisierte Literatur zu Auslaendern im Russischen Reich. Some of the books which he had in his library have been digitalized by the Institut fuer Ost und Suedosteuropaforschung (IN REGENSBURG, GERMANY). His library, listed at 800 items is located there and this library, by the way, has about 300,000 items. He is, of course, also known for his book listing the pastors (with a short biography on each) in the Russian Empire from the end of the 16th century up to 1937 published in 1998 (when he was 91 years of age - so don't give up your research too early!) Horst Gutsche