As a historian, he documented the 19th century exodus from Prussia (Germany) to America and Australia by a group who sought religious freedom (Old Lutheran schism).

As a collector, he assembled Australian pipes, boomerangs, snake skins, butterflies, glass cages with hummingbirds, cabin trunks full of furs and pelts, poison tipped arrows and stone weapons, tortoise shells, precious gems, and gold dust.

The Nicolstadt (also spelled Nikolstadt) congregation, a parish within the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces, was his first and also his last in Germany, as he worked for the next 30 years as pastor of the local Lutheran church of the village (map, postcard picture) near Wahlstatt.

He details the religious and political events and influences which motivated the establishment of German settlements in this region.

[10] In 1939, he retired and moved to Breslau hoping for some peaceful years, but at the end of January 1945, towards the end of World War II, as the Russian army was moving into Silesia, he was forced to flee his city on foot taking his ailing wife and his children with him, pulling his luggage behind him on a small sled, leaving behind his books, manuscripts, collections, and property.

After several stops, he and his family were fortunate to be taken aboard a hospital train in May 1945, and made the dangerous journey to Lindau on Lake Constance.