Comment by Zickzack

Jürgen Udolph - the researcher in Onomastics who has proposed the generally accepted theory - is well respected. The names of families and of places in that region northeast of Berlin resemble those from Hameln/Hamelin. However, he does not claim to have found the one true truth. A possible alternative is that both things happened - locators recruiting the younger generation around Hameln as well as the incident that became the story of the Pied Piper