Point taken on CIFS v. NFS. That said, I do have a Windows box on the network to use with some software. And Samba doesn't seem to be able to support NFS mounts without some extra work which I choose to avoid.

However, when I ssh into the file server, the offending directories appear with question marks in them. So this is a problem local to the box, not just a smb/NFS/CIFS conflict.

I did try changing my language to de_DE but that didn't help. Maybe I should have tried de_DE.iso88591? Short of it is these characters are messing up the standard filesystem commands (mv, find, etc). Using ls -b I can see they map to umlauts (374,326,366)

http://www.pjb.com.au/comp/diacritics.html

I was able to rename the folders and files with this command

$ find -inum (NUMBER HERE) -exec mv {} "NEW FILE/FOLDERNAME HERE" \;
Despite the error messages it throws it worked for me.

Doing another sweep by and to make sure I them all and then I will see if all the folders appear.