November 20, 2007
How WWII was Really Won
It's so clear now.
(via medicmike)
Posted by Groonk at 10:32 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Intertube Madness, Macro, WorldWarII
October 22, 2007
Unique Hitler Items Found in SLC
The hell?
(via msnbc)
Posted by Groonk at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Art, History, USA, WorldWarII
September 15, 2007
WWII Tank Vet Reunites with Holocaust Survivors
On Friday, the now 86-year-old retired state Supreme Court judge reunited with three of the survivors of the Nazi death train his unit found near Magdeburg, about 50 miles southwest of Berlin. The train was on its way to another concentration camp.[...]
The reunion has its roots in a class project launched by Matthew Rozell, a history teacher at Hudson Falls High School. In the early 1990s, he created an elective course for seniors to collect stories from local veterans and post them on a Web site.
One of Rozell's students was Walsh's grandson, who told the teacher about his grandfather's wartime service. Several years ago, Rozell interviewed Walsh and George Gross, a fellow tank commander from Spring Valley, Calif.
Their account of the train liberation was posted on the project's Web site, along with black-and-white photographs taken that day by the major leading their patrol.
That's where some of the child survivors of the Nazi train, now in their 60s and 70s, found their story.
Learn about: A Train Near Magdeburg
Main Link: The World War Two Living History Project (WW2LHP)
(via yahoo news)
Posted by Groonk at 08:29 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
August 06, 2007
Today it Rained Fire Half a World Away
Thus ending a war that cost countless lives in battle and would have had an even bloodier invasion had the Allies traditionally attacked Japan.
Aug. 6, 1945: 'I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds'1945: The United States becomes the first (and remains the only) country ever to use an atomic weapon in warfare, obliterating the Japanese city of Hiroshima and instantly killing 70,000 people. (Many thousands more would die later from the effects of radiation poisoning.) Three days later, the port city of Nagasaki is destroyed by a second atom bomb with the ultimate loss of 140,000 lives. Japan surrenders shortly thereafter, ending World War II.
Several countries, including Nazi Germany, had pursued the development of an atomic weapon but none matched the U.S. Manhattan Project in terms of the resources, energy or scientific manpower devoted to making the bomb a reality.
Such dates should be remembered.
(via digg)
Posted by Groonk at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
July 05, 2007
The Zazou: The French Might be Re-writing their History Again
whether or not the Zazou were real, I can’t say. French recollections of collective resistance seem to be exaggerated wishful fantasies to disguise the fact that they basically just rolled over. But of all the possibly imaginary demarcations of the French Resistance, the Zazou are the ones I most hope to have been real.The Nazis description of the average Zazounian: ““Here is the specimen of Ultra Swing 1941: hair hanging down to the neck, teased up into an untidy quiff, little moustache a la Clark Gable… shoes with too-thick soles, syncopated walk.” An armada of listless youths, taking to the streets in their zoot suit uniforms, swaggering and swinging their pocket watches on their chains, to fight the fascists with the power off le jazz hot!
Digging deeper: 1940-1945: The Zazous | grow-a-brain
(via the marvelous new blog Ectoplasmosis)
Posted by Groonk at 06:04 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, On the French, WorldWarII
April 22, 2007
Cee Gee's Nazi War Mecha Completely Blows My Mind
If the greatest generation were going to fight WWII with giant warbots, I know it'd play out just like this.
(via medicmike and cee gee and emotional design)
Posted by Groonk at 05:00 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Just Freaking Neat, Movies, Robots, Video, WorldWarII
April 08, 2007
PBS Under Fire over World War II Documentary
Hispanic groups unhappy with an upcoming Ken Burns documentary on World War II are stepping up pressure on PBS because they say the series omits mention of the role Latinos played in the war.The American GI Forum is appealing to Hispanic veterans and other Latino groups to write members of Congress and their local PBS affiliates about the documentary, "The War," which has been six years in the making.
(via military.com)
Posted by Groonk at 03:47 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Culture, Movies, WorldWarII
March 28, 2007
Tuskegee Airmen to get Congressional Gold Medal
President George W. Bush will honor the surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen with a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award given by Congress, at a ceremony on Thursday at the U.S. Capitol.The airmen helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement and influenced President Harry Truman's decision to desegregate the army in 1948.
[...]
In all, about 1,000 pilots were trained, and also ground crew. Fewer than a third of the pilots are still alive to receive the medal.
"We had the feeling that the program was designed to fail," said one of the pilots, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Charles Dryden, who graduated from the school in 1942.
"Our mantra was that we dared not fail because if we did, the doors of future aviation would be closed to black people forever," he said in an interview at his home in Atlanta.
Dryden, 86, who stayed in the Air Force after World War Two, recalled the "horrible discrimination" he faced and said he decided to stay away from whites in Alabama as far as possible to avoid breaking the racial mores of the south.
[...]
"I had a deep feeling of fear," he said of his first combat encounter. "It wasn't about the enemy, it was about myself ... But the first time I saw the enemy I ran (flew) toward him and I knew that I was a tiger and not a pussy cat."
On graduating from the flying school, he rode the train back to New York wearing his uniform.
"As I was proudly preening my way through the terminal a little white lady said: 'Here Boy. Carry my bags."' The remark angered him but taught him a lesson. "It humbled me. It taught me: It's not the uniform that counts, it's what's inside."
(via yahoo news)
Posted by Groonk at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Alabama, History, WorldWarII
October 30, 2006
Nazi Home Movie Found in Church
A 10-minute home movie made by Nazi officers during World War II has been found in a church in rural Devon.It shows members of the SS running a slave labour camp in southern Russia. In the footage, troops force prisoners to work and officers are seen relaxing.
No one is sure how the film came to be stored at Cullompton Baptist Church but historians say it is unique.
[...]
"It looks very much like this is something somebody shot to show where they are working to take home to show the wife and kids."
Fuck zombies, werewolves, aliens and all that noise. People are the scariest monsters on Earth.
(via bbc news and warren ellis)
Posted by Groonk at 12:37 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, Religion, WorldWarII
August 25, 2006
Nobel Prize-winning German writer was Technically a Nazi
Yet he won the Nobel for an anti-nazi book:
He told a German newspaper he had been recruited at the age of 17 into an SS tank division and served in Dresden.
Previously it was only known he had served as a soldier and was wounded and taken prisoner by US forces.
[...]
"My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book [Peeling Onions]," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview.
"It had to come out, finally."
Grass, who was born in 1927, is widely admired as a novelist whose books frequently revisit the war years and is also known as an outspoken peace activist.
First the new pope and now this guy. You just don't know people do you?
(via warren ellis and his horrible new website design)
Posted by Groonk at 04:00 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, WorldWarII
August 11, 2006
During WWII, Disney Designed Insignia for POWs
Modern Mechanix found the original scan.
(via boingboing)
Posted by Groonk at 02:00 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
July 12, 2006
Auschwitz Concentration Camp gets Re-Branded
Poland asked the U.N. in April to rename Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, died in World War Two.
Warsaw objects to references to "Polish gas chambers" at the "Polish concentration camp" in foreign media. Nearly 3 million non-Jewish Poles died at Nazi hands, and Poles see themselves as victims of the war.
(via cnn news)
Posted by Groonk at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
June 08, 2006
Hitler had Nuclear Weapons?
Of the tactical variety, it seems.
Rainer Karlsch said that new research in Soviet and also Western archives, along with measurements carried out at one of the test sites, provided evidence for the existence of the weapon.
"The important thing in my book is the finding that the Germans had an atomic reactor near Berlin which was running for a short while, perhaps some days or weeks," he told the BBC.
"The second important finding was the atomic tests carried out in Thuringia and on the Baltic Sea."
Mr Karlsch describes what the Germans had as a "hybrid tactical nuclear weapon" much smaller than those dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
He said the last test, carried out in Thuringia on 3 March 1945, destroyed an area of about 500 sq m - killing several hundred prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates.
Modern day Germans remain skeptical. While the Seoul Times has taken it upon themselves to post every Hitler picture they have in their archives. It's like the History Channel threw up all over their web page.
(via warren ellis)
Posted by Groonk at 01:53 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, World, WorldWarII
December 20, 2005
Stalin wanted Man-ape super soldiers
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."
[...]
Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.
Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.
Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.
Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.
A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.
That Stalin, I tell you. he was one crazy fuck.
(via digg)
Posted by Groonk at 04:05 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Research, Science, Weird, WorldWarII
October 20, 2005
Diary of a Corsair Pilot in the Solomons
Here is the diary of a World War II Corsair pilot online and ready to be comsumed.
I just started reading it and so far he hasn't gotten to his war station and all they're doing is preparing for war and getting their drunk-on.
But he has mentioned the name of a lass he wants to make Mrs Corsair Pilot.
(via medicmike)
Posted by Groonk at 11:55 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
October 04, 2005
The William Canaris Mystery
Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) eighteen months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win.
In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war.
For years he played a dangerous double game, desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo. The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler became suspicious of the Abwehr and by 1944, when Abwehr personnel were involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler, he had the evidence to arrest Canaris himself. Canaris was executed a few weeks before the end of the war
Posted by Groonk at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, WorldWarII
Gypsy Jazz
Django Reinhardt & Doktor Jazz
On Django Reinhardt:
Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt (January 23, 1910 – May 16, 1953) was a Belgian Gypsy jazz musician. He was the very first important jazz musician who was born in Europe. His most renowned tunes include Minor Swing, Tears, Belleville and Nuages. Django is pronounced zhane-go (with a long 'a').
[...]
Reinhardt survived World War II unscathed, unlike many other gypsies who perished in the concentration death camps of the Nazis. He had the help of a Luftwaffe official named Dietrich Schultz-Kohn, a.k.a. Doktor Jazz, who deeply admired his music. In 1943 he married Sophie Ziegler, with whom he had a son, Babik Reinhardt, who went on to become a respected guitarist in his own right.
After the war, Reinhardt rejoined Grappelli in the UK, and went on to tour the United States, opening for Duke Ellington, and playing at Carnegie Hall, as well as making more recordings.
Django Reinhardt was then among the first people in France to appreciate and understand the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (he sought after them when he first arrived in New York). He integrated some elements of their music, still never compromising his own musical visions.
Jazz Against Nazi Germany
In Different Drummers, Michael Kater--a distinguished historian and himself a jazz musician--explores the underground history of jazz in Hitler's Germany. He offers a frightening and fascinating look at life and popular culture during the Third Reich, showing that for the Nazis, jazz was an especially threatening form of expression. Not only were its creators at the very bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy, but the very essence of jazz--spontaneity, improvisation, and, above all, individuality--represented a direct challenge to the repetitive, simple, uniform pulse of German march music and indeed everyday life. The fact that many of the most talented European jazz artists were Jewish only made the music more objectionable. In tracing the growth of what would become a bold and eloquent form of social protest, Kater mines a trove of previously untapped archival records and assembles interviews with surviving witnesses as he brings to life a little-known aspect of wartime Germany. He introduces us to groups such as the Weintraub Syncopators, Germany's best indigenous jazz band; the Harlem Club of Frankfurt, whose male members wore their hair long in defiance of Nazi conventions; and the Hamburg Swings--the most daring radicals of all--who openly challenged the Gestapo with a series of mass dance rallies.» Jazz Research: Here we find a "list current research projects - scholarly studies as well as discographical or biographical book projects or ongoing dissertation projects from different fields concerned in some way with jazz research." It's constantly being updated.
» The Django Reinhardt Swing Page
» Tribute to Gainsbourg (sucker's in french)
» Jazz Guitar Licks : Django Reinhardt
» GYPSY The life of Django Reinhardt: A review of this book by The New Yorker
(a ponzu inspired bit of research)
Posted by Groonk at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, History, Music, Research, WorldWarII
September 06, 2005
Beware Nazis Bearing Gifts
Which should be a moot point anyway. But you never know.
Britain's Security Service began opening its records this year under the country's new Freedom of Information Act.
Among the files declassified by the National Archive was a treasure trove of nifty exploding gadgets, labeled "Camouflages for sabotage equipment used by the German sabotage services."
The drawing of the design for the chocolate bar grenade says it is made from steel coated with real chocolate, and activated by breaking off a bit at one end. It doesn't say whether the grenade was ever actually manufactured or used.
The file also includes photos of the incendiary pastille sweets, and bombs hidden
Posted by Groonk at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Research, WorldWarII
August 25, 2005
Watercolored Nuclear Atoll
Insanely beautiful and haunting watercolors of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests can be found on the official US navy history site.
(via boingboing)
Posted by Groonk at 06:52 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
August 08, 2005
Hiroshima Film Cover-up Exposed
The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades.
[...]
Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.
[...]
More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was ... because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.
Ten years ago, I co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) the book "Hiroshima in America," and new material has emerged since. On Aug. 6, and on following days, the Sundance cable channel will air "Original Child Bomb," a prize-winning documentary on which I worked. The film includes some of the once-censored footage -- along with home movies filmed by McGovern in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Posted by Groonk at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, War, WorldWarII
July 27, 2005
40s Hat Trick
Let us look back, once again, during the days of the second world war.
(photos shared by medicmike)
Posted by Groonk at 10:44 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
Last of the Code Talkers Passes On
[...]
The group of Comanche Indians from the Lawton area were selected for special duty in the U.S. Army to provide the Allies with a language that the Germans could not decipher. Like the larger group of Navajo Indians who performed a similar service in the Pacific theater, the Comanches were dubbed "code talkers."
In a 1998 story for The Oklahoman, Chibitty recalled being at Normandy on D-Day, and said someone once asked him what he was afraid of most and if he feared dying.
"No. That was something we had already accepted," he said.
"But we landed in deeper water than anticipated. A lot of boys drowned. That's what I was afraid of."
"I wonder what the hell Hitler thought when he heard those strange voices," he once told a gathering.
(via military.com)
Posted by Groonk at 01:44 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
July 25, 2005
History of the PB&J
If this is true, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn't popular in other countries.
[...]
Food historians have seen nothing written about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich before 1940. What we do know is that GI's in WW 2 were given rations of both peanut butter and jelly. When they returned to the states after the war peanut butter sales and jelly sales both soared.It would seem most likely this would be the birth of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Huh.
(link via b55seddel)
Posted by Groonk at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
July 13, 2005
Christmas Cards from Hitler
And made by the bastard, too.
Iegor de Saint Hippolyte said Tuesday that the private auction, which also includes two Christmas messages from the Nazi leader, would take place on July 19 and last only for a few minutes.
He said the current owner of the six pieces wishes to remain anonymous, and he declined to say how much he expected the sale to bring.
Hitler, German chancellor from 1933 to 1945, unleashed World War II when his armies invaded Poland in 1939. His racial policies led to the Holocaust, the organized massacre of some 6 million European Jews, largely at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
Well what do you expect from a man named "Iegor"? The article goes on to say Iegor may contribute the money to a humanitarian organization.
(via mywaynews)
Posted by Groonk at 03:10 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
June 21, 2005
A Nagasaki Report
American George Weller was the first foreign reporter to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug. 9, 1945. Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city, but censors at the Occupation's General Headquarters refused to allow the material to be printed. Weller's stories, written in September 1945, can be found [here]
(via warrenellis)
Posted by Groonk at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
June 19, 2005
We've Hit the Motherload
Oodles and smoodles of World War II Propaganda, Cartoons, Film, Music, & Art
Also bunches of trivia are solved.
Kilroy was a 46-year old shipyard worker from Halifax, Massachusetts and, during the war, he worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in nearby Quincy. His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piece-work and got paid by the rivet. Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. When he went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.One day Kilroy's boss called him into his office . The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then that he realized what had been going on.
The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn't lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but he added "Kilroy Was Here" in king-size letters next to the check. Once he did that , the riveters stopped wiping away his marks.
(via medicmike)
Posted by Groonk at 03:36 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
A Wall Full of Models
Airplane models that is:
(via medicmike)
Posted by Groonk at 03:23 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
June 16, 2005
More War Propaganda
Notice that it is a very female hat. I find this strange since soldiers gossip more than a neighborhood bridge club.
(link via MedciMike)
Posted by Groonk at 11:03 AM | Comments (1) | Ministry of Art, WorldWarII
April 23, 2005
Simplistic Jujitsu circa 1942
One of Warren Ellis' readers sent him a scanned copy of an AMerican jujitsu manual made in 1942.
american martial propaganda
dirty moves
In-fucking-sane.
(via warrenellis)
Posted by Groonk at 02:45 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, History, Martial Arts, WorldWarII
April 19, 2005
Asian WWII Dispute Continues
I only now learned that WWII Japan was decades ahead on their biological warfare research in the mid 40s. They were going to use fleas infected with bubonic plague. These fleas would ride inside bombs that would be put inside planes and dropped on the Allies.
Tricksy. Very tricksy.
Almost as tricksy as their discovery of the jet stream and their attempt to use it to bomb the North American west coast.
A Japanese court again rejected an appeal by 10 Chinese survivors and their relatives of biological warfare experiments carried out in China in the 1930s and 1940s, and of the 1937-38 Nanjing massacre.The court upheld a ruling by a lower court in 2002, that international law prohibits foreigners from seeking damages directly from the Japanese government.
Meanwhile China's state media called for a site where biological weapons were tested on humans, Unit 731 in north-eastern Heilongjiang province, to be given UN World Heritage status.
China says 3,000 people were killed at Unit 731 during World War II, while 200,000 residents living near the camp may have died as a result of the experiments.
Posted by Groonk at 08:30 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
April 17, 2005
Survivors: 60 Years Later
Thousands of survivors of three Nazi concentration camps have attended ceremonies in Germany to mark the 60th anniversary of their liberation.Former prisoners of Ravensbruck, Bergen-Belsen and Sachsenhausen were joined at the camps by world leaders and former servicemen.
Some wore the blue-and-white striped scarves, recalling the camps' uniform.
Tens of thousands of people died in the camps from hunger, disease, exhaustion or medical experiments.
(via bbcnews)
Posted by Groonk at 06:44 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
April 11, 2005
There was Another 'Schindler'
A German army officer who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazi Holocaust in Lithuania has been honoured at a ceremony in Israel.The story of Maj Karl Plagge was unearthed by a US doctor, Michael Good, who began searching in 1999 for the Nazi who had saved his mother.
Plagge, who died in 1957, was honoured by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
(via bbc news)
Posted by Groonk at 07:51 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
April 02, 2005
WWII german Military Phrasebook
Somebody scanned in this original 1943 US Army German phrasebook.
look closer
The US government will pay!? That's nothing but lies and also lies.
(via boingboing)
Posted by Groonk at 05:34 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Grammar, War, WorldWarII
January 08, 2005
Nurse Emma Jane Foster
This lady has done and been through a lot:
In 1937 she was 19 and fighting for womens rights, long before it was fashionable. She was part of a secret, rogue group formed by President Roosevelt just prior to WWII, called the American Volunteer Group (AVG) and later known as the Flying Tigers. She survived jungle camps in Burma, snakes, and scorpions. She was a survivor in Kunming, China, fleeing with the Chinese when the Japanese bombed the city. She is Emma Jane Foster, better known as Jane or Red Foster.
Read her story and be amazed.
(via MedicMike)
Posted by Groonk at 03:03 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
December 17, 2004
Hitler the Tax Dodger
BERLIN (Reuters) - Adolf Hitler spent years evading taxes and owed German authorities 405,000 Reichsmarks -- equivalent to $8 million today -- by the time his tax debts were forgiven soon after he took power, a researcher said on Friday.Klaus-Dieter Dubon, a retired Bavarian notary and tax expert, said he found Hitler's tax records in a Munich archive. They show the Nazi dictator battled tax collectors for eight years before becoming chancellor in 1933.
"Hitler owed tax but didn't pay it, full stop," Dubon told Reuters on Friday. "He was constantly challenging tax office rulings on his income tax between 1925 and 1932, just like a common citizen. After taking power he didn't pay tax anymore."
Hitler's record as a dictator who started World War II and sent millions of people to their deaths in concentration camps is well known. But the unearthed records show a new, previously undocumented side to his life: as an ordinary tax evader.
The man had millions, I'll say that again, millions of people executed. I wouldn't think he'd be above tax evasion.
(via 7d)
Posted by Groonk at 05:53 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
December 16, 2004
Sen Toku
World War II Japan had submarines that were big enough to carry a plane per sub.
(link via MedicMike)
Posted by Groonk at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
November 13, 2004
Arlington National Cemetary
I got to this one a day or so after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Some Alrington National Cemetary history and, previously unknown to me, info on Audie Murphy and Glenn Miller who are but two of the many heroes buried there.
link via MedicMike
Posted by Groonk at 05:47 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, War, WorldWarII
November 05, 2004
Band of Brothers: The Pacific Theatre
There's movement on the new Band of Brothers mini-series and a forum discussing the details.
Posted by Groonk at 02:16 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Culture, WorldWarII
October 25, 2004
UBoat.net
Models, galleries, history, the crews...tons of info on the German submarine.
link via MedicMike
Posted by Groonk at 03:42 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of WorldWarII
October 13, 2004
Operation Foxley
Adolf Hitler was the centre of the Nazi system. Around him revolved a loose confederation of fiefdoms, whose leaders engaged in a ceaseless struggle to protect and enhance their power. If Operation Foxley, the plan devised by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to assassinate Hitler, had succeeded, this system would have been thrown into chaos.
That is the theory anyway. I viewed the History Channel program "Killing Hitler" during their Military Monday extravaganza. It was an interesting little BBC production.
Posted by Groonk at 02:55 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, War, WorldWarII
October 07, 2004
Maus
This is the most intriguing review I've ever read. I need to buy this book.
Here's Warren Ellis' review:
This is the story of Art Spiegelman's father, who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. It is also the story of how Art Spiegelman's father explained all this to his son, and how Spiegelman watched and learned of the damage that the experience continued to wreak all around his life. And, in yet another detachment from the central narrative, everyone is depicted in cartoon terms. All Nazis are depicted as talking cats. The Poles, pigs. And the Jews, mice. It's a Krazy Kat level of separation. But it works. It works visually because it makes all the emotions big and transparent, and makes the reader consider the horror rather than react to its surface. And because it speaks directly to the way the Nazis dehumanised everything around them. A Polish dignitary once questioned Spiegelman on this, uncertain whether the stink of racism was on MAUS, explaining that the Nazis called the Poles pigs. "And they called us (the Jews) vermin," was Spiegelman's response.
It was also the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Brought to my attention by MedicMike
Posted by Groonk at 04:12 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, WorldWarII
July 02, 2004
Word IQ
Combination encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus and other neat shiznit.
Vietnam War
World War II
Information Warfare
PSYOPS
Yes, I am planning a war.
No, you can't join.
Yes, I am full of beans.
Posted by Groonk at 07:11 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
June 08, 2004
World War 2 Propaganda posters
I have taken an interest in propaganda posters.
World War II Propaganda, Cartoons, Film, Music, & Art
Posted by Groonk at 02:47 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
May 26, 2004
World War II photo galleries
Finally closing my last few Netscape tabs with these URLs.
Posted by Groonk at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
May 24, 2004
Hitler Heir Doesn't Want 'Mein Kampf' Royalties
Werner Maser told Bild am Sonntag that Peter Raubal, whose father Leo Raubal was a nephew of Hitler, would have a strong chance of winning the copyright from Bavaria, which was given the German rights to the book by the postwar occupying powers."Peter Raubal is the only heir of Hitler that I know of," Maser said. "As the closest relative alive, he could claim royalties from Hitler's book 'Mein Kampf'. Raubal would have to sue Bavaria. I am quite certain he would win."
Hitler died with no immediate heirs but Leo Raubal was one of his half-sister Angela Raubal's children. Maser said Leo Raubal long considered such a lawsuit before his death in 1979. Bild am Sonntag said royalties could be worth millions of euros.
In Germany, it is illegal to distribute "Mein Kampf" except in limited circumstances. Nazi symbols like the swastika and the stiff-armed Hitler salute are also banned. "Mein Kampf" is available online and in most countries, including Israel.
Hitler dictated the tome to his secretary Rudolf Hess while in prison in Bavaria following the failed Munich "Beer Hall" putsch of 1923. It outlines a doctrine of German racial supremacy and ambitions to annex vast areas of the Soviet Union.
Published in 1925, it became a school textbook after Hitler won power in 1933. All German newlyweds also received a copy.
Now, purchasers who can prove an academic purpose may secure an existing copy but otherwise sales are banned and Bavaria refused to authorize new copies. The Allied Control Commission assigned Bavaria the rights to Hitler's assets in 1946.
Posted by Groonk at 04:33 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
Found that sucker
Maybe it's because the 60th anniversary of D-Day is fast approaching but I'm all about collecting anything I can find on World War II.
The book: One Shot: The World War II Photography of John A. Bushemi is most definitely on my list.
Posted by Groonk at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, WorldWarII
The Motherload Listing of World War II books
I found it while looking for another link I lost.
Posted by Groonk at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Books, History, War, WorldWarII
May 03, 2004
Song about von Braun
One of his many feats was that he put Huntsville on the map.
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical."Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
via 7d
Posted by Groonk at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of USA, WorldWarII
March 23, 2004
Surgical nurse recalls WWII
By Juanita Westaby
The Grand Rapids Press
Of the people who served in World War II, "everybody was terribly young," Beth Sefton recalls.
"There was a man in my (future) husband's outfit they called Pops. He was all of 28."
Sefton was 23 when she left Iowa. "The whole experience was of places I'd never seen and places I've never been. The Europeans thought differently than we did. I don't think they valued life the way we did."
If she learned anything from her war experience, it was that U.S. ignorance of foreign affairs and its isolation from them were dangerous policies.
"One thing I came out of the war thinking was we should never be an isolationist country. Pearl Harbor changed our minds."
Posted by Groonk at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of War, WorldWarII
March 02, 2004
Pilots
World War II pilots and their medals:
Cdr. William L. "Country" Landreth - VF-17, VF-10 Corsair Pilot
Lt. Cdr. Harold J. "Bitz" Bitzegaio - VF-17, VF -10 Corsair Pilot
Lt. (jg) Jack Chasnoff - VF-17, Corsair Pilot
via MedicMike
Posted by Groonk at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, USA, War, WorldWarII
January 14, 2004
Dr Seuss' War
Wartime Dr Seuss political cartoons
via gaiman
Posted by Groonk at 11:48 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Art, History, USA, War, WorldWarII
January 03, 2004
How to fly the B-26 Marauder...
After the initial disastrous flights, pilots gave the B-26 their own names like "The Widowmaker" and "The Baltimore Whore"(because it had no visible means of support).
It got so bad that the Army Air Corps made and distributed a video on how to fly the thing. I'll be damned if someone didn't decide to stream that video on the net. There's also vids on how to fly the P 38 Lightning and several other aircraft.
Posted by Groonk at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of USA, Video, War, WorldWarII
December 16, 2003
Luc's Photo Hangar
Oodles of nose art fromWWII and Korea.
Posted by Groonk at 04:57 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
Nose Art Panels
What we have here:
Nose art panels. Buy them. Hang them on your wall.
Posted by Groonk at 04:46 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Art, WorldWarII
December 10, 2003
Nose Art Continued
My latest search on nose art yields far better results than before. The following images were drawn by a WWII P-47 pilot who died several weeks after D-Day. The site was created by his surviving son, Damon, and is now maintained by Damon's wife Linda:
Ed Abdallah was the first member of the 379th to be shot down. When he bailed out, the canopy slammed shut on his legs, breaking both of them. One leg was amputated in a German POW camp. He returned home in the fall of 1944, traded out by the Red Cross.
His aircraft bore the only example of "cheesecake" nose art that Rarey did. Notice the can-opener in Abby's hand - a tool for opening the armor of "Abby's Amazon."
Hugh Houghton had been an aspiring actor before the war, and was now one of my father's closest friends. He was killed in action in April 1944, which Rarey commemorated with a drawing in Volume IV.
Posted by Groonk at 03:54 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Art, History, War, WorldWarII
November 14, 2003
Star Trek actor Takei returns to internment camp
ROHWER, Ark. - A cypress root harvested from an Arkansas swamp 60 years ago is one of the few mementoes George Takei has from his childhood at a World War II internment camp.
The gnarled cypress knee sits on the actor's desk at his Los Angeles home, reminding him of a part of his family's history that - until this month - he had revisited only in his mind.
Takei, who portrayed Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek series and in six Star Trek movies, was four when he, his parents and two younger siblings were ordered from their Los Angeles home and taken by railroad under armed guard to Arkansas after Pearl Harbor.
Six decades later, Takei drove alongside the same railroad tracks to visit the former Rohwer Relocation Center.
"My mother said the scariest part about that trip was the uncertainty," Takei said, glancing out a car window at the abandoned rail tracks that once led to the camp. "I remember my father telling us we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas."
Takei, 64, returned in part to bring awareness to an effort to preserve the history of the Arkansas camps by the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum. Takei is chairman of the museum board.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the actor drew on his history and celebrity to fight discrimination against Arab-Americans by helping organize a candlelight vigil at the museum and a public radio forum.
"There were chilling echoes of World War II," he said.
But he praised leaders for working quickly to address the discrimination issue following the Sept. 11 attacks - something that didn't happen six decades ago in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
"It wasn't until I was a teenager that I started realizing what my family went through (in World War II), and I began to ask questions. When I was 15 or 16, I had a conversation with my father that I would always regret. I asked him 'Why did you go into that camp like sheep?'," he said.
"He said 'Maybe you are right,' and left the room and closed the door."
More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps at the beginning of the war. Eight camps were in the West; two southeast Arkansas sites at Rohwer and Jerome were the only ones in the South. Together, the Arkansas sites housed more than 16,000 detainees.
Other well-known former internees include U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, artist Henry Sugimoto and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii.
The Takeis spent only a year in Arkansas. They were later sent to a higher security camp at Tule Lake, Calif., for detainees who, on loyalty questionnaires, said they would not take up arms in defense of the United States.
Takei recalled that his father later told him that he and his wife responded "No" to that and to one that asked them to "forswear loyalty to the emperor of Japan." Takei said his father was insulted by the assumption that his family was loyal to the emperor in the first place and "didn't want to grovel and give them his dignity."
"My memories of Rohwer were innocent childhood memories," Takei said, recalling the first time he saw snow, his search for tadpoles in creeks and his first encounter with a hog. "I had never seen anything so monstrous, so smelly and so grotesque," he said.
His Tule Lake memories are different.
"At Tule Lake, we woke up in the mornings to radicals who said they would rise up when the Japanese army won and who were working to make their bodies strong for the fight," he said.
Also at Tule Lake, Takei's mother learned that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, where her parents had returned to from the United States before the war.
His mother's sister and her infant child were killed in the blast. His grandparents survived, but it was months before the family learned their fate.
"My mother was torn with anxiety. I remember my father telling her that we had to assume they were all dead," Takei said.
Takei recalled starting kindergarten at Rohwer and memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance while looking out on a barbed-wire fence.
"Now, I think about the irony of saying that line 'liberty and justice for all'," he said.
After the war, Takei's father rebuilt the family's laundry business and later became successful in real estate. Takei went to UCLA and studied theater. His younger sister became a teacher and his brother a doctor.
He credits his parents for putting aside bitterness and allowing their children to overcome their turbulent childhood experiences during the war.
After the family returned to Los Angeles from Tule Lake, his father took him to a vaudeville production at the Orpheum Theater.
Even though the family didn't have money for luxuries, "he wanted to contribute to my passion for acting," said Takei, who appeared in several movies and had guests roles on shows including "Perry Mason" and "My Three Sons" before joining Star Trek in 1966.
"For Asian-Americans, Star Trek was a wonderful breakthrough because Sulu wasn't a villain or a servant," said Takei, who held a variety of ranks in the fictional space fleet. And he said the Starship Enterprise was intended to show the ideals of democracy, which he learned from his father during his childhood in the camps.
"My father really believed in the ideals of a people's democracy and he understood that people are fallible," Takei said.
"He also understood that the democratic system has the ability to correct and heal old wounds," Takei said. He noted war reparations approved by Congress in 1988 for Japanese-Americans and a decision by former President Clinton to recognize some Japanese-American war veterans with the Congressional Medal of Honor decades after the war.
Posted by Groonk at 07:41 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
October 02, 2003
Nazis Used Hospitals for Killings
BERLIN - Nazi Germany used hundreds of hospitals and clinics to kill at least 200,000 handicapped, mentally ill and other institutional patients who were deemed physically inferior, researchers said Tuesday.
The conclusion is based on what researchers said was the most comprehensive analysis of Nazi records on the sites that helped carry out Adolf Hitler's program to purify, as he saw it, the German race.
In a report compiled by Germany's Federal Archive, researchers found new evidence on the program under which doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs or starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany and in present-day Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Even in internal documents, the Nazis cynically referred to the deaths as mercy killings, said Harald Jenner, a researcher at the federal archive.
The program originated at the Nazi regime's highest levels, Jenner said in a recent essay.
"The Fuehrer's chancellery and the Reich Interior Ministry were the starting point for the murders," Jenner wrote.
The three-year effort to catalog the deaths was intended to "restore some dignity to the victims" while encouraging further research into a dark chapter of history, German Culture Minister Christina Weiss said at a news conference Tuesday.
"We know that these crimes were meant to be kept secret," Weiss said. "The relatives of the victims received fake letters of condolence. The doctors in charge worked under false names."
The Nazis launched the drive to root out what they called "worthless lives" in the summer of 1939, predating their full-scale organization of the Holocaust in which they killed 6 million European Jews.
Between January 1940 and August 1941, the Nazis turned six hospitals in Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar into the main killing grounds for what they referred to as "euthanasia." Other clinics and hospitals were added as the program expanded.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the program was a kind of training ground for the Nazi regime to "fine tune" its "technology of death" before the Holocaust.
"I think it's an extraordinarily important body of information," Cooper said.
The program was "a warning to society and to the scientific community that it's a very slippery slope when you start putting different values on human life," he added.
"Of course, with the Nazi regime it was a combination of racism but also with the enthusiastic backing of the scientific community who saw mentally ill and physically disabled people as cannon fodder for their pseudoscientific research in the name of the great Aryan race."
The federal archive is not publishing names of victims, but is posting a list of the facilities used on its Web site. Relatives tracking down suspected victims may benefit from the new research, Weiss said.
Cooper also said the German government should compensate victims' families.
In the new study, researchers drew in part on records from Hitler's Reich chancellery found in the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi, after German reunification in 1990, said Klaus Oldenhage, the national archive's deputy head.
At the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, authorities determined the number of handicapped and mentally ill victims of the Holocaust totaled 275,000 people, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In the first phase, from 1939 to 1941, the Nazis killed about 70,000 people, the museum reported.
___
On the Net:
http://www.bundesarchiv.de German federal archive site.
Posted by Groonk at 11:06 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
September 24, 2003
Earliest British cemetary dated
The site at Aveline's Hole, near Burrington Combe, contained human bone fragments that have now been confirmed to be between roughly 10,200 and 10,400 years old.
The specimens - representing about 21 individuals - were originally removed from the cave in the early years of the 20th Century and were held in a museum in Bristol.
There, the collection was largely destroyed in a World War II bombing raid.
It is only recently that scientists have returned to the surviving bone and teeth samples to give them a proper assessment using modern methods.
'Ceremonial burial'
David Miles, Chief Archaeologist of English Heritage which commissioned the dating, said: "The dates show that some people in Britain were burying their dead in a cemetery in the early Mesolithic period 4,000 years earlier than had previously been thought.
(via dph)
Posted by Groonk at 06:28 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, People Who Died, Science, WorldWarII
September 12, 2003
'Father of H-Bomb,' Edward Teller Dies
Edward Teller, the man known as the "father of the H-bomb", has died in California, at the age of 95. The Hungarian-born scientist promoted a strong defense policy in his adopted homeland.
A key member of the Manhattan Project, he helped the United States develop the first atomic bomb, during the Second World War. He played an important role in U.S. defense and energy policies for half a century.
Mr. Teller championed development of the hydrogen bomb, nuclear power and the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative. He was a vocal critic of the former Soviet Union and communist governments in Eastern Europe.
Born in Budapest in 1908, Edward Teller was educated at the University of Leipzig, under the noted physicist Werner Heisenberg. After the rise of Hitler, Mr. Teller, who was Jewish, escaped from Nazi Europe to Britain and the United States, where he taught at a number of major universities. After the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, he worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
Edward Teller died in Stanford, California, near the Hoover Institute, where he was a senior research fellow.
Posted by Groonk at 06:41 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of History, WorldWarII
September 07, 2003
Finding lost art
(via 7d)
By CARL HARTMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) - People searching for art stolen that was by the Nazis have a new tool: a Web site that allows U.S. museum collections to be checked for long-lost pieces.
The Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal - - is a searchable registry for people looking for items that disappeared in Europe between 1932 and 1946. It goes online Monday.http://www.nepip.org
So far 66 museums have signed up to participate in the program overseen by the American Association of Museums. They include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Chicago Institute of Art. The Web site has indexed 5,761 of their objects and an additional 1,663 are in process.
Similar sites in Europe will be reachable through a link with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
The Nazis and their allies may have stolen as many as 1.5 million objects by the end of World War II.
Estimates of the number still missing run as high as 100,000 works of museum quality. Some have found their way to the United States.
The association's president, Edward H. Able Jr., counted 17 claims settled for paintings, sculptures, textiles and pieces of armor found in American museums since 1997. Among them are a pastel by Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter, that had been bought by a trustee for the Art Institute of Chicago, and a painting by Henri Matisse that had been at the Seattle Art Museum.
The Nazis not only confiscated property but also forced dealers and agents to sell, at artificially low prices, art owned by Jews and the Nazis' political enemies. Confiscations and forced sales included books, religious objects, stamp and coin collections, furniture and other antiques and rarities.
Able said for that reason the Web site initiative includes more than just art museums. "We have museums of all kinds - an item could have seeped into a history museum, for example," he said.
---
On the Net:
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org
American Association of Museums: http://www.aam-us.org
Posted by Groonk at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Art, History, WorldWarII
August 07, 2003
P.T. Boat Base of World War II
The amount of detail on this work is insanely good:
In August of 2002, I was contacted by O & S Inc., an exhibit and display company, who were looking to hire an artist/modelmaker to create two dioramas depicting John F. Kennedy's PT 109 naval service in the Solomon Islands during WW II. I was recommended for the job by an artist/friend who knew both my fine art work (sculpture and photography), as well as my freelance work for film, theatre, television and museum exhibits.
Posted by Groonk at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of Art, WorldWarII
July 28, 2003
Over 4 generations of troops entertained
Bob Hope dies at 100
By VINCENT CANBY
Bob Hope, whose mastery of the comic monologue and the topical wisecrack carried him from vaudeville to Broadway musicals and then on to worldwide fame as a radio, film and television star of the first magnitude, died Sunday night in Toluca Lake, Calif., according to The Associated Press, which cited his long-time publicist, Ward Grant. Mr. Hope was 100.
There was nothing Bob Hope loved more than an audience, and audiences responded in kind, particularly soldiers facing combat who desperately needed a laugh. Some years ago, he chartered a yacht for a cruise in Canadian waters. It was one of the few formal vacations the comedian ever took, and he found he could not stand the serenity. He cut the cruise short and returned to Hollywood with the comment, ``Fish don't applaud.''
Mr. Hope, who made an art and a vast fortune out of the delivery of the one-line gag, thrived on applause. It was the secret of his youthfulness.
It was also an important source of the energy that allowed him to travel millions of miles to entertain American servicemen, far exceeding the effort of any other entertainer. From 1941 to 1948 he performed nearly all his 400 radio programs at military bases. And at an age when most performers curtail their activities, Mr. Hope continued to make his annual tours during the war in Vietnam, playing to the sons of the servicemen he entertained during World War II and the Korean War.
Servicemen, as well as several generations of civilians, delighted in Mr. Hope's style of humor, epitomized by his breezy monologues, which were tightly woven gags that mixed the topical with the fantastic.
He arrived in Saigon on the day that Vietcong agents blew up an American officers' billet. ``I was on the way to my hotel,'' he told an audience several hours later, ``and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction.''
Mr. Hope excelled at a typically American brand of brash, timely humor. The wit was never very profound or subtle, but it was, at its best, irreverently poignant, carrying him through several immensely successful careers in the theater, radio, films and television.
Posted by Groonk at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | Ministry of USA, WorldWarII
July 27, 2003
Old Message in Bottle
(via 7d. I wonder if it's real.)
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - A message in a bottle apparently thrown into the sea 60 years ago by an Estonian refugee fleeing the Nazis has been discovered on a remote Swedish beach.
Thorsten Schwarz said Friday he found the bottle outside Oxeloesund, a town 55 miles southwest of the capital, Stockholm.
Schwarz, a Swiss tourist, said the message was written in English and dated 1943, when the Nazis occupied Estonia, 200 miles east of Sweden, across the Baltic Sea.
He said the message was signed by Maja Westerman, an Estonian refugee who wrote that she and her sister had arrived a year earlier on the small Swedish Baltic island of Gotska Sandoen, 68 miles southeast of Stockholm.
"We are still dreaming about our home," the yellow letter said. "Is the war over yet? We are looking forward to peace and friendship. I would be very grateful if I could see my family again."
About 2,000 refugees from the three Baltic countries - most of them from the Estonian islands of Saarema and Kaerdla - were given asylum on Gotska Sandoen during the war.
"It is very moving," Schwarz told The Associated Press by telephone from his home in Altnau, near Lake Constance in Switzerland.
"Just imagine if Maja Westerman is still alive today and it would be possible to find her," he added.
Schwarz said he found the bottle Tuesday, and returned to Switzerland on Friday. He said he would search for the letter's author on the Internet and attempt to authenticate the letter.
Schwarz said he had to break the bottle to get the letter out. He said he will mail it to a journalist on Gotland, a resort island near Gotska Sandoen, who will try to confirm the letter's authenticity. Schwarz said he doesn't believe the letter is a hoax.
"I know about the type of paper used during that time," Schwarz said. "And my brother, who is a doctor of history, said he too believes it is real."
Soviet troops occupied then-independent Estonia in 1940 and the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Most of the 100,000 Estonians who fled the small Baltic state during the war left as Red Army soldiers returned in 1944. Estonia regained its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Posted by Groonk at 01:44 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of War, Weird, WorldWarII
May 27, 2003
Truth be told
MedicMike has been keeping correspondance with a WWII fighter pilot. Here's an article on that pilot and his brother:
It's been more than 58 years since Norman Burns Bitzegaio, younger brother of former Vigo County Superior Court Judge Harold J. Bitzegaio, was shot down over Japan. It's been less than a month since the elder Bitzegaio has known what actually happened to his brother during World War II.On July 30, 1945, Navy pilot Norman Bitzegaio and his two-man crew were shot down while on a mission over Osaka, Japan. It was assumed all three crew members had perished when other squadron members reported the plane had burst into flames upon impact.
Gilbert and Dora Bitzegaio were soon informed by the Department of the Navy that their son had been killed in action. That's apparently not what happened.
"Two crewmen died in the crash, but somehow Norm got out," says Harold.
The Bitzegaio brothers -- Norm, a Navy pilot of torpedo bombers, and Harold, a Navy pilot of fighter planes -- were part of the same task force in the Pacific theater of World War II. Harold, who had graduated from Hymera High School in 1939, was stationed aboard the naval carrier USS Intrepid, while brother Norm, who graduated from Gerstmeyer High School in Terre Haute in 1942, was aboard the carrier USS Hancock. Middle brother Bill Bitzegaio enlisted in the Air Force.
Harold, being the oldest, was the first to enlist in the armed forces and was called to duty Jan. 1, 1942. Soon after, his brothers also enlisted, their decisions likely influenced by their older brother.
"I think they were a little envious of me and both were very proud of me and I think my enlistment rubbed off on them," Harold says.
Being in somewhat close proximity had its rewards for a couple of kids fighting in a war thousands of miles from their Indiana home. Though they never saw one another, Harold and Norman were able to talk a few times.
"One day I was spotting for offshore cruisers, they were shelling the island, and I was calling the shots back to the cruiser, ranging for them, and I was interrupted by the radio. Somebody said, 'Hey, big Bitz, this is little Bitz!' It was Norm," remembers 82-year-old Harold, laughing, while sitting in his home on Terre Haute's east side. "We had two or three conversations that way, inadvertently. We just happened to be on the same frequency at the same time."
The last time Harold ever talked to brother Norm was during one of those fortuitous occurrences. "And that was just happenstance," says Harold.
In 1949, Norman's remains were returned to his mother and father and he was buried in the K of P Cemetery in Hymera on June 8. His family went about their lives, raising families, with older brother Harold serving as judge of the Vigo County Superior Court from 1958 to 1980.
After retirement, Harold Bitzegaio became curious, remembering something his mother had once told him, that several months after the discovery of Norman's remains in Japan, government officials had contacted his parents and requested some of Norman's personal effects, including his pilot's log book and other items. They were told they were to be used as evidence in a war crimes trial. The log book was never returned and the family heard no more.
About six years ago, Harold began looking back into the matter, but didn't get very far until about 18 months ago, when he met with a representative of Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who had partnered with the Library of Congress to implement the national Veterans History Project. Its aim was to create a lasting legacy of documents and recorded interviews with the men and women of America's veterans.
Harold presented the facts as he knew them and Lugar's office contacted the Missing in Action/Prisoner of War section of the government, which forwarded the request to several other agencies. On May 2, a letter was received by Lugar's office from the Department of the Navy, informing him that the National Archives and Records Administration had found in more than 4,000 pages of transcripts from the War Crimes Trial of the Osaka Military Police what had been Norm Bitzegaio's fate:
"That on or about 30 July, 1945, at Osaka, Honshu, Japan, the accused, Tsugio Nagatomo, then and there being the commander of the Central District Military Police, and having the physical custody of Ensign Norman B. Bitzegaio, a wounded American Prisoner of War, did through his own acts and the acts of his subordinates, willfully and unlawfully neglect and refuse to provide him with adequate medicines and medical attention in consequence of which the said prisoner of war died on or about July 30, 1945 at the Central District Military Police Headquarters, Osaka, Honshu, Japan."
Harold says other documents he's received listed his brother's cause of death "as a hole in the base of the skull" and that he was initially buried in a common grave with Japanese black marketeers before being moved to a U.S. military gravesite.
Harold now believes his brother was not killed in action, but rather executed.
"That was the Japanese method of execution because they used to make a guy dig his own grave and then kneel down and they'd shoot him and cover him up," notes Harold.
In addition to the Purple Heart, the Air Medal and the Navy Cross that Norman Bitzegaio earned, he will now be awarded the Prisoner of War medal posthumously -- 58 years later.
"There were mistakes made or some record keeping not done, but we finally penetrated the veil of unknowns of what happened after he was shot down ... that he was taken prisoner and died in the hands of the Japanese," says Harold, who retired with the rank of lieutenant commander. "I just get a sense of satisfaction that the truth is out and this whole story is being told. The story, the sequence of events and the circumstances all fit together now."
Posted by Groonk at 06:11 PM | Comments (0) | Ministry of War, WorldWarII
May 16, 2003
Jesus in Japan
Another old one that's so worth keeping up with:
Its a story of Jesus Christ, and it goes a little something like this: Jesus didnt die up on his cross at Golgotha. That was his brother. Christ himself fled across Siberia and, after a brief detour through Alaska, landed in Japan where he got married and raised a family.The town, Shingo, calls itself Kirisuto no Sato: Hometown of Christ.
Not many burgs outside of Bethlehem make that claim.
Today, Shingo is known more for its garlic farms (they even make garlic ice cream there) and apple orchards than the Tomb of Christ that is, if it were to be known for anything at all (its not).
The site itself, a few minutes drive from the towns tiny commercial district, is rather unspectacular. Two 8-foot-high wooden crosses surrounded by a white picket fence sit on a bluff in the woods overlooking a gravel parking lot. A small museum sits at the other side of the parking lot.
On a typical day, dozens of people wander through. Some leave a small offering five-yen coins, considered lucky, are common in a basket at the gravesite. Some even pray.
The idea of Jesus visiting, much less settling down in, Japans equivalent of the Ozarks may sound patently absurd. Even many locals doubt the tale. But some residents of Shingo say its entirely plausible that the man many call Messiah came here, and claim they can prove it.
An Ancient Scroll and a Remarkable Tale
In the years leading up to World War II, ancient scrolls turned up in the hands of a Shinto priest just outside of Tokyo. They pertained to two small, forgotten graves in the remote mountains of northern Honshu, the main island of Japan
The scrolls written in a Japanese so archaic that only experts can read it recount the unlikely tale of Christs escape from death, and were purportedly written or at least dictated by Jesus himself as his last will and testament. Call it the Last Testament.
When the priest realized what he had uncovered, he summoned Banzan Toya, an artist/researcher specializing in ancient Japanese history. Together, they located two graves in a bamboo grove on