DONALD WILLERTON
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THE SALT MARCH

3/5/2023

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​Researching the salt mines in Europe, I found several articles dealing with salt in India. Along the west and east coasts of India, extensive low-lying marshes are flooded by the sea during the monsoon season. When the seawater evaporates during the summer, large salt pans are created that hold thick layers of salt. Many years ago, if you lived near these salt pans, you could gather all you needed, and then sell or trade the remainder.
 
Then someone figured out that if everyone had free access to salt, someone else was losing an opportunity to make money. Therefore, for the past 5,000 years, India has suffered in one way or another from the objective of making money from its naturally abundant salt.
 
In particular, the governing of India by the British in the 1700s created a seriously onerous situation where overlords made it a law that indigenous residents would be taxed for salt, resulting in, first, the British East India Company having a monopoly on the manufacture, sales, and possession of salt, and then the British Government, itself, to use the continuing monopoly to make up to 10% of its Indian revenue. Eventually, the law made it a crime not only to make salt, but to even possess it without having bought it from the government. The annual cost to a family for salt was two-thirds the average family’s income.
 
The history of British salt in India is involved in the particulars, but it brought about one of the most famous non-violent acts of civil disobedience by a nation: the Salt March of 1930, led by Mahatma Gandhi. That action and subsequent actions around the production of salt would eventually add momentum to India becoming independent of Great Britain.
 
From 12 March to 6 April, 1930, for 24 days, Gandhi led a march from the town of Sabarmati Ashram to the town of Dandi, around 240 miles away. Beginning with 78 trusted followers and ending with many thousands, the march brought world-wide recognition of India’s oppression by the British government, and would lead to large scale acts of civil disobedience against the salt laws by millions of Indians. The Salt March culminated with Gandhi walking into a salt pan at 8:30 in the morning, gathering a lump of salty mud and boiling it in seawater, and then raising the handful of salt that he had made high above him, declaring that he had broken the law. He then implored all his followers to likewise begin making salt along the seashore.
 
Gandhi kept the British government fully informed of what he was going to do – before, during, and after he had done it. There were no covert actions; he wrote articles, had letters published, sent telegrams, held interviews, and met daily with reporters, all telling the same story: salt laws were unjust, it punished the Indian society at the individual level as well as the national level, it hurt the poor worst, it kept the Indian economy at the mercy of the British government, and it was a crime against the very society who should be benefiting from their natural resources.
 
The British reacted in royal fashion by arresting Gandhi and 60,000 others. They passed more laws, including censorship of correspondence, as well as the clamping down on newspapers reporting the incidents. They also reacted with force, the most famous incident using machine guns to slaughter 200-250 non-violent and unarmed protestors in Peshawar’s Qissa Kahani Bazaar on 23 April, 1930. One British Indian Army soldier, Chandra Singh Garhwali and some other troops from the renowned Royal Garhwal Rifles regiment refused to fire at the crowds. The entire platoon was arrested and many received heavy sentences, including life imprisonment.
 
Less than a month later, another non-violent action was planned as a raid on the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat, south of Dandi, where Gandhi’s walk had ended. It ended with British soldiers senselessly clubbing non-resisting protesters until “…in two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies…The police became enraged by the non-resistance…They commenced savagely kicking the seat men in the abdomen and testicles. The injure men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police…The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.”
 
The story of the brutalities appeared in 1,350 newspapers throughout the world and was read into the official record of the United States Senate.
 
Nothing changed. The salt laws remained and no major policy concessions were made by the British until the 1950s. However, world opinion increasingly began to recognize the legitimacy of claims by Gandhi and the Indian Political Party. It was a significant step in Britain ultimately surrendering its control of India.
 
Thirty years later, the significance of the Salt March was still being felt in America:
 
“Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read, I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was particularly moved by his Salt March to the Sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of his [truth force or love force] was profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.”
 
                                                Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
 
 
 
I’m taking a vacation with my family in a week, so will not be posting blogs on the next two Sundays.

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IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF?

2/26/2023

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​USA TODAY ran an article on Friday that told of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s program of placing war-displaced Ukranian children either with Russian families or into camps for the purpose of converting them into Russian citizens.
 
A State Department-funded report estimates that as many as 6,000 Ukrainian children have been sent to at least 43 re-education facilities that stretch from the Black Sea coast all the way to Siberia.
 
Michael Scharf, a human rights lawyer who tries cases at the International Criminal Court, said the real number of Ukranian children being relocated is likely closer to 400,000 children, based on “numerous reports of Russian forces seizing children from orphanages, schools, and hospitals in areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation and transferring them to Russia where they are sent to foster families to be transformed into Russians.”
 
Getting a firm grip on the actual numbers is complicated because Russia has refused to permit the kind of independent centralized registration system that’s required by the international laws of armed conflict to track and protect children in war zones.
 
The article draws parallels between Putin’s actions and Hitler’s efforts to convert non-German children into German citizens (who could then be drafted as soldiers or workers). In October of 1939, with the invasion of Poland, Hitler created the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom, with Heinrich Himmler as its head. Its aim was to help resettle the newly occupied territories with a German population. They found in Poland, however, an abundance of children who resembled the ideal Aryan German—blond hair, blue eyes, a similar length of the nose, the thickness of the lips, and an erect posture. 
 
To reconcile this problem, the Nazis propagated the idea that these children were actually descended from German blood. Therefore, these children should be taken away from their Polish parents and repatriated to German families, that the children could be “returned to the Fatherland.” This was not only true of Polish children, but of any Aryan-looking children from Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, or other recently German-occupied countries.
 
Between 1939 and 1944, approximately 200,000 Polish children were stolen by the Nazis and sent away to be “Germanized”. Using a list of 62 physical characteristics, children were identified, photographed, and analyzed, and if the children were found to be suitably Aryan, then those between two and six were sent to maternity, or Lebensborn, homes in Germany. After their adoption by a proper SS family, the children were provided false birth certificates with new German names and birthplaces. Children not found suitable were sent on to concentration camps and gas chambers.
 
The goal of the German parents was to erase any trace of their native heritage and reshape them as loyal Nazis. They were taught to speak German (if they spoke their mother tongue they were deprived of food or whipped with a strap), forced to wear uniforms with swastikas, sing military songs, and were taught Nazi beliefs. They were also forced to endure countless hours of drills and marches to destroy any sense of individuality.
 
Older Polish girls with Aryan characteristics were sent to SS maternity homes where they became “breeding material” for SS officers.
 
Putin’s program is less selective and he is no longer limiting the program to displaced or abandoned children. He’s even using one of the same ploys that Hitler did: Ukranian parents are being tricked into signing consent forms for their children to be sent to summer camp facilities to be “out of harm’s way”, while Himmler sent notices to parents to bring their children to the local train station at a certain time to go on a holiday to “improve their health”. The children never returned from their holiday and there are still thousands of them or their descendants who live in Germany today unaware of their true identity and heritage.
 
Putin’s purpose for Ukraine, however, seems to be the same as Hitler’s for Poland. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made this statement: “It…speaks to the fact that President Putin has been trying from day one to erase Ukraine’s identity, to erase its future.”

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THE SALT MINES OF POLAND

2/19/2023

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​Outside of Krakow, Poland, are the Wieliczka and Bochnia Royal Salt Mines, the oldest tunnels of which were dug in 1248. Close to one another, they are an official Polish Historic Monument and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. My photos show the largest Wieliczka chamber, located about 800 feet underground, plus the dining hall as it was being prepared for a banquet. Except for wood pilings and the electrical parts, the wall, floor, ceiling, candelabra, staircases, statuary, relief panels, chapel niches, and tunnels are carved entirely out of the vast layers of grey-colored rock salt.
 
You can rent the facility for weddings and receptions. The chapel is often said to have the best acoustics in Europe and many musical recordings have been done there.
 
The maximum depth of the tunnel system is a little more than a thousand feet, there are 178 miles of tunnels and chambers, and it was a full-blown enterprise producing commercial quantities of table salt until 2007. There is still enough mining activities to provide tourists with token salt containers and chunks of rock salt in the gift shops above ground.
 
There is also a large brine-solution lake where guided tour boats are available, but swimming is not allowed. The water is crystal clear and the level of quiet is impressive. The typical guided tourist route is 2.2 miles in length, so it is not a casual walk; lots of descending stairs. There are statues, vignettes, and salt relief panels along the way. There is a special statue of Karol Wojtyla (later, Pope John Paul II) in the chapel, who attended it’s dedication.
 
In the nearby Bochnia mine, which has only 2.8 miles of tunnels but descends to over 1500 feet, a small town has been created out of its tunnels and chambers, and is open to visitors. I did not tour that mine. A three-hundred-bed sanatorium is currently operated there, plus fields for playing volleyball, basketball, and handball. There is also a restaurant and conference rooms; I don’t know how bathrooms are handled. The air stays a constant temperature of 57-61 degrees Fahrenheit, with a relative humidity of 70%, and is recognized for its purity.  
 
The beginning and end of my tour involved riding an (old) industrial elevator. The cars are a steel-mesh-enclosed five-foot square box, not much more than six feet tall, and the operators cram as many as eight or nine people inside at a time. It provides a nice level of excitement. About 1.2 million people visit annually.
 
During March and April, 1944, the Nazis used the Wieliczka chambers for an armament factory. Several thousand Jews were transported from the forced labor camps in Plaszow and Mielec to an above-ground labor camp in St. Kinga Park, with about 1700 prisoners being used in the mine itself. However, manufacturing never began as the Soviet Army soon occupied the area; the Jews were relocated to factories in Litomierzyce in the Czech Republic and Linz in Austria.

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MAD KING LUDWIG II - PART TWO

2/12/2023

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​Being as different a king as he was, Ludwig II had few friends inside his own government. In particular, the ministers of the realm, whom he had inherited from his father, were seriously offended by his behavior and his refusal to pay attention to them. Although he had paid for his pet projects out of his own funds, by 1885, the King was 14 million marks in debt, had borrowed heavily from his family, and rather than economizing as his financial ministers advised, Ludwig continued to pursue his further opulent designs without pause; besides the four castles he had already begun, he had four more on the drawing board. He demanded that loans be sought from all of Europe’s royalty, while still remaining aloof from the matters of state. Feeling harassed and irritated by his ministers, he let it be known that he was considering replacing them all.
 
The ministers feared that he would actually do it, so they decided to find a way to declare the King mentally ill, which would render him unable to rule. Between January and March of 1886, when Ludwig had ruled Bavaria for twenty-one years and was only forty years of age, the conspirators assembled a “medical report” that included a litany of supposed bizarre behaviors: his pathological shyness, his avoidance of state business, his complex and expensive flights of fancy, sloppy and childish table manners, and sending servants into foreign lands on “research trips” to verify architectural details of buildings.
 
The report was finalized in June and signed by four psychiatrists, the main one being Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, the head of the Munich insane asylum. The report concluded that the King suffered from paranoia and was incapable of ruling. Interestingly, three of the signers had never met the King, while Gudden had met him only once, twelve years before. There was no examination.
 
Ludwig’s uncle, Prince Luitpold, kindly let it be known that he would take over the government if the King were to be deposed.
 
At four in the morning on June 10, 1886, a government commission arrived at Neuschwanstein to deliver a document of deposition to the King. Having been warned an hour earlier, Ludwig had them arrested at the gates and imprisoned until later that day. In spite of the King not being officially deposed, the government issued a news release declaring Luitpold as Prince Regent, which made him the ruler of Bavaria. King Ludwig protested with his own news release, but most of the copies were seized by the commission and the populace remained ignorant of the happenings.
 
On June 12, the commission succeeded in capturing the now non-king Ludwig, taking him to the Castle Berg for confinement. That evening, on a private walk around the castle’s lake with Dr. von Gudden, Ludwig and his psychiatrist both disappeared. Their bodies were found the next morning in waist-deep water. Ludwig’s death was officially ruled a suicide by drowning, despite an official autopsy indicating that no water was found in his lungs. Gudden’s body showed blows to the head and neck, with signs that he had been strangled.
 
Ludwig was officially succeeded by his younger brother Otto, but since Otto had been ruled insane three years before (by Dr. von Gudden), Prince Regent Luitpold continued to rule until his death in 1912, at age 91. His eldest son, also named Ludwig, took over, officially deposed Otto, and declared himself King Ludwig III of Bavaria. He would rule only until 1918, when the end of World War I declared that Germany would no longer have monarchies.
 
Prince Regent Luitpold, needing money to finish the castle, began charging visitors to see Castle Neuschwanstein in August of 1886. Since that time, more than 50 million people have walked through the halls, becoming one of Bavaria’s biggest tourist attractions. 

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MAD KING LUDWIG - PART ONE

2/5/2023

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​In 1806, Maxmilian I was the King of Bavaria. When he died in 1825, he was succeeded by his son, Ludwig I, who abdicated to his son, Maxmilian II, in 1848. After Max II died in 1864, his eldest son, Ludwig, became Ludwig II. When that Ludwig supposedly committed suicide in 1886, he passed the throne onto his brother, Otto. However, Otto had already been declared insane, so his Uncle Luitpold took over as the Regent of Bavaria until he died in 1912, leaving the regency to his eldest son, also named Ludwig. That Ludwig took only a few months to have Otto (who was still alive and still insane) officially deposed and himself declared King Ludwig III. That lasted until after WWI, in 1918, when monarchies in Germany were dissolved.
 
As uninteresting and opaque as all that is, you might be surprised to know that Ludwig II is quite well-known: one of the castles he built for himself served as the model for the centerpiece castles at Disneyland and DisneyWorld.
 
Ludwig II was not like the other Bavarian rulers. He was raised with constant reminders that he would someday be king, so his parents indulged him to the extreme, while also severely controlling him, subjecting him to a strict regimen of study and exercise. In spite of it, or perhaps because of it, Ludwig displayed rather odd behaviors as an adult. His father, the King, was frequently ignored, while he would later refer to his mother as “my predecessor’s consort”. He preferred fantasy worlds, heroic German sagas, and images of German knights, and was athletic in riding horses, swimming, and climbing mountains near his childhood home. He loved to read poetry, and enjoyed staging scenes from the Romantic operas of Richard Wagner in and around the castle. He would later decorate castle interiors with large scenes from Wagner’s The Ring.
 
Ludwig’s father died after a three-day illness in 1864, and Ludwig Otto Friedrich Wilhelm, who was only nineteen at the time, became Ludwig II, King of Bavaria. In spite of a war between Bavaria and Prussia, and then a war where they were allies against France, both happening before he was twenty-five, the King had no interest in the military might of Bavaria and became recognized as a complete pacifist. After Bavaria was pressured into joining Bismarck’s unification movement of Germany in 1870, Ludwig II largely withdrew from politics, devoting himself to his personal creative projects in art, music, and architecture. He built Munich’s famed opera house, encouraged foreign composers and performers to tour Bavaria, and made himself the patron of Richard Wagner, who might have been unknown, otherwise. But his delight was designing and building castles, where he personally approved every detail of the architecture, decorations, and furnishings.
 
That did not free him from his greatest royal stress, however, for he had no heir, owing to the fact that he was not much interested in women. He was engaged to a cousin in 1867, but the only thing they had in common was a deep interest in the works of Wagner. Over the next few months, he repeatedly postponed the wedding date, and finally canceled the engagement. He later confessed that he could not envision sharing his house with a woman.
 
This might have only been the exaggerated behaviors of an introvert, but his preference for being by himself was pathological. In Castle Linderhof, which was the only castle of his that was finished before he died, the castle’s dining table had only enough space for one person. In fact, the King designed his dining room to be directly over the kitchen. Refusing to allow the servants to witness him eating, the dining table was lowered down through the floor by pulleys into the kitchen, loaded with the meal, and raised back up, where Ludwig would then eat alone. He sent it down when he was finished.
 
For having several castles, he was often the only inhabitant, other than the servants. Even if there were guests in the castle, he designed his private quarters to be accessible only by a single passageway, which they were forbidden to use.
 
Between 1872 and 1885, the King attended 209 performances at various royal theaters. They were all mostly performed for only one audience member – himself. He watched and listened, by himself, to 44 operas, 11 ballets, and 154 plays. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people, he said, but that he did not want people staring at him and following his every expression through their opera-glasses.
 
At Castle Linderhof, he had a personal grotto built in the upper expanse of the park – a manmade cave with its own lake, where he would be rowed alone in a shell-like boat through the cavern as it was lit by different colors of electric lights (he built one of the first power plants in Bavaria to provide the electricity).
 
As for leading the government as King, he was basically absent. In his last ten years of governing, he only visited the Royal Palace in Munich once, while attending only one military review. He did, however, like roaming the countryside in his carriage, alone except for the driver, where he would stop and visit at different homes and farms, visiting with the common people. For this, he was immensely popular with the people of Bavaria, even if he wasn’t with the government and military officials.
 
As for his castles, there are three on regular tourist routes: Castle Linderhof, which is smallish for a castle, but had several acres of park around it; the iconic Castle Neuschwanstein, which is recognized world-wide; and Herrenchiemsee, a partial replica of the French palace of Versailles (which was not on my particular tour) and in which he stayed a total of ten days. The other castle of note was not his, but was his childhood home - Castle Hohenschwangau, built by his father.
 
At the time of his death, Ludwig was about to start building another fairy-tale castle that was styled much like Neuschwanstein, but higher up the same mountain.
 
The photos include Castle Linderhof, which is more ornate on the inside as it is on the outside. I did not see a square inch of floor, wall, or ceiling that wasn’t extravagantly decorated, usually being gilded in gold. He also had been impressed by the mirrors at Versailles, so he covered the walls of his residence with mirrors to make the rooms look bigger, as well as giving himself more reflections; he was quite vain about being a very handsome man. The surrounding many-acre park is also elaborate with several buildings, fountains, ponds, and statuary, many of them fashioned after the backdrops and sets in Wagner’s operas.
 
Castle Neuschwanstein is easy to recognize – there is a small bridge across from it that provides the money shot. A guard manages the crowd at the bridge to prevent overcrowding. Exiting the castle, an impressive model is shown inside a glass case. By the way, as fairy-like as the towers are, they hold staircases that provide access to the different floors of the castle. There are no public elevators and visitors are sometimes challenged to make all the steps.
 
In the photo that includes a lake, the yellowish/orange castle at the bottom right is Castle Hohenschwangau. I took the photo while standing on an outside deck of Neuschwanstein.

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A VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ

1/29/2023

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​My first impression was that it was too pretty to have been a concentration camp. With well-spaced buildings, brick siding, tiled roofs, tall windows, and healthy trees, it wasn’t far different in appearance from the college I attended (photo #1).
 
What I had entered into was Auschwitz I, which existed from after WWI and was a Polish army barracks when Poland was invaded in 1939. The Germans first used it to keep POWs but quickly evolved it to look like the Dachau Concentration Camp, Himmler’s standard.
 
In 1941, a newer and much larger facility was built to compliment the original and to provide faster mass executions; see the map in photo #2. It is called Auschwitz II (also referred to as Birkenau, after a nearby village) and provides the more iconic view that most people are familiar with (photo #3), and has the large capacity crematoria.
 
The third part of the complex is Auschwitz III (also referred to as Monowitz, after another nearby village), which was built in late 1942. Monowitz is much smaller than the other two and was built to house prisoners who worked as slave labor at the large IG Farben chemical plant across the street.
 
Within 2 miles of each other, Auschwitz I and II receive about two million visitors a year; Auschwitz III was as close, but was destroyed at the end of the war; it’s not part of the tours.
 
My tour in September of 2022 was led by a resident guide using a microphone, while we wore earpieces. With maybe thirty on-hand during the day, each guide goes through several weeks of training to learn and follow a common script, meaning that except for answering questions, my group heard the same information as everyone else.
 
After going through metal detectors at the entrance, it took 45 minutes or so to tour Auschwitz I, transfer by bus to Auschwitz II, spend an hour or so there, walk through the museum, and then end the tour with a short visit to the bookstore. Several locations visited by the tour did not allow photography, out of reverence for the prisoners.
 
I did go through a crematorium, saw the execution wall where prisoners were routinely shot, peeked through the window of a genuine prison cell used for political prisoners, and saw the nice two-story house of Rudolf Hoss, his wife, and children. He was the commandant of Auschwitz, and was hung in 1947 from the same gallows that his prisoners had been hung. What would it have been like to grow up with a window that looked out on a concentration camp?
 
Every 27th of January is the International Holocaust Day, recognizing the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945. Last year on this date, I wrote about the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, hosted on January 20, 1942, by Reinhard Heydrich, that formalized the operational aspects of the extermination of the Jewish Race in Europe. In particular, six prison camps were recognized as those that would be reconfigured or built new as “Death Camps”. Those six camps would have the joint capability to kill as many as 25,000 Jews a day.
 
Auschwitz was selected as one of those six and that’s why Auschwitz II was built. Unlike Treblinka, another Death Camp, which had a few barracks (Jews stepped off the trains and were herded directly into gas chambers, which meant there was no need for a lot of housing), Auschwitz not only routinely brought in by train those who would be killed (photo #4) but also had a significant worker population to help build the camp, operate the camp, and to provide workers to the various projects and factories building war-related products. Auschwitz-Birkenau would eventually have more than a hundred barracks that would house 300,000 prisoners during the three years that it was active.
 
Seeing the preserved barracks and the vast number of foundations of destroyed barracks was the most gripping part of the tour for me (photo #5). Between 1940 and 1945, about 1.3 million Jews, Poles, Roma/Gypsies, Soviet POWs, Italians, French, Scandinavians, and others were brought to the camp, while 1.1 million of those were executed, the majority in the gas chambers. No matter how many came, there was always room for more.
 
I appreciated the model of the crematorium. Photo #6 gives the layout. Photo #7 is where the people arriving on the trains were directed into an underground room where they disrobed, hung their clothes on pegs, and sometimes found soap to use in the showers.
 
Expecting to shower and be deloused, they went into a large room that had shower heads installed in the ceiling. Once the gas pellets were dumped into the rooms, it took ten to twenty minutes for everyone to die from poisoning (photo #8).
 
The next photo is the room with the ovens. Bodies were brought up from the underground chambers and burnt, sometimes four-to-five bodies in each oven (photo #9). There were at least two of these facilities.
 
These buildings were destroyed by the Germans as they fled the camp in the face of the approaching Soviet Army. All that remains today are large piles of bricks and steel.
 
I’ve read about the various work assignments that prisoners were forced to perform: gathering the clothes, personal items, and the suitcases left by the people in the undressing room; cleaning the dressing room so the next crowd of people would not be suspicious; pulling out the bodies after they had been gassed (800 or so piled five deep on top of each other); searching each body for gold teeth, coins, hidden gems, and other valuables, cutting and collecting women’s hair; taking the bodies upstairs to be cremated; operating the ovens; and periodically taking the ashes out to be dumped.
 
I cannot imagine the horrors they must have seen. 

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TREPTOWER PARK, BERLIN

1/22/2023

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​From April 16 to May 2, 1945, more than 70,000 people were killed in the liberation of Berlin from the Third Reich. That number includes some 22,000 Soviet soldiers, 20,000 German soldiers and 30,000 civilians. Five years later, on May 8, 1949, the largest and most well-known Soviet war memorial was dedicated, paying tribute to the liberation of Europe from National Socialism and the end of World War II.
 
For over three years, some 1200 workers, 200 stone masons, and 90 sculptors worked on the complex. With its completion, it became the third memorial built by the Soviet Union in Berlin, the other two being the Tiergarten Memorial built in 1945, and the Schonholzer Heide Memorial in 1947.
 
The Soviet War Memorial and military cemetery in Berlin’s Treptower Park is spread over 25 acres and includes a 36 foot-tall bronze statue of a Soviet soldier with a sword, holding a German child, standing over a broken swastika. In front of the statue is a central area lined on both sides with 16 sarcophagi, one for each of the then 16 Soviet Republics, with relief carvings of military scenes and quotations from Joseph Stalin, on one side in Russian, on the other side in German. Between the sarcophagi is a cemetery with some 7,000 soldiers of the Red Army. The Schonholzer Heide Memorial includes more than 13,000, while Tiergarten holds more than 2,000.
 
The end of the central area has a portal consisting of a pair of stylized Soviet flags built of red granite, flanked by two statues of kneeling soldiers. Beyond those, close to the main walkway of the park, is a stone figure of the Motherland weeping at the loss of her sons.
 
The life of this memorial has not been comfortable. When Nikita Khruschev denounced the Stalinist rule in 1956, there were calls then and throughout the 1960s for Stalin’s words to be erased. It still took 30 years after Khruschev for Stalin’s reign of terror to be openly criticized, and with the fall of the wall and the unification of Germany, there were demands for the statue and the memorial to be torn down. There were massive protests and vandalism, but Germany has maintained its agreement to maintain and repair all war memorials in the country, including the memorial in Treptower Park.
 
It is a very impressive memorial and that statue is huge. 

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THE DRESDEN FRAUENKIRCHE

1/15/2023

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​Frank Smith didn’t know he would become well-known for an act of violence he had committed fifty-five years before.
 
The first church in Dresden was built in the 11th century. In an old yard that lay outside the city, surrounded by a cemetery, the church was the center of the earliest village settlement on a small hill alongside the Elbe River. By 1722, it was in danger of collapsing and was torn down, which was okay with the city council, because the church had been historically Catholic, whereas the citizenry of Dresden had experienced the Reformation and was now fervently Lutheran. Plans were drawn up for a new church by the city master carpenter, George Bahr, that would better reflect the new spirit of the Protestant liturgy by placing the altar, pulpit, and baptismal font directly in the center of the congregation’s view.
 
The Dresden Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) was enormous. Made of Saxony sandstone, it was an engineering marvel for its time, with an unconventional high dome (220 feet), four diagonally set corner towers in the outline of a Greek cross, and with staggered galleries inside that resembled a European opera house. It would hold 3,400 believers. When finished, it would include a famed Silbermann organ that was dedicated on November 25, 1736, and served as a recital organ by Johann Sebastian Bach on December 1.
 
For more than 200 years, the bell-shaped dome dominated the skyline of the city of Dresden. The church was highly important for the spiritual life in the city, for church music, and a focal point of political history.
 
On February 13 and 14, 1945, allied forces carried out a firebombing campaign against the city. In two days, the planes dropped some 650,000 incendiary bombs that would eventually lead to the city being 85% destroyed. The church held up well for the two days, but at 10 am on February 15, the eight interior sandstone pillars that held up the immense dome reacted to the heat of fires raging inside, glowed bright red, and exploded; the outer wall shattered and nearly 6,000 tons of stone plunged to the earth, collapsing the church’s floors into the crypts below.
 
After the end of the war, there were immediate calls for the landmark church to be rebuilt but by then, Dresden was not in Germany, anymore. It was in East Germany and was now governed by the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The Soviets agreed to leave the immense pile of rubble as a war memorial, but they were not interested in erecting any new buildings that did not conform to the principles of the stark and proletariat Soviet architecture.
 
The rubble would remain for almost fifty years before miracles happened: the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Germany was reunited.
 
If you go to Market Square in Dresden today, you will not see the Frauenkirche as a historical structure of the city because the building itself was begun in 1993 and completed in 2005. It was built using computers, including a 3D program created by IBM that allowed visual placement of the stones; used modern engineering methods, machines, and materials; and featured immensely clever stone masonry. It was also built primarily by donations from around the world. It ultimately cost about $180 million.
 
But it looks just like it did in 1736. The building goal was not to make a replacement, but to achieve an architectural restoration. The original building plans used by George Bahr, plus various additions and corrections over the previous two centuries, formed the core drawings for the engineers and architects. Of the millions of stones used in the rebuilding, more than 8,500 original stones were salvaged from the original church and approximately 3,800 stones were used in the reconstruction. Two thousand pieces of the original altar were cleaned and incorporated in the new structure. The organ is new, but is constructed such that it can mimic the music of the original. The statue out front is of Martin Luther and was put into place before the war.
 
Where you see darker squares or rectangles in the pictures, those are original stones. Because Saxony sandstone has a small metal content, the appearance of all of the stones will eventually stain to the same color.
 
And Frank Smith? He was one the crewmen on the B-17 that targeted the Frauenkirche in 1945. While clearing the rubble, the original cross of the dome was discovered; it was on the top of the dome the night that Frank Smith flew over. In the early 2000s, Frank’s son, Alan Smith, was a goldsmith that lived in London and worked for Grant McDonald Silversmiths in London. Alan was selected to make the new gilded cross that now stands on top of the dome.
 
The old cross is on display next to the new altar inside.
 
The photographs are from my visit to Dresden in September of last year. The whole town, much of which was also restored after 1989, was a highlight of my trip.

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A WOUND WHICH WILL NEVER HEAL

1/8/2023

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​Peter Kollwitz was not of full age in August 1914 when he wished to join the German army. As such, he needed permission from his father to be a military volunteer, but his father refused. His mother, Kathe, persuaded her husband to change his mind and permission was granted. So, when Peter was killed ten days after leaving his home town of Berlin in October, there was not only grief, but also guilt.
 
By 1914, Kathe Kollwitz had already established herself as a great German artist through her production of prints, lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, as well as sculptures. Having been born in 1867 Prussia to socially radical parents and an equally radical Lutheran priest for a grandfather, she was from childhood consumed by issues of social justice. When she married a doctor who worked solely among the poor in 1890s Berlin, she became deeply involved with the lives and hardships of the working-class people among whom she was living, and above all, with the role and responsibilities of women.
 
Peter’s death became a turning point. “There is in our lives a wound,” she wrote, “which will never heal, nor should it.” She would try to express her grief and guilt about her son through her different mediums for the rest of her life.
 
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, many of Kathe’s posters, exhibits, displays, sculptures, and carvings were reflections of the war and its effect on people, society, and social concerns. She publicly opposed the rise of Hitler and, along with Einstein and other intellectuals and artists, encouraged voters to reject the Nazis in the 1932 election. Unsurprisingly, once they came to power, the Nazis banned her from exhibiting and forced her to resign from the Academy of Arts, where she taught.
 
In 1935 she produced her last cycle of prints—eight lithographs called simply Death. They portrayed individuals, including herself, in deep sorrow, grief, and despondency for the condition of their lives, transformed and diminished by war and oppression.
 
This was hardly welcome to the Nazi regime, as it claimed to be the rebirth of a cleansed and pure nation. She was visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with a concentration camp; her international profile left her in relative freedom. The Second World War delivered a final blow: the death of her grandson on the Eastern Front in 1942 followed by her evacuation from Berlin the following year. She died in the last weeks of the war, in April, 1945.
 
In an entry in her diary dated October 22, 1937, the anniversary of Peter’s death, she wrote about a small sculpture she had been working on, a sculpture meant to be a private memorial for her son and herself together. It showed a mother, seated, holding her dead son lying between her knees, in her lap. Although the form derives from religious imagery, there is nothing Christian about this sculpture. The son is not, like Jesus, presented to the viewer for contemplation or adoration. He is not resting, as in Michelangelo’s Pieta, on her knees, but is huddled between her legs, almost totally enclosed. She does not show him to us, but attempts to shield him, although dead, from further harm. There is no hint of salvation, merely a response to slaughter.
 
On November 14, 1993, in the pouring rain, the President of Germany, Richard von Weizacker, came to the Neue Wache [New Guardhouse] building in Berlin to rededicate it as the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Dictatorship. It is a building with one display room with a plain slate floor and walls of stone under an oculus in the ceiling that is open to the wind, rain, and snow, as well as the sun. In the middle of the otherwise undecorated and unadorned room, was placed a larger version of the sculpture created in 1937 by Kathe Kollwitz, herself both a witness and victim.
 
Ruth Padel, a poet, said this about the sculpture:
 
“So there it stands, light versus dark. It is in the open air, the light comes down and it is surrounded by empty walls. It sums up the suffering of everybody in all wars. If this were found in a Neolithic tomb, it would still be relevant, because it is about a grown-up mourning a child. It was a kind of political genius of [Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany, who chose the sculpture] to see that this would stand when other things fall away. There is no contextualizing, with any particular clothing or prop. There is just the little face of the dead child, turning up to the mother, the mother’s hand over his face but yet looking at the child, helpless. It is the embodiment of grief and loss.”
 
I took this picture in October of last year. I had read about this memorial, but had not expected to find the sculpture. I discovered it only three blocks from my hotel. Many of the words above come from Germany, Memories of a Nation, by Neil MacGregor.

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SHEPHERD.COM

8/30/2022

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​When I was writing Teddy’s War, I developed the authenticity of the story by using a slew of books that I had already or bought along the way. My bookcase currently holds about seventy books related to World War II, most of them nonfiction. I’m not sure how many new books I bought during my writing time, but I would guess around thirty. And I’m still buying; I’m just that interested.
 
I found most of the books by browsing the books listed in Amazon.com. I’d type in the subject and see what came up. There was always something that seemed interesting, but it wasn’t likely that I was finding the “best” books on the subjects. I enjoy looking at Amazon Choice books, recommended books, the “readers who chose this book also looked at these books”, “books similar to what you asked for”, or other marketing devices that Amazon has on their website that give priority to the books they want me to buy.
 
I have discovered a better way.
 
A month or so ago, I was contacted by Dan Shepherd. He is the head of a small group of people who launched a new author site in the Spring. Dan asked me to provide him a blurb on Teddy’s War, and then recommend five more books that provided material associated with it. I looked at their webpage, liked it, filled out some templates that he provided, and then gave him my blurb about the book and my list of five associated books. Dan’s group edited my words a little, but basically accepted what I had written. They adjusted everything for their website’s format.
 
This is the result:
 
https://shepherd.com/best-books/what-our-fathers-never-told-us-about-wwii
 
 
I created the “topic”, chose five books I had used while writing the novel that fit the topic, and then wrote less than 110 words of why the book was significant to me. I had to swear that I’d read them all and was making honest comments.
 
What you see in my presentation is similar to the presentations throughout the website. It provides selections of books that have been read by and then recommended by authors writing in the field. The website provides several searchable topics that can focus what the reader is looking for. That seems more interesting and infinitely more profitable than randomly browsing Amazon.
 
At the end of September, I’m heading to Poland and Germany for a tour. I’ll be gone for almost three weeks. It is a tour hosted by Globus and has a World War Two focus. I’m visiting these major cities: Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Dresden, Berlin, Weimar, Nuremberg, and Munich. Along the way, I’ll see the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration and termination camps; Oskar Schindler’s factory; Buchenwald concentration camp, the Nuremberg Trials courtroom, the Dachau Memorial Site, and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. I’m staying an extra couple of days in Munich to research a few nearby sites that might have been seen by my dad. He was in the area during October, 1945.
 
I’ll take a lot of pictures so you can look forward to being inundated when I get back.

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