Tom McMahon

Rat Poison Wanted

Rat Poison Wanted

World War II Conservation Public Service Ad

Mustard Gas Smells Like Garlic

Mustard Gas Smells Like Garlic

Who knew? A World War II unpublished poison gas warning poster. (via Neatorama)

A Very Inconvenient Question About The John Demjanjuk Nazi Death Camp Guard Trial Going On Now In Germany

An excerpt from FoxNews.com:

MUNICH — Jewish prisoners had to unload decomposed corpses at the Nazi death camp at Sobibor and were forbidden to warn new prisoners that they would be gassed within the hour, a survivor testified Thursday at the trial of John Demjanjuk.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker, is accused of serving as a low-level guard at the Nazi camp in occupied Poland and is charged with accessory to murder in 27,900 deaths. Demjanjuk rejects the charges, saying he never served in Sobibor or any other Nazi camp.

Sobibor survivor Philip Bialowitz told the Munich state court that Jews being brought from western Europe largely believed the Nazi ruse that they were being resettled and arrived at the camp relieved that their long journey was over.

The 84-year-old testified that he and other Jewish prisoners helped unload the trains, under the watch of German SS and Ukrainian guards. Music was played over loudspeakers to keep the atmosphere calm.

"When I helped the Jewish passengers with their bags, some of them offered me a tip," said Bialowitz, who was born in Poland and now lives in New York. "My heart was bleeding because I knew that they would be dead in less than an hour and I couldn't warn them." ...

Bialowitz was the second Sobibor survivor to testify this week. Though neither he nor the other witness remember Demjanjuk from the camp, their testimony aims to give the court a general idea about how the camp operated.

So if John Demjanjuk is on trial for helping out the Nazis at the Sobibor Death Camp, why isn't Philip Bialowitz also on trial for helping out the Nazis at the Sobibor Death Camp?

A Knack For Accomplishing Impossible Things

From Herbert E. Meyer:

An intelligence service is one of these highly specialized organizations whose success depends more on talent than on management. And the precise talent that an intelligence service needs is the ability to connect dots -- to spot a pattern with the fewest possible facts -- not only to intuitively grasp what lies in the future, but to grasp it soon enough, and clearly enough, so that there's time to change the future before it happens.

We used to understand this. Our country's World War II intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, was led by William J. Donovan. He was a brilliant Wall Street lawyer with a razor-sharp analytic mind and a talent for spotting talent. For example, when all the experts told Donovan that it was impossible to get spies into Nazi Germany, he gave the job to a young tax attorney he'd worked with who seemed to have a knack for accomplishing impossible things. His name was William J. Casey, and from his base in London as head of secret operations for the OSS, he organized 103 missions behind Nazi lines. The OSS was perhaps the greatest intelligence service in world history, and its roster of stars included Arthur J. Goldberg -- later President Kennedy's secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, and U.N. ambassador -- and even Julia Child.

The Time Winston Churchill Almost Met Adolf Hitler

An excerpt from The Churchill Centre and Museum:

Churchill, researching his life of Marlborough, had traveled to Europe on 27 August 1932 for a tour of Marlborough's battlefields, following his great ancestor's march to the Danube and visiting Munich in mid-September. Here Churchill was joined by his wife, son Randolph, daughter Sarah and Professor Lindemann. Randolph Churchill contacted a colleague, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl (a Harvard graduate acting as Hitler's press secretary) who suggested a meeting. Hanfstaengl wrote about this in his memoirs, Hitler, The Missing Years (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode 1957), quoted at length in His Father's Son.

Hanfstaengl attempted to persuade Hitler to join Churchill's dinner party at Munich's Hotel Continental, but Hitler was reluctant: "Don't they realize how busy I am? What on earth would I talk to [Churchill] about?" Hanfstaengl himself joined the party, suggesting that "Hitler might join us for coffee." It was at this point that Churchill made the famous remark: "Tell your boss from me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker."

Hanfstaengl sniffed at that comment, but was tantalized by another remark by Churchill: "How does your chief feel about an alliance between your country, France and England?" Hanfstaengl wrote that he was "transfixed" at this. (Remember, Hitler had not yet come to power; the quote sheds interesting light on Churchill's thinking at the time, already intent on preventing another war by a coalition that would presumably redress Germany's legitimate grievances over the Versailles Treaty.)

In a last-ditch attempt to get Hitler to change his mind and meet Churchill, Hanfstaengl excused himself and went in search of Hitler, finding him in the stairway of his apartment "in a dirty white overcoat, just saying good-bye to a Dutchman...'Herr Hitler...don't you realise the Churchills are sitting in the restaurant?...They are expecting you for coffee and will think this a deliberate insult.'" Hitler said he was unshaven and had too much to do. Hanfstaengl suggested he shave and come anyway. Hanfstaengl then returned to the Hotel and played the piano for the Churchills, hoping Hitler would arrive, but he never turned up.

Creamed Chipped Beef in a Can: A Terrific Stocking Stuffer for that Hard-To-Buy-For Army Veteran in Your Life

Creamed Chipped Beef in a Can: A Terrific Stocking Stuffer for that Hard-To-Buy-For Army Veteran in Your Life

Of course, you could always make your own SOS.

That's Gratitude For You

Benjamin Netanyahu:

These planes were available, these aerial photographs were available during World War 2, they may have been deciphered after the war with a full import, but when I was the ambassador of Israel to the UN I went into the UN archives that had been sealed for many decades and I found files of war criminals, war criminals with details from 1944, detailed descriptions that reached Allied headquarters about what was happening in these compounds.

It is not that they didn’t know; they knew, they knew but didn’t act. We cannot allow this to be repeated. ‘We’ means the whole civilised world. We cannot allow those who wish to perpetrate mass death, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state, to go unchallenged. This is the main, this is the most important lesson that we draw from the Holocaust and from this visit today.

Didn't act? What about The Battle of the Bulge, etc? What about the "Europe First" strategy, even tho it was Japan who attacked the USA?

What Was In The Original CARE Packages?

From Care.org:

The first CARE Packages were U.S. Army surplus "10-in-1" food parcels intended to provide one meal for 10 soldiers during the planned invasion of Japan. We obtained them at the end of World War II and began a service that let Americans send the packages to friends and families in Europe, where millions were in danger of starvation. Ten dollars bought a CARE Package and guaranteed that its addressee would receive it within four months.

When the "10-in-1" parcels ran out, we began assembling our own food packages, greatly assisted by donations from American companies. At first, senders had to designate a specific person as the recipient, but soon CARE was flooded with donations to send CARE Packages to "a hungry occupant of a thatched cottage," "a school teacher in Germany," and so on.

Decades ago, we largely phased out the CARE Package as we expanded the breadth of our work, focusing on long-term projects in addition to emergency relief. However, it remains a powerful symbol of the compassion and generosity of those who support our vision of a world free of poverty and suffering.

What was in the first CARE Packages?

• one pound of beef in broth
• one pound of steak and kidneys
• 8 ounces of liver loaf
• 8 ounces of corned beef
• 12 ounces of luncheon loaf (like Spam®)
• 8 ounces of bacon
• 2 pounds of margarine
• one pound of lard
• one pound of fruit preserves
• one pound of honey
• one pound of raisins
• one pound of chocolate
• 2 pounds of sugar
• 8 ounces of egg powder
• 2 pounds of whole-milk powder
• 2 pounds of coffee

Later CARE Packages included food for different cultural diets and non-food items such as carpentry tools, blankets, school supplies and medicine.

IQ's of the Nuremberg Defendants

Name	Born	Died	IQ
Martin Borman	1900	-	-
Karl Doenitz	1891	1980	138
Hans Frank	1900	1946	130
Wilhelm Frick	1877	1946	124
Hans Fritzsche	1900	1953	130
Walter Funk	1890	1960	124
Herman Goering	1893	1946	138
Rudolf Hess	1894	1987	120
Alfred Jodl	1890	1946	127
Ernst Kaltenbrunner	1903	1946	113
Wilhelm Keitel	1882	1946	129
Constain von Neurath	1873	1956	123
Fritz von Papen	1879	1969	134
Erich Raeder	1876	1960	134
Joachim von Ribberntrop	1893	1946	129
Alfred Rosenberg	1893	1946	127
Fritz Saukel	1894	1946	118
Hjalmar Schacht	1877	1970	143
Baldur von Schirach	1907	1974	130
Arthur Seyss-Inquart	1892	1946	141
Albert Speer	1905	1981	128
Julius Streicher	1885	1946	106

IQ's of the Nuremberg Defendants

More here. Make of it what you will.

Communism and Fascism: Two Socialist Peas In a Pod

From Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change :

Nazism’s one-nation politics by its very definition appealed to people from all walks of life. Professors, students, and civil servants were all disproportionately supportive of the Nazi cause. But it’s important to get a sense of the kind of person who served as the rank-and-file Nazi, the young, often thuggish true believers who fought in the streets and dedicated themselves to the revolution.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young Briton traveling in Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, met some of these men in a Rhineland workers’ pub, still wearing their night-shift overalls. One of his new drinking buddies offered to let Fermor crash at his house for the night. When Fermor climbed the ladder to the attic to sleep in a guest bed, he found “a shrine to Hitleriana”: The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His SA uniforms hung neatly ironed on a hanger…

When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on the bed, and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers, sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite!…Then, suddenly when Hitler came to power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!”…Had a lot of people done the same, then? “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!”