Category: World War II

An Unusual Term: the “Civilian V2” (1951)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

A few days ago in the pages of a 1951 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society I found a most unusual phrase: “Civilian V2”. At the time it was probably necessary to distinguish between the wartime V2 and the astronautic research done with it over the next six years, but I’m pretty sure that I had never seen the term’s use before. I’m not an expert in space flight, or early rocket-powered flight, though I have seen a lot of this sort of material and read around it over the last four decades–still, it looked very unusual to me. I did a simple search under “Civilian V2” and found only 9 hits in Google and 50-odd on “Civilian V-2”, none of which actually apply to the missile itself , but to a “civilian expert” on the V2 (“…civilian V2 expert…” In any event, this light look at the “Civilian V2” term indicates that it probably really is unusual and little-used. If someone out there has any info on this, please let me know.

Source: Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, volume 10 no. 5, September 1951, page 212.

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Technology, History of — World War II
On Long-Lived Nazis, Part II: Instructors from the Cliff’s Note Summer Camp for Nazis, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books (Old Post 1849 expanded somewhat)

Oh happy day for this handy Cliff’s Notes pamphlet for the visiting visitor, for the foreign foreigner, to the “new” Germany of 1937. It is difficult to imagine but not horribly so the subtitle here, “Vacation Course for Foreigners”–it was, after all, so far as the rest of Europe and England and the rest of the world was concerned, still only a conceit that the Germans were harboring for themselves, the sabre-rattling Lebenstraum was still in the theoretical stage, though the loathing and discrimination of the Jews and other sorts of humans was not.

The pamphlet promises to “give our foreign guests an opportunity of seeing young National-Socialist Germany as it really “is” and to “show them that the German people do not want anything but to attend to their work in discipline and peace”. Which was not the case.

I was interested to see the “programme” of instruction, and to check out the near-futures of the people who were the lecturers for each section. Before I began, I wondered how much their fates would be changed eight years hence and if they would resemble the fates of other high ranking Nazis. (I looked at the lives of Nazi medical personnel and experimenters in an earlier post here called “Kristallnacht: The Long post-WWII Lives and Forgotten Pasts of Criminal Nazis: Doctors”, here.)

Mostly, they went on to live long lives.

In the program, Dr. Reinhard Hoehn delivered a talk on “National-Socialist Law”. Hoehn was a Nazi academic lawyer with a criminally morose view of jurisprudence; he went rather high-ranking and was successful in laying the “legal” groundwork for Nazi ambitions. Born in 1904, Hoehn went on to live until 2000.

Next, Wilhlelm Haegert taught “The People, the Party and the State” to our foreigners, and became the Staff Director of the Propaganda Department and was a lead lawyer in Greater Berlin, during and after the war. He died in 1994, aged 87.

Friedrich Berber, lecturing on “the International Situation of Germany”, was a leading Nazi Propaganda person and international jurist. helping to pave the necessaries for the Lebenstraum philosophy. He went on to establish the Institute for International Law at the University of Munich, serving as its chief, from 1954-1968. He died in 1984, aged 86. He was an esteemed jurist post-war, and seemingly his Nazi career didn’t stand in the way of his later success. As a matter of fact, one of the current judges at the International Court of Justice contributed to a Festschrift for Berber in 1973, celebrating Berber’s 75th birthday.

Karl Boemer (lecturing on the Nazi press) became chief of the Foreign Press Department–he came to an earlier and bad end in 1942, after having spoken to the wrong people about the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and was tried and sent to the Eastern Front, where he met his end.

Herbt Scurla, speaking on “Cultural Problems of National-Socialist Policy” (and god knows what that was about), survived the war and lived to 1981. Heinrich Hunke, speaking on “State and Economics”, lived to be nearly 100 (dying in 2000), was a Nazi who served Deutsche Bank well to secure the assets of “undesirables”.

And lastly from the sample is Eugen Fischer, a Nazi by 1940, director of the Institute of Anthropology (and Eugenics), a racial anti-semite who worked in his anthro-derived eugenic race-baiting experiments into a basis for Nazi policy and practice and ideology. He was a respected figure post-war, filling in his dates like some of the others, living to 93 (1874-1967). I’m not sure if he died in his own bed, on his own pillow, or not.

These were high-ranking officials, almost all of whom (so far as I can determine) managed to escape (or disassociate) themselves from their high-Nazi past, and live to old age in a future they tried to destroy.

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World War II
Churchill and the Conservatives Abandoned–an anti-Labour Pamphlet of 1946

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Even though Churchill was enormously popular in the public mind (well over 80% approval rate in 1945…I guess the question would have been what was up with the remained who disapproved?) the Conservatives and Churchill with them were utterly swept away from power in the general election of the summer of ’45, in the heights of victory in Europe and before the war in the Pacific was not yet ended. Clement Attlee was in charge as head of Labour—he was very skilled and competent and accomplished, though these characters were not manifest in his public persona, hardly a Churchill who shone through and through. It all made sense, in its way, though it was a shocking turn of the screw in the U.S. That’s not to say that the Conservatives weren’t shocked, though at least there was an understanding on that turn of affairs came to be. I doubt that was the case in D.C.

In any event, this pamphlet shows the vestiges of political posters for the ’45 election a year or so later, promises that in their future looked not-so-good what with rationing still going on, a problematic economy, housing issues, battle weariness, and so on. The pamphlet was written by the Conservatives who tried to remind voters that Labour’s labour has been lost, and one should return the privilege of government to the Conservatives. That wouldn’t happen for almost another 10 years, when they and Churchill made their return in 1955.

The cover is very striking, and makes a clear point.

(It seems this is a rare pamphlet–I can find only one copy accounted for in WorldCat/OCLC, and that in the British Library.)

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Social History — World War II
The Mysteries of Air Travel (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There’s very little detail of the aircraft in general, though like a lot of free-thinkers the artist has imagined plenty of life being lived in the interior of the plane’s wings, where all of our attention is directed. It seems that the plane has banked to such a degree that it has completely upset the pace of life of its passengers. Many of the travelers have taken a big tumble, and we can see a guy hanging onto another man’s suspenders who in turn is hanging on to a woman clutching a man grabbing a man holding onto a door. Beneath that circus routine is another–we see a small band jostled and imploded into itself (with the clarinetist swallowing his instrument and someone landing in a tuba) while a man in sock garters and a night shirt takes aim at the group with something-or-other.

Evidently, the plane’s performance was destabilized by a moth–all was brought back to normal.

In any event, I came upon this looking for early published tech reports on the V-1, so there was something that came from this rabbit-hole research:

Source: L’Air, revue mensuelle: organe de la Ligue Nationale populaire de l’aviation (France). January 15, 1945 (via the wonderful Gallica site)

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of — World War II
Bombing Tokyo with Dollars (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is part of a report of the Bridgeport Brass Company for 1943 detailing the company’s activities in the war effort. This was apart from the general war products industry, and included what the company was doing in response to the U.S. War Production Board’s outline for pulling together labor and management in joint committees to solidify the extreme national war effort. One small part of that was the donation of a portion of every paycheck–the suggested amount was 10%–that would be used towards war production. The poster below was a reminder to folks in the factories about where and how that money was being used:

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World War II
On Unconditional Surrender (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I found this arresting map in a tiny publication called …Sans Condition, which was published in the first half of 1943. The publication is only 12 pages long but has a number of evocative images of Germany being bombed and lines of German POWs–it is in general a propaganda piece for French-speaking folk (which was printed god-knows-where) produced deep in the war and at a time when the tide has about turned on the Nazis. The term “Sans Conditions” refers to “Unconditional surrender”, which was a phrase that President Roosevelt surprisingly used when meeting with Allied leaders at Casablanca in January 1943. It is a term that doesn’t make many appearances in U.S. military history, though it was famously endorsed by General U.S. Grant in 1862 in response to an entreaty from Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner jr.–and as it happened a U.S. general by the same name was killed om Okinawa by a direct hit from a Japanese heavy gun. Roosevelt would send the same directive to the government of Japan at Potsdam July 26, 1945 (later modified somewhat to accommodate the Japanese keeping their emperor).

The title of this post is the title of the map, “Ils ont decide ou, quand et comment les Allies lanceront leurs attacques”–and you don’t need to know French to know what it says.

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Propaganda — World War II
Very Early Published Works on the Holocaust (1942)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

After reading my quick post from yesterday (on Oswiecim, Camp of Death, March 1944, a very early work published on the Holocaust) my friend Andy Moursund made several good points on other pieces of very early Holocaust literature (those being books or pamphlets rather than newspaper or journal articles), which I note below with links to their full text.

Andy went directly to Jan Karski’s extremely early (1942 and 1944) works–they were potentially momentous, though they missed their true moment, the reasons of which will no doubt be long discussed and debated. Karski (1914-2000) performed an heroic duty reporting on the mass extermination of Jews, ethnic Poles, and other nationalities in Poland in 1942-3, and wrote on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. He was a professor at Georgetown University for a while, and lived on or near MacArthur Blvd–I saw him a couple of times in Georgetown (where my store was for years) back in the mid/late 1980’s but never spoke to him…he had very penetrating eyes in a sharp and angular face, exceptionally striking in a Samuel Beckett sort of way–his Story of a Secret State was well known to our circle, and Karski was very easily recognized, but not necessarily easily approachable. In any event, I regret not speaking with him.

The earliest work by Jan Karski is The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. First official government-documented alert about the Holocaust and genocide of Poles addressed to the wartime allies of the then-United Nations.Government of the Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs MSZ, published in 1942. I should point out that “extermination” used in the description of mass execution of human beings seems to predate the recorded OED first-usage by three years. (“Extermination, attributive, as extermination camp n., a concentration camp for the mass murder of human beings, applied esp. to the camps set up by Nazi Germany in the war of 1939–45.1945 [First usage] Atlantic July 55, “Among the workers a threat of being sent to an extermination camp has its uses.”–OED)

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World War II
One of the Earliest Appearances of “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Spring, 1944)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2788

I stopped by my old friend the amazing Andy Moursund’s fantastic Flickr site, where in just the first 30 seconds or so I needed to stop and follow Andy’s lead on an astonishing book. The cover¹ is stark, and justifiably so as Oswiecism—Camp of Death. (Underground Report)² is one of the earliest separately published reports on Auschwitz, published in March, 1944. (Auschwitz, which is the German rendition of the Polish “Oswiecism”, comes into being in May 1940, grows by 140,000 prisoners in March 1941, another 200,000 in 1942, and then many more until the end, when something on the order of 1.1 million people were murdered there, 90% of them being Jewish.)

See Andy’s site here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/145907841@N08/albums/721577056751817750

I checked the title on the internet archive, where there is a full-text copy available to read (here:

https://archive.org/details/OswiecimCampOfDeath/page/n1

Reading this pamphlet is a very stiffening experience, even if you have a background in reading about the Holocaust.

I imagine too that this may be one of the earliest appearances in print of the hellish sign at the entrance to the KZ, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Brings Freedom”).

We read of it on page 24 of the pamphlet:

“HERE is a large sign over the camp entrance with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei”, (“Work Brings Freedom”), while from any spot in the camp one can see the huge chimney of the crematory. It is an ugly, brownish red.”

“A prisoner’s life moves between these two points — the sign and the chimney —from the moment he “loses” his life when he enters the camp until the moment he “regains” it as a bit of ashes coming from the crematory.”

“Surrounding the camp for an area several miles in width are cultivated fields from which the previous owners have been evicted. Many farm buildings and workshops adjoin the camp and its barracks. Scores of miles beyond the actual camp boundaries are the coal mines. All work, above ground or underground, is done by prisoners. They till fields, build houses, mine coal, load and unload trains. They produce goods of which only a part is for the camp; the major share goes to the German army…”

And of further interest is this map of concentration camps in Poland:

Notes
1. Cover by Teresa Zarnower (Teresa Żarnowerówna was a Polish avant-garde artist, painter, sculptor, scenographer, and architect). “One of the most important artistic personalities of the Polish constructivist avant-garde in the 1920s…” (Jewish Women’s Association Archive)
2. Oswiecism—Camp of Death. (Underground Report), Sponsored by NATIONAL C.I.O. War Relief Commission, First Edition: March 1944. Copyright 1944 by Poland Fights New York, N. Y. Sponsored by American Friends of Polish Democracy; Published by Poland Fights, 55 West 42 Street, New York 18, N. Y. Assisted by Polish Information Center
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Social History — World War II
Infiltrating Fascist Sympathizer Groups in the U.S. (1943)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

John Roy Carlson (the pseudonym of Arthur Derounien, 1909-1991) was an investigative journalist and during WWII he went undercover and infiltrated many of the right wing/fascist/”patriot” groups operating in the U.S. The result of that work as a well-received book called Undercover, My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America¹, which was published by Dutton in 1943 and which went through seven printings in its first two months of publication. It wasn’t yellow journalism, either–it was an expose of Nazi and fascist sympathizers, who–even after Pearl Harbor–supported the ideas of fascism.

Derounien was a busy man, joining and infiltrating such groups as:
- National Socialist White People’s Party (formed by George Lincoln Rockwell in a shabby store front on Wilson Blvd in Arlington,Virginia, and renamed the American Nazi Party in 1960);
- Christian Mobilizers (allied with the Bund, this was a militant arm of the Christian Front which had a more-militant spin-off in the American Unity Party);
- America First Committee (a mixture of patriotic, isolationist far right-wing and Nazi sympathizers, infamously spearheaded by Lindbergh, the group disappeared on 7 December 1941;
- German American Bund, (a loud German-patriotic pro-Nazi group which filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 with 20,000 members, sweatily drenched in Hitler rhetoric, an enormous portrait of G. Washington, Brownshirts, and swastikas: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/);
plus the Gray Shirts (not to be confused with local boy Pelley’s Silver Shirts, abandoned after his jail sentence for sedition and replaced in the 1950’s with his new religion of UFOs and religious-something called “Soulcraft”), American Nationalist Party, American Women Against Communism, The American Defense Society, Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, National Workers League, Yankee Freemen, Flanders Hall, American Patriots, and others²–it was a very impressive undertaking.

[German American Bund at Madison Square Garden, 20 February 1939. Source: https://youtu.be/WpaYQqzFouw]

His book had a very wide impact, contributing to some degree in bringing together thirty leaders of such groups to trials for sedition during wartime. Carlson had in the intervening year or so, 1943/4, been subject to many accusations and charges of being an enemy alien himself, or Communist, or something–accusations initiated by many of the groups that he exposed. So it seems that in preparing himself for the trials to come that in anticipation of more libels to come Carlson published this short broadsheet call Under Cover News, which appeared five days before D-Day, June 1, 1944. In it he asked himself questions that he thought his detractors might ask, and answered them.
```
Note:

1.   Full text is available here: http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/sites/dlib.nyu.edu.undercover/files/under_cover-%20john%20roy%20carlson-1b.pdf

2.  A fuller list of the organizations: 
American National-Socialist Party, German-American Bund, Christian Front, The Ultra-American, Nationalist Party, 
American Nationalist Party, American Women Against Communism, The Gray Shirts , America First Committee, 
No Foreign War Committee, Christian Mobitizers, American Destiny Party, American Brotherhood of Christians 
Congress, The Ethiopian Pacific Movement, Citizens Protective League, Social Justice Distributors Club, 
The American Defense Society, Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, Paul Revere Sentinels, Ra-Con Klub, 
Crusaders for Americanism, Inc. 
```
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Bad Ideas — Social History — World War II
The Situation of the Jews in Europe, a 1941 Assessment

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Jews in Nazi Europe, February 1933 to November 1941; a study prepared by the Institute of Jewish affairs, submitted to the Inter-American Jewish conference, November 23-24-25, 1941, Baltimore, Md., .Institute of Jewish Affairs.Institute of Jewish Affairs, [New York, 1941]. This 175pp (or so) report made at the end of 1941 was a sort of census about what was happening to the Jews delegated in geographical sections, at the end of which was an overview summation. The writer(s) were seeing things accurately in terms of overall viciousness towards the Jews, and amongst other conquered peoples, but did not see the full and overwhelming, impossible, extent of the situation and the enormous numbers, not in 1941. (In that year alone, addressing solely the construction of concentration camps, six death/extermination camps were constructed in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec , Sobibór, Lublin ( Majdanek ), and Chelmno, with the result of murdering millions.)

This from the “Conclusion”:

“How does the general picture of Jewish life in Axis Europe look? The most important elements are the following: 1. Decrease in the number of Jews in Europe At the beginning of 1933» the area now under Axis domination had a population of about 8,500,000 Jews. Since that time, about 600,000 Jews have migrated. Another 400,000 are now homeless refugees, interned in concentration camps, building railways in deserts, waiting vainly in harbors for a ship, rotting on floating prisons, in the heat of the Sahara and in the cold of Siberia…addition, hundreds of thousands of Jews of the Soviet Union have been forced to leave their homes as evacuees and as refugees. The Jewish birth rate has been decreasing steadily during this period, while the death rate has been increasing at an accelerated speed of between five and ten times the normal pace. The population has been further decimated by the death of thousands in concentration camps, at the hands of the Gestapo and in the flames of total war, while many thousands more took their own lives in hopeless despair…”–Jews in Nazi Europe…, final section (unpaginated).

The entire document is well worth reading:

[Source for page images: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c070874352;view=2up;seq=1

[Source for text version: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=mdp.39015002352097;seq=303;num=

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Social History — World War II