History Is A Mystery

All of these things happened long ago. They are written up by people who took different paths to the knowledge, people who studied and believed different versions of events. Historians, like anyone else, may be biased. New original sources are being discovered all the time. An older history book may or may not still be a reliable account of events. Dollar amounts are given for certain things; they may be adjusted for the current value of money or just reported in contemporary amounts. It can all be confusing.

It is also important when reading history to read many books on the same subject. Different historians will address different facets of the events. They will provide different details. To get the complete picture, you need to read as many sources as possible. This aspect will be important for another post that should hit the blog within a week or so.

But today, the money.

I don’t have a real historian’s interest in history. I have a grown-up little boy’s interest in historical events that have always fascinated me. Like World War II. It is often reported that the Manhattan Project, which gave the world the atomic bomb, had a total cost of two billion dollars. That’s an impressive figure; that’s still a lot of money. But a little context would be helpful.

It has recently come to my attention that the development and construction of the B-29 bombers used in World War II had a price tag of THREE billion dollars. Is that merely shocking? Or does it only serve to make the atomic bomb sound like a bargain?

Here’s a good one. The Thompson sub-machineguns used in WWII had a price tag of about $350 apiece. Okay. It was a complicated piece to manufacture. It had lots of parts that needed to be individually machined. It had a wooden stock and hand grip. It was a terrific weapon though, it was durable, efficient and reliable. Very popular with the troops. America made an impressive one point three million of them (1,300,000 units). That comes to about a half a billion dollars, total. How should we fit that into the context of the atomic bomb or the B-29?

Then there are the little gems of information that drop by sometimes. It seems that the unit cost of the Thompson was daunting to the people running that war, and early on they began to look for a lower cost replacement. They found it in the sub-machinegun designated the M3 and called “the grease gun.” This gun only made it into use for the tail end of the war, but it remained in use by the armed forces for a long, long time. Unit cost? Between $15 and $20.

How’s that for a contrast? Almost identical in their utility, but the cost drops from $350 to $20. The M3 was made from parts that could be pressed out of sheet metal and mass produced. It only had one part that needed to be machined, the bolt.

My interest in these things is almost certainly foolish, but I’m not hurting anybody. Let an old man have some fun! 

My First Vote For President

The year was 1972, and it was not a great year, as years go.  Vietnam was still percolating, even if the boil had gone down a little.  The “Generation Gap” was in full effect.  Politics was already a zoo, and new things, bad things, were waiting in the wings. 

That was the year in which I cast my first vote for president.  I usually say that I have been a “lifelong Democrat,” but I didn’t feel it very strongly in 1972.  The war, LBJ’s style of leadership, and Hubert Humphrey’s goofy old-school phony-Liberal presence had done nothing to endear me to the party.  I did like one of the Democrats in the primaries though.  George McGovern was a familiar name.  He was obviously a nice guy, and I liked his positions on most things.  At least I liked them to the small degree that I was able to pay attention to politics in those days.  I was generally apathetic.  But I liked McGovern for some reason.  He seemed to be a guy that I could vote for.

The Democratic primaries were a tough slog in which a lot of dubious practices were employed.  The politics of personal character assassination were there.  Humphrey came up with a slogan for McGovern:  “Amnesty, Abortion and Acid.”  That was even before Nixon got a crack at him.  The catch-phrase stuck throughout the campaign. 

With Humphrey, Muskie and George Wallace (!!!) out of the way, it was McGovern vs. Nixon in November.  For some reason, McGovern chose not to mention his service in World War II.  It might have been modesty, or a general feeling that it had nothing to do with anything, but now it seems quaint for him to leave it out.  After all, his service had been a spectacular, heroic success.

McGovern served as a pilot for the B-24 Liberator, the biggest bomber in use at the time (1944) and famously the most difficult to fly.  Early models had no hydraulics, so all of the controls were simple cable arrangements.  This required almost super-human strength in controlling the aircraft.  The yoke had to be controlled with only the left hand too, because the pilot’s right hand was busy making small adjustments to the engine controls.  The missions lasted seven or eight hours, and they were harrowing affairs, what with the flak and the German fighters and all.  McGovern completed thirty-five missions.

Not only flew them, but flew them with great élan and distinction.  He made emergency landings on several occasions that were credited with saving the lives of the crew.  He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with Oak Leaves.  They didn’t throw those things around, you had to really work for them. 

Now I believe that McGovern was one of those guys who would say, “I just did my part,” or “we all did our parts.”  That’s not true though.  A comparison to Nixon’s service would have been apt.

Richard Nixon’s service was admirable, but there was nothing much to recommend it as a saga.  Nixon was in the Navy.  The only creditable thing that he did was request sea duty, although they didn’t really give it to him.  They sent him to the Pacific, but he was assigned to island facilities well back from the point of the spear.  He was made the officer in charge of Combat Air Transport Command, South Pacific, which is some kind of travel agent position, and he seems to have done a good job.  He got a Letter of Commendation.  Still, the comparison between Nixon and McGovern is one-sided. 

People knew about Nixon’s service, because he’d never been shy about mentioning it.  But they didn’t know about McGovern’s.  Most of what people knew about McGovern came from opposing campaign organizations.  The Amnesty, Abortion and Acid line.  He was a “peace freak,” which was seen as a bad thing.  He was a soft-spoken man too, not like Nixon.  Nixon always pretended to be channeling Moses.  But I still cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could have believed a word that came out of Nixon’s mouth, or how anyone could have voted for Nixon after so many campaigns in which he displayed himself to be so ethically bereft and morally dubious.  “Peace with honor!”  What a bunch of Rubes.  It should have been closer, anyway.  

Within a year or so we knew about the Watergate break in, and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP!), and Spiro Agnew, nobody’s idea of a good vice-president, was out on his ass, and soon thereafter Nixon became the first president in American history to resign in disgrace under threat of impeachment.  I don’t recall anyone saying, “we should have voted for McGovern.” 

Well, I did vote for McGovern.  I remember thinking at the time, “I might as well vote for the Communist Worker Party candidate, for all the good it’ll do.”  But it was a vote for McGovern.  And since that time history has proved that he, and I, were right about issues like the war, and amnesty for draft-resistors and other matters.  We still don’t get any credit for our insight, though.  “Our kind” is still being blamed for ruining the fun by opposing the war, or restraining the government’s fullest prosecution of the war, or limiting the effectiveness of our troops, or something.  Nobody to this day wants to admit that it was a stupid war from the get-go, and badly run, and ended on lies.

So when you are considering your vote for president next year, remember this.  It’s always been a messy process, and the right choices are never as clear as bells, but the final choice is very important.

So make the best of it.  

Holocaust Remembrance Week

When we say, “the Holocaust,” we all know what we’re talking about.  At the same time, it is one of the least understood major events of the Twentieth Century.  It’s certainly worth remembering, but a question that needs to be asked is:  who are we remembering? 

DISCLAIMER:  NOTHING THAT FOLLOWS SHOULD PERSUADE YOU THAT I AM SOME KIND OF HOLOCAUST DENIER, OR A HOLOCAUST APOLOGIST, OR EVEN A HOLOCAUST MINIMIZER.  I FULLY BELIEVE THAT IT HAPPENED, AND I BELIEVE THAT THE NUMBERS THAT WE HEAR ARE CORRECT.

So, the question, or let’s say the two questions.  For one thing, regarding the dead, who gets included in the total?  And regarding the living, the survivors, who may be called a “Holocaust survivor?” 

I cannot say that I have any specific knowledge of the dead, except to say that the families left behind by my many American friends of Polish, Belorussian or Ukrainian Jewish background must certainly have suffered and died.  But of the survivors, I got to know one very well.  His name was Jack, and he was a client of mine.  He believed that he was qualified to receive German Social Security payments as a survivor, and he was referred to me only because my file at the Santa Monica Bar Association listed German as a language skill of mine. 

I agreed to help him where previously no one had.  The matter looked like a lot of work with a very low chance of success, and as Abraham Lincoln said, and I paraphrase, time is money for lawyers.   I thought, let’s give it a shot, this will be interesting.  And Jack was a great guy.  Every night he collected some food from restaurants, and bought more, and drove around giving food to the homeless in Los Angeles.  His only explanation was to say, “I’ve been hungry, I didn’t like it.” 

Jack was born in western Poland in the nineteen-teens to a family that was Jewish, but not particularly religious, and German, and proud of it.  Mostly you’d say that they were Polish though, the family had been there for many generations.  In 1939 the Nazis and the Soviets divided Poland after simultaneous invasions.  Jack was in the half that the Nazis took over.  Of course the family knew what had been going on in Germany, they knew about the bad treatment of the Jews of Germany.  Jack had a bad feeling about it all and decided to flee to the Soviet zone.  One brother was convinced to join him, but the rest of the family chose to stay put.  What could happen?  After all, the Germans had not yet started any kind of program of killing Jews, and the family members were identifiable as culturally German/Polish.  Sure the Nazis are a bunch of bastards, but these are the people of Goethe and Beethoven!   

So Jack said, “good luck,” and split with his brother on foot.  The brother got homesick almost immediately and turned back, but Jack made it to the Soviet zone.  It was all very dramatic, gunfire and hiding in the woods were involved, but he made it.

The bad news is that everybody in Jack’s family, including the brother, everybody but Jack, died in the ensuing Holocaust. 

That’s the bad news, and actually, there’s no good news at all.  He lived, but only barely.  The Soviets, of course, arrested him immediately.  He had blond hair and blue eyes, and he spoke Polish and German, so to them he was obviously a spy.  They sent him, and hundreds of thousands of Poles from the Soviet sector, to concentration camps, probably in Kazakhstan. 

For a few years there Jack was very hungry, those Gulag camps were hunger camps.  Many prisoners died of hunger, and prisoners survived by scheming to get enough food to live on.  Recalling this time years later, Jack developed a lifelong interest in alleviating hunger, God bless him. 

Later on he was chosen for some kind of Soviet sponsored Polish Anti-Fascist Army, towards the end of the war the Soviets were making plans for their take-over of eastern Europe.  After the war he emigrated to Israel where he fought against the English mandate and later in the new Israeli Army.  (He knew Menachem Begin.)  Eventually he emigrated to America, ending up in Los Angeles. 

So our first problem was this:  even though German Social Security seemed, to our understanding of their own materials, to include Jack in the group that qualified for payments, they had consistently refused his applications for years. 

I was by training a lawyer, but I decided that the best strategy here would be a public relations campaign.  I contacted them by mail, letting them know that I was now representing Jack, and please address all future correspondence to me, and by the way, here are the reasons that I believe Jack qualifies and could you please explain to me just how I am wrong?  I wrote to them in English; they wrote to me in German.  They just stuck to their “no.” 

I went to the Jewish community, the temples, the newspapers.  It was an interesting story, and it got some play.  Ari Noonan was a reporter at the Jewish Times who was particularly sympathetic and helpful.  I would send copies of the newspaper articles to the Germans with cover letters.  It did finally work, and they put Jack on the roles, even paying the arrearages back to the original application.  It was a good benefit. 

We now encountered problem number two.  The Times got some letters from L.A. Jews who were angered by Jack’s case.  “Who is this guy claiming to be a Holocaust survivor?”  They acted like Jack was defiling the memories of those who had died.  Jack was from the wrong country, wasn’t he?  And he had certainly been in the wrong camp system.  (Perhaps they would have given him some credit if they’d chosen to recall that his family had been wiped out.) 

I believe that those letter writers were victims of a common misconception about the Holocaust, or a set of misconceptions.  They thought that the victims were German, and they thought that the victims were gassed and cremated in the large, famous death camps.  In the event, only two to three percent of the victims were German.  There had been fewer than 500,000 Jews in Germany as of 1933, and more than half of them were allowed to emigrate.  Those that remained were killed later on, in camps.  The total number of victims is generally agreed to be about six million, and I, like most reasonable people, recognize that figure, but the remaining ninety-seven percent of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust came from outside Germany, most were Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians.  Something like fifty percent of those victims were shot, not gassed, and they never saw even the gate of a camp, they were simply marched outside of town and killed. 

So is Jack a Holocaust survivor?  He was from a country where over a million of the recognized victims were killed, in the recognized way, and his family died with them.  Did his act of running away and surviving somehow remove him from consideration?  What about one of those rare few who escaped by jumping from the trains taking them to the death camps?  Should they also be disqualified? What about the Jews that worked for Schindler?  Or Ernst Leitz (Leica Cameras)?  

It would be better if we agreed to define the category “victim of the Holocaust” as generously as possible, and it would be better to do so not only for the dead, but also for the survivors.  Surely any Jew within a thousand miles whose life was in jeopardy, and whose family members died, was a victim.  Even if they survived, they were victims.  Oddly, the spirit of the German Social Security Code recognizes this to be true, even if some armchair historians do not. 

Postscript:

I chose to leave the Gypsies out of this discussion, but that doesn't mean that you can't bring it up. Actual Germans who were consigned to concentration camps but who were of categories other than "Jew" we can leave off.  They survived in much greater percentages, being kept alive for their labor. For the Jews, on the other hand, and for the Gypsies too, the Nazis saw greater value in their deaths.   

(Recommended reading:  “Bloodlands,” by Timothy Snyder, available anywhere that books are still sold.)  

Art + Truth = Censorship

This is an accurate depiction of the fate that descended on thousands upon thousands of Polish and German women at the hands of Red Army soldiers in the closing months of World War II.  To be fair, it could be much more objectionable without exceeding the bounds of naturalism.  For instance, her brains could be flying out the back of her head as the soldier achieves orgasm.  So yes, this woman would be one of the lucky ones if she wasn't shot after she pulled the train.

The poor artist, a twenty-something art student up in Poland somewhere, is in a world of trouble for showing this piece.  It might even be a hate crime!!!  If hating these all-too-common aspects of war is a hate crime, kill me now.

The Russians are upset, somewhat predictably.  I am the first to give the 1940's Soviet G.I. Joe his, and her, full measure of credit.  They were amazingly tenacious and brave, and they rolled up the over-matched Germans like a damn crepe.  Their great achievements are not, in my estimation, sullied by the facts that they were often drunk and that getting carried away with the revenge thing was a daily occurrence.  Russian officialdom would have us delete all of this negativity and concentrate on the "heroic" part.  How dare this Polish artist (that's an 0-2 count right there) draw attention to the "carried away" part?

I'm behind the artist all the way on this one.  I do hope that fate doesn't fall on him too hard, like it did on the poor woman in the sculpture.  The Russians can be as sensitive as they wish back in Russia, at home.  They shouldn't be permitted to intimidate the rest of us.