Eideard

A German pensioner who received a tin of American lard 64 years ago in an aid package has only just tasted it, after discovering that it is still edible.

“I just didn’t want to throw it away,” said Hans Feldmeier, 87. I love my fellow pack rats.

Food safety experts in Rostock, his home town on Germany’s Baltic coast, said the pig fat was still safe to eat.

Mr Feldmeier was a student in 1948 when the US was running a huge aid programme to rebuild war-ravaged Germany. He kept the tin of lard for emergencies…

A food expert, Frerk Feldhusen, said the lard was rather gritty and tasteless and hard to dissolve, though quite edible. Mr Feldmeier provided some black bread to go with it.

The red, white and blue tin of Swift’s Bland Lard bore no expiry date.

Eeoough!

After all, it works for cheese and most wine.

Former prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp return on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Click here for the series of photos published by the Telegraph.

The year Leroy MacKlem lost his veterans disability compensation for a bad hip, gasoline cost 27 cents a gallon, a Yankee shortstop named Rizzuto was the American League’s most valuable player and President Harry S. Truman ordered production of the hydrogen bomb. It was 1950.

He is about to get it back. All of it.

In a case as much about government bungling as one man’s perseverance, the Department of Veterans Affairs said last week that it would end years of litigation and repay Mr. MacKlem, 88, for six decades’ worth of disputed disability compensation, about $400,000…

To which Mr. MacKlem, a World War II veteran from Portland, Mich., replied, “I’ll believe it when I get the settlement…”

In 1944, he received a medical discharge and was assigned a 20 percent disability rating for service-connected arthritis in his hip, entitling him to disability compensation. Mr. MacKlem later went to work in a plastics factory in Detroit.

But in 1950, the Veterans Administration, as it was then known, severed his compensation, saying that his pain resulted from the “natural progress” of his pre-service injury. His monthly payments of $105 ended.

And there the case sat for 56 years.

In 2006, Mr. MacKlem — for reasons his lawyer could not explain — decided to appeal, saying the department made a “clear and unmistakable error” in its 1950 decision. A regional office in Detroit rejected his argument, and he submitted a notice of disagreement.

Then a curious thing happened. Mr. MacKlem received a letter in June 2007 saying that a review officer had concluded that the 1950 ruling was indeed wrong and that he should be granted retroactive benefits. Mr. MacKlem was not supposed to get that letter…A few weeks later, the department sent him another letter saying that the June notice was only a draft and that his benefits would not be restored. He appealed. And while his appeal was pending, a federal court ruled in 2009 that the department’s “extraordinary award procedure” for reviewing compensation awards larger than $250,000 or for retroactive payments dating back more than eight years was illegal.

In 2010, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims ruled that the department had to reinstate Mr. MacKlem’s award because it had been reversed under that now illegal “extraordinary award procedure…” This month, a federal appeals court upheld that decision…

“I’ve always had the feeling that the government was hoping that I would die so they wouldn’t have to pay,” said Mr. MacKlem, a widower with no children. Disability payments to veterans with no immediate survivors are returned to the department, Mr. Viterna said.

Having watched my closest friend more than once forced into battling the VA to keep benefits for injuries that kept him in hospital for 16 months after the war – I don’t doubt in the least that some petty-minded bureaucrat felt it his duty to screw some poor grunt who risked his life in one of the few worthwhile wars this nation has fought in centuries.

An unexploded Second World War bomb is leading to the evacuation of nearly half of the population of the German town of Koblenz.

The 1,800 kilogram bomb was discovered lying in the River Rhine after falling water levels revealed its resting place.

Some 45,000 of the 106,000-strong population will be cleared from an evacuation zone 1.8 kilometres in radius in the biggest post-war evacuation in Koblenz’s history.

Local authorities will provide temporary accommodation in schools outside the danger zone for residents unable to stay with friends or family, and free shuttle buses are being laid on to transport the thousands of people forced to leave.

On Monday two Koblenz hospitals began preparing to move 200 patients and started to cancel operations. Koblenz railway station will shut down, hotels have been told to close, and the inmates of a local jail will also have to pack their bags “The extensive measures are necessary,” said Norbert Gras, a spokesman for the local fire brigade. “It’s true we are dealing with a very large bomb.”

Although discoveries of unexploded ordinance from the massive Allied aerial assault on the Nazi Reich are frequent in Germany, the Rhine bomb poses a particular challenge for explosive experts.

The bomb lies in 40 centimetres of water with parts of it buried in mud, making it difficult to access the detonation fuse. The presence of a smaller American bomb close by has also complicated matters, and set back the operation to defuse the RAF bomb till the weekend…

The low water levels in the Rhine brought on by an autumnal drought have led to a spate of discoveries of unexploded munitions left over from the war. On Sunday 1,000 people in the Rhine town of Neuwied had to leave their homes as experts defused a 500 kilogram American bomb on the banks of the river.

The gift that keeps on giving. Though this bomb was dropped on a part of the world containing the remnants of the Fascist onslaught that threatened the whole world. Our part of comparable dangers presented to civilians from the dispersion of landmines and cluster munitions – during “peacetime” – is a lot less tolerable.

 
A collection of 300 paintings worth millions of euros have been discovered in a Polish outhouse belonging to a 92-year-old former bricklayer, with police baffled as to how they got there.

The paintings were found mixed up with junk and rubbish in a dirty two-storey concrete building in the bricklayer’s garden near the north-western city of Szczecin.

Police said the mysterious collection included works of art from the Renaissance and German baroque periods, with the oldest painting dating back to 1532. They also discovered a lithograph by the Polish artist Jozef Czajkowski, which disappeared from a museum in Katowice during the war…

The collection, having suffered from its 66 years in the outhouse, has now been moved to a museum in Szczecin. “Many of the pictures are in a terrible condition and we’re trying to identify them and find out where they came from,” said Przmyslaw Kimon, spokesman for Szczecin police. “Some of them are Italian so we’re in contact with the Italian authorities, and we are also working with Interpol.”

But police admitted to being perplexed as to how the bricklayer, now charged with handling stolen art, came to possess the paintings. Their investigation has also been hindered by the fact that two strokes have left the man known only as Antoni M. [owing to reporting restrictions] unable to communicate.

Most theories revolve around the possibility that the bricklayer had somehow managed to get hold of a collection of looted art, abandoned in the chaotic last weeks of the Second World War as Germans put life before property in their efforts to escape the advancing Red Army…

Possessing an interest in art he decided to keep the paintings rather than turn them into the authorities.
He also decided to keep them out of public sight. Stashing them in hiding places in his outhouse, he made the building off-limits to even his closest family.

The news of the discovery was welcomed by Leszek Jodlinski, director of the Silesia Museum in Katowice, one of the museums stripped bare by the Nazis during the war, and the former home of the Czajkowski lithograph.

BTW – ever wish to see a great film about Resistance fighters stopping a Nazi art hoard from being carried off to Germany, rent The Train [1964], starring Burt Lancaster.

Search giant Google has teamed up with the Bletchley Park Trust to kick start a fundraising effort to rebuild the records center known as Block C. A Google-supported garden party was held within the grounds of the famous WW2 decoding center last week to start off the restoration fund, which aims to transform the now derelict building into a visitor and learning center.

It’s not the first time Google has joined forces with the Trust to preserve a piece of history. Last year, Google contributed $100,000 towards an effort to save a collection of scientific material and papers relating to the wartime codebreaking work of Enigma genius Alan Turing, which had been put up for auction. In spite of public donations to the tune of $37,432 also being raised, things looked decidedly hopeless until the National Heritage Memorial Fund stepped in and secured the winning bid. The papers are now safely housed in a special display at Bletchley Park.

Now Google is helping to transform a dilapidated building last used in 1984 into a new visitor and learning center for Bletchley Park and the UK’s National Museum of Computing, which is housed in H block on the site and is home to Colossus – the world’s first electronic programmable computer…

It’s estimated that the efforts of the Park’s 10,000 plus personnel shortened the war by at least two years and saved more than 20 million lives.

Bravo!

All the rich, earthy smells of the farm fill the air. It’s morning on May 11, 1944, and the bloodshed on the continent seems far away from this quiet field in south east England.

A distant buzz builds into a roar as suddenly it is not the bucolic scent of the soil that fills the air but hundreds of airplanes from the United States Army Air Force. The gigantic B-17 Flying Fortress bombers paint the blue sky white with their contrails. The morning ends up to be chillier than expected, as the bombers soar off to rain death on Germany…

Allied bombing raids leaving from Britain seem to have affected the local climatic conditions. Rob MacKenzie, now at the University of Birmingham, and Roger Timmis of the British Environment Agency looked at weather records from 1943 to 1945 and found that after massive air raids the areas the planes flew over were cooler than similar areas nearby…

In 1943 the United States began basing bombing raids out of England, and there was a tremendous increase in the amount of air traffic in specific and well recorded areas. That made distinguishing airplane-influenced climate data more clearly discernible from unaffected nearby climatic conditions.

For example, on May 11, 1944, a massive number of planes flew through an otherwise clear sky in south east England. A total of 1444 aircraft were recorded. The area they flew over stayed an average .8 degrees Celsius (1.44 degrees F) cooler than surrounding areas from about 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.

“This is tantalising evidence that Second World War bombing raids can be used to help us understand processes affecting contemporary climate,” concluded MacKenzie. “By looking back at a time when aviation took place almost entirely in concentrated batches for military purposes, it is easier to separate the aircraft-induced factors from all the other things that affect climate.”

The greater reflectivity of the white contrails was sufficient in and of itself to diminish the amount of warming expected from the sun. Good science. Sound computational analysis derived from good record-keeping.

On the black sand beaches of Iwo Jima, 18-year-old Marty Connor stood over the body of a dead Japanese soldier. The young U.S. Marine figured it was only a matter of time before he suffered the same fate.

But he didn’t dwell on it and he didn’t ponder whether the enemy had a family, a hometown, or a name. Instead, he reached into the dead soldier’s pack and grabbed his diary…

Little did he know then that this was a moment that would change his life; that he would spend 40 years reuniting such war souvenirs with surviving relatives of the dead enemy soldiers…

When he returned home after the war, Connor locked up his souvenirs in a trunk and rarely thought about them again.

“Some of the Marines were getting back to have a reunion on the 25th anniversary of our landing,” said Connor. “I had a call if I’d like to go, and I thought yes, I would like to go back.”

Connor returned to Iwo Jima in 1970. On top of Mount Suribachi, he and other U.S. Marines shook hands with the Japanese veterans they had once fought against.

“They suffered, we suffered,” said Connor. “We came to tell them what brave soldiers they were… and our people, our Marines, were just as brave.”

The diary, photos and other items Connor had taken from Iwo Jima remained locked up at home. But one of his fellow Marines brought his souvenirs with him, and returned them to their owner’s grateful and tearful family.

The emotional scene stuck with Connor. A Buddhist monk named Tsunezo Wachi explained to him the deep spiritual significance these items had for the families of the dead soldiers.

As soon as Connor returned home, he opened the trunk for the first time in 25 years.

“I sent back whatever I had, and in most instances, [Wachi] found the families within two weeks after he received whatever I sent.”

Among the grateful recipients of Connor’s souvenirs was the widow of the soldier whose diary Connor had taken.

And that was the beginning of a 40-year mission to return the spoils of war to the Japanese families that survived the death of their loved ones in the Pacific Islands during World War 2.

RTFA. Please. Understand how the best of those who survived, who “won” a war – find the place in their hearts where they can replace victory with sympathy for those who fought just as bravely on the other side.

Hitler’s “defense” force marching into Austria, 12 March 1938

The Austrian capital Vienna has announced plans to erect a memorial in honour of soldiers who deserted from Adolf Hitler’s army, the Wehrmacht.

The city council has yet to decide the exact location, but campaigners want it to be put in Heldenplatz (Heroes Square) alongside war memorials. The square is also where Hitler, born in Austria, addressed crowds in 1938 when Austria was annexed to Germany…

Two years ago Austria’s parliament agreed to rehabilitate soldiers criminalised by the Nazis for deserting from the Wehrmacht.

The decision to erect a memorial was endorsed by the socialist and green parties which form Vienna’s municipal government coalition. Vienna Green Party leader David Ellensohn said the monument could be modelled on other memorials to Wehrmacht deserters in some German cities…

“In large parts of the Austrian population deserters are still considered cowards, traitors, even comrade-killers. A monument – and especially the public debate around the erection of the monument – could somehow change that.”

Mr Geldmacher said an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Austrians deserted from the Wehrmacht, especially in the final days of World War II.

And someday – someday – the United States may even honor those who deserted from our war on VietNam.

Not yet. The chickenhawks who run for public office still reinforce the patriotic agitprop that sends young men and women off to invade lands judged threatening to the United States – regardless of history and truth.

A thousand-year-old religious manuscript which was looted in Italy during the Second World War has been returned by the British Library to its rightful owners in the southern Italian town of Benevento after a decade-long legal battle.

A British lawyer who acted for the archdiocese of Benevento, handed back the manuscript personally. The codex was written on parchment around 1100.

“The return of the missal had become highly symbolic for Benevento and its cathedral, so they were absolutely delighted to have it back,” Mr Scott said…

The early 12th century liturgical book is the first item to be returned by a British institution since the UK adopted a law regarding the looting of cultural treasures during the Nazi era, from Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933 to the end of the war in 1945…

It is assumed to have been looted, but it is not known whether it was stolen by a German soldier, a member of the Allied armies or an Italian soldier or civilian.

It turned up in a second-hand book shop in Naples in early 1944, where it was bought by a British officer, Capt Douglas Ash of the Intelligence Corps, who was told by the owner of the shop that it was “molto antico” – very old.

On his return home he offered it for sale at Sotheby’s. It was bought by the British Museum for £420, before being transferred to the British Library in 1973.

The archdiocese of Benevento asked for it to be returned a decade ago, but the British Library refused the request.

Don’t you love how upright and prestigious institutions have no problem whatsoever keeping hold of stolen goods? Often, the rationale is some sort of elitist defense – “you ordinary folk wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had it back!”

I don’t know if that’s the case with this manuscript; but, hey – the British Library has known it was misbegotten for a decade. How long do you need to make up your mind about honesty?