Steve Goddard's History Wire

Concentration Camp Doctor Heads List of 10 Most Wanted Nazis

Newsday.com:

Baden-Baden, Germany - Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched SS doctor Aribert Heim kill a man. It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was he so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

"Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

"'He needed the head because of its perfect teeth,' Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in an Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. 'Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible.'"

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Are We Living In 2d Gilded Age? Let's Ask Mark Twain

Newsday.com:

"Google 'second Gilded Age' and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: It's a matter of déjá vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened 'gilded' in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

"Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in 'The Gilded Age,' is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsize as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad's chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant's vice president, to loot the federal Treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policymaking.

"A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go 'round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq were conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.

"Reagan's America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the new rich and the new right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president's inaugural ball, it was called a 'bacchanalia of the haves.' Diana Vreeland, style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt: 'Everything is power and money and how to use them both ... We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury.'"

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Book Alert / Earth: The Sequel

Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Revinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn, Norton '08, $24.95, 279 pages, ISBN #0393066908. Index, resources, no source notes or illustrations.

Do I have a surprise for you! From the book's title, you expected a team of Cassandras to lay another guilt trip on you about not doing enough to combat global warming. Instead, the authors reveal how Americans' entrepreneurial spirit has already led them to do well by doing good in creating clean energy ventures.

A few examples: Finavera Renewables of Vancouver, B.C., "aims to produce electricity by harvesting the kinetic energy of ocean waves" and has already received the first federal operating permit for a wave energy plant. Chena Power of Chena, Alaska generates low-temperature geothermal power and taps the hot water bubbling from spent oil wells. And so on, with vignettes from companies pioneering in greenfuel technology, clean coal, solar thermal, and solar photovoltaic energy, among other fuel sources.

Fred Krupp is the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Miriam Horn, an EDF staffer, is also a writer and author. In a brief interview, Krupp spoke of the writing of this book:

Q. Why Earth: The Sequel?

A. We called the book Earth: The Sequel because we all know what is now: strengthening hurricanes, rising sea levels, droughts. The question is what is next: a total makeover of the $6 trillion world energy economy. New fortunes will be made, and the change will make the difference between dangerous global warming and a healthy future for our families.

Q. Is there a role for government?

A. Government needs to set a declining cap on global warming pollution. That single action will send businesses knocking on the door of these inventors to get them to scale up and commercialize their ideas at the speed that we and the Earth need.

Editor's note: Lest one conclude the authors are wild-eyed optimists, I note in my morning newspaper that the lower house of Connecticut's General Assembly, which until recently had turned a deaf ear to pleas to stop global warming, yesterday passed a bill to "drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions" by 131-16. Swift Senate passage and prompt enactment are expected. No doubt your own state has a measure in the hopper as well.

Book Alert / Bananas -- How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

Bananas -- How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman, Canongate '08, $24, 224 pages, ISBN #1841958816. Index, bibliography, no source notes or bibliography, unillustrated.

Nearly a century after author O. Henry coined the term, I asked my college class, "Can anyone define 'banana republic' for me?" A 20-year-old girl in the back row stopped filing her nails and shot up her hand eagerly: "It's a store at the mall!" So who says we don't need Peter Chapman's book, which traces the history of the ubiquitous banana and how it came to create and perpetuate a wildly rich and powerful industry?

More particularly, Chapman's tale revolves around the United Fruit Company: "A company more powerful than many nation states, it was a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the (banana) republics (Guatemala, El Salvador, Hondurasq, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) as its private fiefdom." Chapman's saga follows the company through 1975, when its president, Eli Black, leaped from a Manhattan skyscraper, causing a worldwide revulsion against the company, which soon "mysteriously disappeared."

Bananas, Chapman tells us, are not only plentiful, nutritious and cheap but "have been said to solve virtually every health problem: obesity, blood pressure, depression, constipation. They have natural sugars for lasting energy, potassium to regulate blood sugar levels, fibre for the bowels. They lift the mood or alternatively calm you down, containing the neurotransmitters dopamine and seratonin that, respectively, replicate Ecstasy and Prozac."

The author spins out his saga through the eyes of  a cast of notables who came in contact with United Fruit: Fidel Castro, whose father leased land from the company to grow sugar; novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who featured a company strike in his 100 Years of Solitude; Teddy Roosevelt, who shared United Fruit's expansionist views in the early 20th century; John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, who became the company's legal adviser; and Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who tried to rally armed resistance to the company in Guatemala before joining Fidel Castro.

Chapman writes for the Financial Times and was a correspondent for Latin American Letters, The Guardian, and the BBC in Central America and Mexico.

Book Alert / Dog Years -- A Memoir

Dog Years -- A Memoir by Mark Doty, HarperCollins '07, $23.95, 215 pages, ISBN #006117100X.

"No dog has ever said a word, but that doesn't mean they live outside the world of speech. They listen acutely. They wait to hear a term -- biscuit, walk -- and an inflection they know. What a stream of incomprehensible signs passes over them as they wait, patiently, for one of a few familiar words! Because they do not speak, except in the most limited fashion, we are always trying to figure them out. The expression is telling: to 'figure out' is to make figures of speech, to invent metaphors to help us understand the world. To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation -- a mutual agreement, though the human being holds most of the cards."

Thus does Mark Doty set the table for his affecting memoir. At its beginning, Doty and his partner already owned Arden, a black retriever. When the author learns that his partner is dying, he adopts a second dog for him, a large golden retriever named Beau, "malnourished and in need of loving care." Soon the two dogs become, at once, Doty's companions and his solace, and eventually the "life force" that keeps him from "abandoning hope during the darkest days."

By now, certain readers have begun to reach for the click to Amazon. You know who you are, you who are suckers for "profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about life, love, and loss...the heart-wrenching vulnerability of dogs, the positive energy and joy they bring, and the gift they bear us of unconditional love."

Clinton, Obama Aides Looking For An Edge? -- Read Sun Tzu

The New Yorker:

"The terms of the 2008 Presidential campaign were set twenty years ago—or, more accurately, perhaps, sometime around the fifth century B.C. In 1988, as Lee Atwater, President George H. W. Bush’s young campaign manager, was contemplating how to defeat Michael Dukakis, he consulted 'The Art of War,' by Sun Tzu, the well-known ancient Chinese political consultant.

"Among Sun Tzu’s pithier bullet points: 'Know your enemy.' Atwater conducted a bit of opposition research, identified Dukakis’s vulnerabilities, and gleefully promised to 'strip the bark off the little bastard.' The two TV spots that ended Dukakis’s political career followed in due course. One, calculated, in Atwater’s words, to make Willie Horton Dukakis’s 'running mate,' featured Horton, a black murderer who raped a white woman after escaping while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison—under a program that Dukakis supported.

"The other used footage from an event organized by the Dukakis campaign in an effort to show that he was tough on defense. Waving from a tank in an unfortunate helmet, Dukakis looked, as Atwater put it, like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Those were the most memorable moments of the Bush-Dukakis campaign, and every Presidential candidate since has absorbed their lesson."

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Roger's Having A Bad Year -- Now, a Way-Old Bimbo Eruption

Newsday.com:

"Roger Clemens had a decade-long relationship with country star Mindy McCready that began when she was a 15-year-old aspiring singer and the pitcher was a Boston Red Sox ace, the Daily News reported. Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, confirmed a long-term relationship but told the newspaper it was not sexual.

"'He flatly denies having had any kind of an inappropriate relationship with her,' Hardin said. 'He's considered her a close family friend. ... He has never had a sexual relationship with her.'
Clemens was 28 and a married father of two when he first met McCready, the newspaper reported.

'The story, which appeared on the newspaper's Web site Sunday night and in editions Monday, quoted several people who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation. It said Clemens sent cash to McCready to help her with legal issues and reached out to her when she was in jail last year in Tennessee for violating probation after allegedly hitting her mother.

"The revelation could undermine Clemens' reputation, which is central to the defamation suit the former pitcher has filed against former personal trainer Brian McNamee. McNamee contends Clemens used performance-enhancing substances during his major league career. "'If true, it's just another example of Roger's pervasive prevarications which will be at the core of any defamation case,' said McNamee's attorney, Richard Emery, in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

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Book Alert / Kasztner's Train

Kasztner's Train -- The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust by Anna Porter, Walker '08, $27.95, 431 pages, ISBN #0802715966. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The saga author Anna Porter recounts is surely the stuff of novels. Consider this paradox: the man who saved more Jews than anyone in the Holocaust immigrates to Israel after the war and is convicted as a Nazi collaborator. How can this be?

As Porter tells it, lawyer Rezso Kasztner, a leading member of the Hungarian Jewish Rescue Committee, "desperately negotiated" with the Nazis to buy the lives of 1,684 Jews, who would be packed onto "Kasztner's Train" and ridden to safety in Switzerland. Here's the hitch: most of the travelers had paid their patron $1,500 each for their tickets, thus establishing a threshold which might be called, "How much freedom can you afford?"

Kasztner appealed his conviction and was ultimately exonerated, but while awaiting appeal, he was assassinated in Tel Aviv on March 4, 1957. But not all Jews, by any means, felt Kasztner's actions were a simple Faustian bargain. Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem unveiled Kasztner's private archive on the 50th anniversary of his death, in a mission to restore his reputation.

Book Alert / Decadent Culture in the United States

Decadent Culture in the United States -- Art and Literature Against The American Grain, 1890-1926 by David Weir, SUNY Press '08, 233 pages, ISBN #0791472779. Index, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"During the fin de siecle," writes Professor Weir, "many Americans felt the nation had entered a period of decline, since the frontier had ended and the country's 'manifest destiny' seemed to be fulfilled." Americans had watched their European cousins' adopt decadence as its cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy, and gradually, American artists and writers adopted the same response to what was happening in the United States. "To be decadent," Weir observes, "one would have to develop an attitude of knowing acceptance of the prospect of collective ruin while also accepting or even relishing personal degeneration."

What differed from the European experience, he says, was America's "capitalist, commercial context," which made it easier for decadence to enter popular culture than in Europe. "American-style decadence was driven by a dual impulse: away from popular culture for ideological reasons, yet toward popular culture for economic reasons."

David Weir is professor of comparative literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Pre-Civil Rights Movement Social Activist Succumbs At 105

The Los Angeles Times:

"The rev. ray gibbons, a minister who helped Protestant churches in the United States address major social and political issues as director of the Council for Christian Social Action from 1944 to 1968, died of natural causes March 18 at Pilgrim Place retirement home in Claremont, his son David said last week. He was 105. The council was an agency of the Congregational Christian Churches of America and, starting in 1957, the United Church of Christ.

'Soon after taking over as director, Gibbons called on the denomination's 4,000 clergymen to address 'racial relations, labor problems, peace treaties, management [and] economic questions,' according to a 1944 Time magazine article. Gibbons worked out of the council's New York offices but traveled extensively to lead congregations as they put their Christian faith into practice.

"During World War II, he visited internment camps where Japanese Americans were detained, offering encouragement and advocating their release. After the war, he helped churches as they worked to re-integrate those citizens back into their communities. He spoke out in Appalachia and other depressed areas while helping to develop better housing for low- and middle-income families."