Marit (Nansen) Greve 11/8/28–3/26/21

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Marit as a child

Three years ago today my dear friend Marit Greve, eldest child of Odd and Kari Nansen, and granddaughter if Fridtjof Nansen, died.  She was 92 years old.  Those of you who have heard my presentation on Odd Nansen’s diary know that Marit is only briefly mentioned; however, she played a key part in my life, and since many of my subscribers have only recently signed up for my blogs, I feel it worthwhile for my readers to revisit our relationship (portions of which have appeared in previous posts). 
Marit was born November 8, 1928, in Brooklyn, NY. (I would often kid her that, beneath her Norwegian lilt, I could still detect a trace of a Brooklyn accent.)  She was 13 years-old when her father was arrested in 1942, old enough to remember vividly the night he was taken away.

She was also old enough to remember well the hardships that followed—like learning to make and eat dandelion salad and soup.  But there were also moments of humor.  Like many families, the Nansens raised animals during the war for food.  At one point they were down to a single rabbit, which they then kept with the chickens.  According to Marit the rabbit soon began to think it was a hen: “It climbed the perch . . . in the evenings like the hens, [and] had a siesta in the sitting box  . . . every day.  Astonishingly, it did not produce an egg.”

Marit admiring a Tryon, NC pumpkin, September 2016.

Odd Nansen of course worried about his family while he was incarcerated, and what effect his long separation might have on his children.  On March 3, 1943, he wrote: “Marit looked very fit, but I noticed that she’s almost grown a bit shy of me, and it went right through me like a stab.  Have I been away so long already? . . . I can’t stand for my children to drift away.”  Five months later (Aug. 5, 1943), when Marit was temporarily denied access to her dad, and cried in despair over the thought, Nansen was overjoyed: “Oh, how it warmed my heart; I do believe she cares a little for her daddy, and now I’m not afraid she may have grown away from me and forgotten me in this time.”  On Marit’s 16th birthday Nansen once again fretted in his diary that he was losing his little girl, who was now becoming a woman, despite her protestations to the contrary in a letter she sent him.  “Poor little Marit, she can’t help it.  And besides it’s not to oblige their parents that children live their lives.  But all the same I miss you badly, my little “fishergirl,” and if you sometimes miss your daddy too, my wish is only that it may be a blessing for both of us.”

Odd Nansen and Marit, 1930s

Based on everything I learned from Marit, Nansen needn’t have worried at all.

I first met Marit in August of 2011.  Having decided to republish Nansen’s diary, I first arranged a meeting in Washington, DC, to introduce myself to Tom Buergenthal.  Tom, gracious as ever, offered during the meeting to write to Marit and introduce me so that I could start a correspondence with her.  After all, by that time, Tom and Marit had been friends for over 60 years.  In Tom’s Preface, he writes of his first trip to Norway in 1948: “Kari Nansen, Odd Nansen’s wife, and their four children—Marit, Eigil, Siri, and Odd Erik—treated me almost from the beginning like a member of the family.” Tom further indicated to me that Marit was the “keeper of the flame” and was the best resource to answer all my questions about her father.

Several months later my wife Tara and I were invited to a wedding in Stockholm, Sweden, and I arranged ahead of time to stop over in Oslo on our way home and meet with Marit.  We agreed to rendezvous at Polhøgda, the house built by Fridtjof Nansen that Marit had grown up in as a child.  (When Marit married she moved into a new house a mere five-minute walk away.)  We sat outside on the lawn on a gorgeous afternoon and Marit  patiently answered all the questions I could think of.  Tara (who was furiously taking notes on my behalf) and I had been warned about Norwegians’ habitual reserve, and so we were pleasantly surprised when Marit then invited us to her home.  There we chatted further, and she showed me a framed photo of the Nansen family on the day her father returned from captivity (the same photo appears on page 567 of From Day to Day).  I couldn’t stop staring at this photo, at which point Marit removed it from the frame and handed it to me! A typical example of her graciousness and generosity.

Hotel Grande, Oslo, October 2014. From the left: Me; Marit; Anne Ellingsen (Odd Nansen’s biographer); Anne Greve, Marit’s daughter; Robert Bjorka (last living Norwegian survivor of Sachsenhausen)

And thus began a wonderful friendship and collaboration. Marit visited the U.S. as our houseguest twice, in 2013 and 2016, and I followed up on my 2011 visit with trips to Norway in 2014, 2015, 2018 and 2019.  Had COVID not intervened, I would have travelled to Norway for another presentation, and Marit had even agreed to attend a Kristallnacht commemoration set for November 2020 in New Haven, CT.

Marit in Tryon, NC, September 2016

My many favorite memories include: her visits to America; sharing the podium with Marit at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, where we spoke in the same room Fridtjof Nansen gave his own Nobel Peace Prize address decades earlier; speaking at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies; and most importantly, sharing in Marit’s special 90th birthday party in 2018, held on the deck of the Fram, the ship Fridtjof Nansen built for his expedition to the North Pole (1893—1896).

Marit’s Birthday. She is wearing the apron I gave her, which states “I just turned 90. What did you do today.”

When From Day to Day was re-published in 2016, I acknowledged the critically important contributions of three individuals: Tom Buergenthal, for introducing me to Odd Nansen in the first place via his memoir; Sten Vermund, for introducing me to Vanderbilt University Press, my eventual publisher, and most importantly, Marit Greve.  At the time I wrote: “Many of the insights into Nansen’s diary entries would have remained impossible without her knowledge of the events of 1942-1945.  Marit is a wonderful friend, self-effacing to a fault, and the inheritor of her father’s wit and humor.  To come to know Marit as I have is truly one of the unexpected, but deeply cherished, joys of this undertaking.”

My last image of Marit, holding a US Senate Commendation for Odd Nansen’s work on behalf of refugees, received January, 2021.

Skål, Marit, and may your memory be a blessing.  I miss you terribly.

Lay down
Your sweet and weary head.
Night is falling;
You have come to journey’s end.
Sleep now,
And dream of the ones
Who came before.
They are calling
From across the distant shore.

2023 Year-End Potpourri

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8th Distribution Goes Out

Recently I was able to send out to each of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and HL Senteret, the Norwegian Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities their 50% share of the royalties and speaking fees I earned this past year related to Odd Nansen’s diary.  To date my cumulative distributions now amount to almost $29,000.

Nuremburg Update

Recently I wrote about the anniversary of the Nuremburg Trials (here).  I have since learned that Russell Crowe and Rami Malek are planning to star in a forthcoming film about the trials—Crowe to play Herman Göring, and Malek to play an American psychiatrist who must determine if Göring is fit to stand trial.  (As noted in my earlier post, Göring was found guilty, but died by suicide with poison one day prior to his scheduled execution by hanging.}

What I did not mention in my earlier post was a fortuitous event that occurred during the final semester of my senior year in high school, I qualified for an independent study program, and chose to work with the New Haven, CT Public Defender’s Office.  In the course of my work, I befriended a student at the Yale Law School who was also volunteering at the Defender’s Office.  One day he invited me to sit in on one of his law classes.  Little did I know it was a senior seminar taught by Telford Taylor, the assistant to chief prosecutor Robert Jackson in the initial Nuremburg trial, and, after Jackson stepped down, the lead prosecutor in the 12 subsequent Nuremburg Trials.  Wow!  Taylor was most impressive, and helped cement my decision to pursue a career as a lawyer as well.  (We’ll just have to wait and see if his character ends up in the new movie.)

Happy New Year to all, and every best wish for a healthy, happy, and fulfilling 2024!

December 26, 1941: The Boxing Day Odd Nansen Would Never Forget

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Boxing Day, December 26, also known as St. Stephens Day, originated in Great Britain, but is observed in many other European countries, including Norway.

Boxing Day 1941 must have been a dispiriting day indeed.  Germany had overrun practically all of Europe, and was all but poised to defeat the Soviet Union.  The United States had formally been in the war for a mere 19 days; much of its Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, its army was woefully undersized when compared to that of its new enemies, the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, Italy).

Great Britain was less than 18 months past the “miracle” of Dunkirk, but calling the evacuation a miracle could not soften the blow to its armed forces, with many of its best troops, and most of it tanks, artillery, trucks, etc., lost.

Things looked bleak.

Churchill was eager for any kind of victory, symbolic or otherwise, to change the narrative, and lift the spirits of the Allies.  With that motivation in mind, the British, along with Norwegian special forces, conceived and launched two audacious commando raids against the Norwegian coastline.

Operation Anklet was the code name given to a commando raid of 300 men (223 British and 77 Norwegian), along with a 22-ship naval task force, aimed at Norway’s Lofoten Islands, beginning at 6:00 AM on Boxing Day, December 26, 1941.

Much like George Washington’s assault on Trenton during America’s War for Independence (December 26, 1776), the planners of Operating Anklet were counting on the German garrison at Lofoten being distracted by Christmas festivities.

They were right.

The landings were unopposed, and the raiders successfully destroyed several German boats, as well as two radio transmitters, and captured a number of German soldiers (together with some Norwegian sympathizers—Quislings).  Most embarrassing of all, over 200 local Norwegians made the spontaneous decision to volunteer to serve in the Free Norwegian Forces, returning with the departing Allies, who left the area on December 28.  Allied forces suffered no casualties.

Operation Archery

Operation Anklet, while successful on its own terms, was primarily designed to serve as a diversionary raid for a much larger, more important, raid by British and Norwegian commandos on December 27, 1941, known as Operation Archery.  The immediate goal of Operation Archery was the destruction of fish-oil processing plants at Vågsøy, in western Norway (such plants were used in the production of explosives).  In the longer term, it was hoped that the raid would induce Hitler to deploy more troops to Norway, instead of the all-important Eastern Front.

Lofoten and Vågsøy

Much like Anklet, Operation Archery was a success.  At the cost of four naval deaths, and the loss of 17 commandos (including the commander of the Norwegian Armed Forces in exile, Captain Martin Linge), the Allies killed 120 defenders, captured another 98, destroyed several fish-oil plants, sank 10 enemy ships, and returned with 70 loyal Norwegians eager to join resistance forces in England.

A Fish-Oil Plant Burns

The material damage incurred by Operations Anklet and Archery was modest; the psychological impact, on the other hand, was substantial.

First, the raids convinced Hitler to divert 30,000 additional troops to Norway, troops that were badly needed on the Eastern Front.  Hitler was reported to have said “the outcome of the war will be decided in Norway,” and ended up stationing almost 370,000 soldiers there, or approximately 1 soldier for every 10 Norwegians.

Equally important, the repercussions were felt in Norway itself.  Hitler’s personal representative in Norway, Reichskommissar Josef Terboven was mortified at the embarrassing news generated by the raids.  His reaction was not long in coming.  Finding that many of the Norwegian escapees to Britain were former Norwegian officers and soldiers on parole, Terboven ordered the re-arrest of many such officers, who spent the remainder of the war in POW camps.  Secondly, the SS arrested and imprisoned relatives of the Norwegians who had opted to leave with the British.

Finally, and most ominously of all for Odd Nansen, “Twenty former high court officials and close friends of the exiled royal family were arrested in reprisal for what . . . Terboven . . . called ‘the kidnapping of eight members of the Nasjonal Samling party by Englishmen in violation of international law.”

One of those close friends of the exiled royal family was Odd Nansen (whose father Fridtjof had been instrumental in bringing King Haakon VII from Denmark to Norway in 1905). Nansen was taken into custody “for questioning” on January 13, 1942, and would spend the next three and a half years in captivity—the very last of the 20 hostages arrested in January 1942 to see freedom.

Nansen’s agony would be our gain, for without the fateful events triggered on Boxing Day 1941, we would never have had the “epic narrative of life in Nazi concentration camps,” in the words of three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandburg, a narrative which has taken “its place among the great affirmations of the power of the human spirit to rise above terror, torture and death.”

Happy Birthday Odd Nansen

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Today marks the 122nd anniversary of Odd Nansen’s birth, in 1901.

Sometimes I ask myself why I have become so enamored of a person I never met; why do I spend so much time devoted to a diary he wrote, before I was even born, and which I still have difficultly fully appreciating—the description is so divorced from any personal experience I have ever had.

Recently I read for the first time, the front inside dust jacket from the original, 1949 English-language version of From Day to Day.  It is worth quoting:

“To convey the flavor of Odd Nansen’s remarkable diary, kept while a prisoner in German concentration camps, in a brief description is impossible, for the essence of it is the spiritual quality that shines out on every page—the magnanimity, the tolerance, the humor, above all the humaneness of this daily record (emphasis mine).”

Interestingly, I also recently read a review in The York Review of Books of a newly published book entitled Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community by H.G. Adler.  Adler (1910—1988) was Czech Jew (like Ilse Weber) who, also like Weber, was deported to Theresienstadt in February 1942.  His wife Gertrude could have survived, but chose not to leave her own mother, and so was gassed in Auschwitz.  Adler was also transported to Auschwitz, but survived as a forced laborer, and ultimately emigrated to England in 1947 in anticipation of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.  He lost 18 relatives to the Holocaust.

Adler resolved, while in Theresienstadt, that if he survived, he would write about the camp I detail.  He left notes and materials behind when he was transported to Auschwitz (again, like Weber’s husband, Willi), accumulated more material after his liberation, and published his research, in German, in 1955.  An expanded second edition appeared in 1960, and was reprinted again in 2005 with an afterword by his son, Jeremy.  This version has only recently been translated into English, published by Cambridge University Press.

Not surprisingly, Adler’s book spends a great deal of time examining the role of the Jewish Council of Elders which administered Theresienstadt at the behest of the SS.  Also not surprisingly, he found their actions often falling short—corrupt, focused on self-preservation, condoning favoritism, etc.  However, the reviewer, Thomas Nagel, observes:

“The one positive conclusion [Adler] drew from his dark experiences is that there is nonetheless a ground of morality that is in principle always available.  Adler calls this personal quality ‘humaneness’ (Menschlichkeit, also translatable as ‘humanity”)—an inner resource that enables individuals of sufficient strength to act morally in any circumstance, however horrible.”

I guess it is this quality of “humaneness” that initially attracted me to, and still attracts me to, Odd Nansen.  I end virtually all my presentations with an observation that Nansen’s humane example, evidenced throughout his diary, should serve as an inspiration to us all—of how to “act morally in any circumstance, however horrible.”

Happy Birthday, Odd Nansen

Odd Nansen

December 2, 1942: The Graphite Piles Up

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“The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.”

“How were the natives?”

“Very friendly.”

With these code words, Arthur Compton, head of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, notified James Conant, chair of the National Defense Research Committee (overseeing the Manhattan Project), that the world’s first successful, man-made, self-sustaining chain reaction had taken place, in a squash court beneath the viewing stands at Stagg Field, University of Chicago.

Other observers were a bit more loquacious:

“Nothing very spectacular had happened.  Nothing had moved, and the pile itself had given no sound. . .. We had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it.  We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.”

With the discovery of nuclear fission by German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, as explained and named by their collaborators Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, it was known that the possibility of creating a self-sustaining chain reaction was possible.  However, finding the right material—one that would produce more splitting neutrons than it absorbed, and the right moderating material, to control the activity of those loose neutrons, had proved difficult.

It was up to Hungarian Jewish émigré Leo Szilard, who fled Hitler in 1933, to establish, while at Columbia University, that fission of uranium produced more neutrons than it consumed, and it was up to Enrico Fermi, another émigré fleeing persecution in Italy—his wife was Jewish—to construct the first nuclear reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, or CP-1.  (Fermi is the “Italian navigator” mentioned in the coded message above, and CP-1 is the “pile” referred to in the above quote)

CP-1

Pile was a very appropriate descriptor, as, in the words of Fermi, his primitive reactor was “a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers.”  The final structure required 45 tons of uranium oxide and 5.4 tons of uranium metal, all encased in 45,000 ultra-pure graphite blocks weighing a total of 360 tons.  (Graphite was the moderator needed to control the activity of the neutrons; heavy water, the only other suitable moderator, was too difficult to obtain in large quantities).  When completed, the elliptically-shaped pile stood 20 feet high, 6 feet wide at the ends, and 25 feet across the middle.

The team that worked on CP-1. Fermi is front row, on left; Szilard is second row on right (in white trench coat)

On the fateful afternoon of December 2, 1942, CP-1 was ready.  The control rods were slowly removed, and pile went critical (self-sustaining) at 3:25 PM.  Having run for approximately 4-5 minutes, and having generated about 0.5 watts of power, it was shut down.  A scientist in the party opened a bottle of Chanti, and all toasted the event from paper cups.  It was the first demonstration that a nuclear device was now feasible, a turning point in the evolution of the Manhattan Project, with consequences we are still living with today.  As Leo Szilard observed when he at last proved fission was possible: “That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”

At The Lanier Library

This past Thursday I gave a lecture at The Lanier Library (where I am a proud member of the board), located in my hometown of Tryon, NC. The talk was entitled “The Heavy Water War: Stopping Hitler’s Atomic Bomb.”  It focused on the years-long struggle by the Allies to prevent the Germans from obtaining heavy water—a crucial moderator, as noted above—from the only available source, a facility in Rjukan, Norway.  After my talk ended, a library member named Betty, sitting in the front row, approached me, and shared with me that her mother had worked on CP-1 during the war years, and for her efforts, had been awarded a piece of the graphite pile used.  Here it is:

Graphite from CP-1

Talk about a small world!  Thanks again, Betty!

Justice at Nuremberg–or Not?

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“This, then, is the climax!  This is the moment you have been waiting for all these black, despairing years!  To see Justice catch up with Evil.  To see it overtake these barbaric little men who almost destroyed our world.  This, really, is the end of the long night, of the hideous nightmare.

And how the mighty have fallen! . . . Why, the sudden loss of power seems to have stripped them clean of the arrogance, the insolence, the truculence that was their very being in all the years I knew them.  How quickly they have become broken, miserable little men!”

(Written by William L. Shirer, Tuesday, November 20, 1945, Nuremberg, Germany.)

Seventy-eight years ago today, the first Nuremberg war crimes trial, also known as the International Military Tribunal, began.  Twenty-four of the most important political and military leaders of Nazi Germany were on trial for, among other things, crimes against humanity.

The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were making good on the promise they had made just over two years earlier, in the so-called Moscow Declaration of November 1, 1943. There, the three big Allied powers did “solemnly declare and give warning . . . as follows: At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for, or have taken a consenting part in the above . . . atrocities, massacres and executions, will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of those liberated countries.”   Where such offenses had no geographic locale, the criminals would be punished by a joint decision of the Allies.

The Judges

The Nuremberg trials were the result.  The prosecution, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, wanted more than to simply win convictions against the initial 24 defendants.  They wanted the proceedings to 1) provide “irrefutable evidence” of Nazi war crimes, 2) offer a “history lesson” to the defeated German nation, and 3) delegitimize the traditional German elite.  Proceedings began on November 20, 1945, and ended on October 10, 1946. Of the 24 initially charged, 12 were sentenced to death by hanging, 7 received sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment, 3 were acquitted, 1 was deemed physically incapable of standing trial, and 1 died by suicide before the trial could begin.

The hangings were all carried out on October 16, 1946.  Among the 10 actually hanged (Martin Bormann had been sentenced in absentia, and Hermann Göring, died by suicide the day prior to his scheduled execution), was Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the OKW (Supreme Command of Armed Forces).

November 20 also marks an anniversary of another sort with particular relevance to Keitel.  Those of you who have heard my lecture on the heavy water war/Vemork raid, have learned of the tragic fate of the 30 British demolition experts who took part in Operation Freshman (November 19/20, 1942), the attempt to destroy the Norwegian heavy water facility at Vemork.  The plan called for the sappers to land in Norway in two gliders, destroy the facility, and try and escape to neighboring Sweden.  Such an escape called for evasion over hundreds of miles of Norwegian terrain (in the middle of winter) despite the fact that the sappers could hardly speak a word of Norwegian. In other words, the odds of a successful evasion were practically nil.  By wearing British uniforms, however, the attackers could feel safe in the knowledge that, under the Geneva Convention, they would, if captured, be interned as POWs for the duration of the war.

What the sappers did not realize, however, was that Hitler had decreed that any enemy soldier caught in a commando operation was to be killed immediately, uniform or no, the Geneva Convention notwithstanding.  On November 20, 1942, those surviving British sappers in glider #2 were executed pursuant to the so-called Commando Order, which had been signed by none other than Keitel in October 1942. It is thus ironic that exactly three years after the deaths of the British commandos, Keitel would stand trial for his actions.  By signing the Commando Order, Wilhelm Keitel had sealed his own fate. Whether he realized the coincidence is unknown, although perhaps the enormity of his crimes finally sank in when his request to be shot by a firing squad was rejected by the Allies in favor of death by hanging.

The Defendants

Subsequent war trials at Nuremberg targeted a further 177 military and party leaders, leading to 142 additional convictions, and 25 death sentences. This represented a small fraction of the almost 100,000 Germans initially arrested as war criminals, and the 2,500 “major” war criminals identified by the Allies.

Although other war trials were also held in subsequent years in various venues outside of Nuremberg, the numbers convicted, and their sentences, like that of General von Falkenhorst* represent an exceedingly small price to pay for the many, many millions of innocent lives lost at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

* = Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, the Supreme Commander of German forces in Norway, was also sentenced to death in 1946 for his role in the death of the British commandos in Operation Freshman.  His sentence was later commuted to 20 years imprisonment.  In 1953, having served only seven years of his sentence, he was released “for reasons of health.”  He lived for another 15 years, dying in 1968.

Happy Birthday Marit

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Today would have been the 95th birthday of my dear friend, Marit (Nansen) Greve.

Marit as a child

As I pointed out in the Acknowledgements section of From Day to Day, “To come to know Marit as I have is truly one of the unexpected, but deeply cherished, joys of this undertaking.” If anything, my admiration of, delight in, and love for, Marit only grew in the succeeding years after her father’s diary was republished.

Marit, I shall always miss you, and remember our times together with fondness.  Your memory is, and shall always be, a blessing.

October 6, 1943: Nansen Arrives at Sachsenhausen

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Eighty years ago today, Odd Nansen arrived at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, approximately twenty-five miles north of Berlin.  After a practical joke went awry, and became a contest of wills between Nansen and head of the protective custody camp called Grini, located outside of Oslo, Norway, Nansen was informed by the Schutzhaftlagerführer:

“that I would now go to Germany and fine out what a real German K.Z.Lager” [Kazettenlager][Concentration Camp] was like.  He assured me that I need entertain no hopes of ever getting back to Norway—they could just put up the “monument” upon my grave [once more] straight away, for from the place I was bound for, people seldom returned alive.”

As Nansen departed for his new destination, he remained upbeat, observing “There’s something strange about movement—even if one is going to hell.  At any rate one’s getting somewhere—something is happening, the route may be pretty, and isn’t the paving celebrated?”  And, commenting on his arrival in Sachsenhausen after a voyage by bus, ship, and train, Nansen observes:

“In the light from a crack in the door [of the railcar] where I was lying, I wrote about the strange journey.  Unfortunately I didn’t manage to preserve that section of the diary, but I am certain there was nothing dolorous in those travel notes.  We were going on—slowly perhaps, but we were getting somewhere.  Something was happening—we were in motion.  And as I said, there’s something about movement—even if it leads to hell.  And that is pretty much where it led.”

Prison Wall, Electrified Fence and Guard Tower – Sachsenhausen Camp

(Portions of the preceding post first appeared on October 6, 2017.)

September 26, 1905: Einstein Publishes a Paper

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In his long and prolific career, Albert Einstein published over 300 scientific papers in addition to hundreds of books and articles.  One of his most famous scientific papers, published on September 26, 1905, was “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Køper” or “On the Electro-dynamics of Moving Bodies.”  We mere mortals know it (slightly) better as Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.  Don’t ask me to begin to explain it (I can’t), but I can report that special relativity is important in the fields of quantum mechanics, atomic physics and nuclear physics.

Einstein was only 26 when he published his paper, just months after having received his PhD.  It was one of four groundbreaking papers he published within the space of a single year, which has since been referred to as Einstein’s annus mirabilis—Einstein’s miracle year.  (The other three papers dealt with the equivalence of mass and energy—E=mc2; Brownian motion; and the photoelectric effect.  Don’t ask me to explain them either.)

Einstein was visiting the United States when Hitler came to power in January 1933, and he never returned to Germany.  In March 1933 he learned that his house had been raided (it was later seized and eventually converted into a Hitler Youth camp).  On May 10, 1933, his works were targeted (along with those of Freud, H.G. Wells, Proust, Remarque, and many many others) for Nazi book burnings by students in university towns throughout Germany.

Following short stays in Belgium and Great Britain in mid-1933, Einstein elected to accept a position at the recently formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Those of you who have seen the movie Oppenheimer witness, in one of the early scenes, an avuncular, slightly disheveled Einstein (he was once described as looking like “a reliable old-fashioned watchmaker in a small town who perhaps collected butterflies on a Sunday”) conferring with Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute.  It was Einstein’s initiative with President Franklin D. Roosevelt (explaining nuclear fission and warning that Germany might already be on the road to developing an atom bomb) that, more than anything else, gave rise to the Manhattan Project.

Notwithstanding Einstein’s preeminence—he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921—not everyone in the U.S. was pleased with his decision to move permanently to America in October 1933.  According to historian Richard Ketchum:

“[W]hen it was learned that Einstein  . . .  planned to emigrate to the United States, a women’s ‘Patriotic Corporation’ tried to prevent his admission on the grounds that he was a Communist, and the National Patriotic Council, labeling him a German Bolshevist, announced that his theory of relativity ‘was of no scientific value or purpose, not understandable because there was nothing there to understand.’”

Einstein became a U.S. citizen in 1940, and died in Princeton in 1955, age 76.

We’ll let Einstein have the last word vis-à-vis his xenophobic critics:

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not yet completely sure about the universe.”

“O, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal be Proud?”

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Today marks the 161st anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history.  More Americans were killed or wounded—22,717–in a single day, September 17, 1862, than on any other day in any other war America has fought.

General George B. McClelland, the ever-cautious, ever-methodical commander of the Union Army of the Potomac failed, despite numerous opportunities, to inflict a crushing blow upon General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.  He did, however, force Lee to abandon his incipient invasion of Pennsylvania, and return to northern Virginia.  In that sense Antietam can be considered a slight military victory for Union forces.

The larger significance of Antietam, however, derives from more than the military outcome alone.

By early September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had concluded that the war needed to be fought, not just to preserve the Union, but to end slavery in America once and for all.  Lincoln concluded, however, that such a monumental move could only be implemented when the North had seized the initiative in the war.  As historian Bruce Catton explains in Mr. Lincoln’s Army, the first volume in his Army of the Potomac trilogy (recently re-released by the Library of America):

“[A]s things stood just then he [Lincoln] could not issue it.  [Secretary of State William] Seward had warned him: Put that out now, when we have been defeated [at First Bull Run; Peninsula Campaign; Second Bull Run] and our armies are in retreat, and it will look like a shriek of despair—not an attempt to help the black race, but an appeal to the black race to help us.  We must have a victory first.”

Antietam gave Lincoln this opportunity, as Catton eloquently concludes:

“Yet it was finally, and irrevocably, the decisive battle of the war, affecting the whole course of American history ever since.  For this stalemated battle—this great whirlwind of flame and torn earth and shaking sound, which seemed to consume everything and create nothing—brought about the Emancipation Proclamation and put the country on a new course from which there could be no turning back.  Here at last was the sounding forth of the bugle that would never call retreat.”

The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was issued five days later, on September 22, 1862.

Some of the scenes from the battle are nothing short of tragic.  One regiment, the 16th Connecticut, had been mustered into the army only three weeks earlier. Its soldiers had loaded their muskets for the very first time only the evening before; during the battle it was ordered to maneuver as a regiment for the first time, and do it while under fire. “The grand and picturesque business of charging a rebel line, which had sounded so impressive and inspiring back home, had come down to this—hiding in cornfield and being shot at by people who were completely out of sight.”

The astounding loss of life at Antietam, and indeed, the prodigious casualties experienced throughout the Civil War (more than all the casualties suffered by America in all other wars combined) perhaps explains the attraction of a poem entitled “Mortality,” which was said to be President Lincoln’s favorite poem.

Composed by Scottish poet William Knox (1789–1825), it is said that Lincoln could recite the entire work from memory.  It was widely reprinted following his assassination.  The full poem runs eight stanzas (and can be found here).  The first and last stanzas read as follows:

“O, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?/Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud/A flash of the lightning, a break in the wave/Man passes from life to his rest in the grave.

‘Tis the wink of an eye, ‘tis the draught of a breath/From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death/From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud/O, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”

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