From here.
Here is a photo of a 69-year-old man who drove a delivery truck for 28 years.
This—which is called unilateral dermatoheliosis (one-sided photoaging)—is the result of exposing only half of your face to direct sunlight for nearly three decades.
An iconic photograph son. And what happened after that. This photograph is almost how old I am. Gives you an idea how lives change and how history reaches across decades and touches you.
Read up on history son, it will help you to avoid mistakes. Two quotes. History is a vast early warning system.
Second is, if you want a new idea read an old book. You get great ideas from old books :)
Love
Baba
I've never escaped from that moment: Girl in napalm photograph that defined the Vietnam War 40 years on
The iconic black-and-white image communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe and contributed to its end.
Full Story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2153091/Napalm-girl-photo-Vietnam-War-turns-40.html
Dear Kannu
Here is an interesting history lesson on chickens. So why am I sending this to you? Well, you like chicken for starters, but think about couple of other things.
1. As and how more and more people eat chicken (as red meat is more dangerous), the place to invest would be in chicken farms, or firms who are in this business.
2. An interesting anecdote. One of the biggest countries where chickens are raised is in the USA. But Americans prefer the breast part, they dont really like the leg/thigh part at all. So most of the chicken farms sell the breasts to the American public. What do they do with the legs? After all, its useless to them. Well, guess what? many countries, such as Nigeria and India, they prefer the thighs/legs. So the Americans export the legs to Nigeria and India at dirt cheap prices and thus blow up the Nigerian and Indian poultry industry. Interesting trade patterns...
But I loved the beer bottom chicken, it was really good. I can still taste it. And as the old quote goes, you are what you eat...
Love
Baba
How the Chicken Conquered the World
The epic begins 10,000 years ago in an Asian jungle and ends today in kitchens all over the world
- By Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler
- Smithsonian magazine, June 2012, Subscribe
The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce. The descendants of those roosters might well think—if they were capable of such profound thought—that their ancient forebears have a lot to answer for.
Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents an intriguingly blank canvas for the flavor palette of almost any cuisine. A generation of Britons is coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long after the time when most families had a few hens running around the yard that could be grabbed and turned into dinner, chicken remains a nostalgic, evocative dish for most Americans. When author Jack Canfield was looking for a metaphor for psychological comfort, he didn’t call it “Clam Chowder for the Soul.”
Son
Here is an interesting story about a man who tried to kill Hitler and failed. Interesting indeed and read this about how one man's conviction can lead to heroic attempts.
Now here is the difficult question. Technically speaking, this chap was a terrorist at end of the day. Hitler was democratically if elected on a bit of a dodgy basis. When he started, he was no different to any other post war leader. Based upon that, there is no real reason to go kill him, specially when you compare him with the others from UK or Belgium or France (who collectively did much more damage and killings to their colonial subjects in Africa and Asia). So despite the fact that Hitler turned out to be a monster and killed/led to death millions of people, should he have been killed? Difficult question, and if the situation is here today, I wouldnt agree that you can kill any leader like this. Ratko Maladich is under trial in the Hague for what happened in Bosnia but that's the due process, an individual person cannot take responsibility to take another person's life. Same with the death of Osama, even though he was the head of a terrorist leader, you cannot go about killing people in an extra-judicial manner. Otherwise there is no difference between civilisation and barbarity.
But on the other hand, lone wolf terrorists like Georg are the most dangerous. See these links
For a view from USA: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/09/Biden-Bin-Laden-wanted-911-anniversary-attack-546598/1
For the French attack: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/23-03-2012/120873-lone_ranger-0/
For the British view: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16920643
so while we celebrate one terrorist who tried but failed to assassinate Hitler, there are lone ranger terrorists constantly roaming around trying to kill us.
Worth thinking about indeed.
Love
Baba
Georg Elser: The Man Who Almost Killed Hitler | Past Imperfect
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/08/one-man-against-tyranny/
August 18, 2011
One Man Against TyrannyGeorg Elser, whose attempt to kill Hitler came within moments of succeeding, commemorated on a stamp. The German phrase means “I wanted to prevent war.” Image: Wikicommons
Maria Strobel could not believe it of her Führer. Adolf Hitler and his party—a group of senior Nazis that included Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—had spent more than an hour in her Munich bierkeller. Hitler had delivered a trademark speech, and, while they listened, Himmler and the others had run up a large beer bill. But the whole group had left in a hurry—leaving the tab unpaid and Strobel untippped.
Much annoyed, the Bavarian waitress set about clearing up the mess. She had made only a small dent in the pile of steins when, at 9:20 p.m. precisely, there was a huge explosion only a few feet behind her. A stone pillar disintegrated in the blast, bringing part of the ceiling crashing down in a rain of wood and masonry. The explosion hurled Strobel the length of the hall and out through the bierkeller’s doors. Though stunned, she survived—the person closest to the blast to do so. Eight others were not so fortunate, and a further 63 were so badly injured that they had to be helped out into the open air. As they staggered toward safety, the dais where Hitler had been standing eight minutes earlier lay crushed beneath six feet of heavy timber, bricks and rubble.
Hitler always said he had “the luck of the devil,” and during his years in power he survived more than 40 plots to kill him. The most famous of these culminated in July 1944, when Claus von Stauffenberg managed to place a bomb inside the conference room in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. On that occasion, a table support absorbed most of the blast and the Führer survived to hobble out, his eardrums shattered and his trousers torn to ribbons.
Adolf Hitler
That attempt on Hitler’s life is famous—it was the basis for Valkyrie, the 2008 Tom Cruise film—but it can be argued that it was considerably less astounding, and less courageous, than the bierkeller bombing five years earlier. For one thing, Stauffenberg was well-equipped; he really should have done better with the resources at his disposal. For another, he and his fellow plotters were not convinced anti-Nazis; they may have had an aristocratic disdain for their plebian leader, but their primary reason for wanting Hitler dead was not horror at the barbarism of his regime, but simple conviction that he was leading Germany into the abyss.
The Munich bomb, on the other hand, exploded on November 8, 1939, at the height of the Führer’s popularity and less than three months after the outbreak of World War II—before the final order was given for the invasion of France, and when Russia remained a German ally and the United States remained at peace. Not only that; this bomb was the work of just one man, an unassuming carpenter who was far more principled than Stauffenberg and whose skill, patience and determination make him altogether much more interesting. Yet the Munich incident has been almost forgotten; as late as 1998 there was no memorial, in Germany or anywhere else, to the attempt or to the man who made it.
His name was Georg Elser, and this is his story.
Born in 1903, Elser was just below average height and just above average intelligence. He was not much of a thinker, but clever with his hands: an expert cabinetmaker who never read books, rarely touched newspapers and had little interest in politics. He had voted Communist, and briefly joined the Red Front Fighters’ League—streetfighters who took on their Nazi counterparts, the Brownshirts. But Elser was no Marxist, just a typical member of the German working class in the 1930s. He certainly wasn’t a brawler; for him, the attraction of the Fighters’ League was the chance to play in its brass band. In 1939, the only organization that he belonged to was the Woodworkers’ Union.
Beneath this unremarkable exterior, however, Elser did care—mostly about the way the Nazis and their policies were reducing ordinary Germans’ standard of living. The “economic miracle” that Hitler often boasted of had been achieved at considerable cost. Working hours were long and holidays few. Trade unions and political parties were dissolved or banned; wages were frozen. Meanwhile, members of the Nazi party enjoyed privileges not available to those who refused to join. Elser, who was noted as a perfectionist who took infinite care over his work, found it increasingly hard to make ends meet as real wages declined. Asked later to explain his decision to take on Hitler, he was blunt: “I considered that the situation in Germany could only be changed by the elimination of the current leadership.”
There were only a few signs that Elser might be prepared to take his opposition to Nazi regime beyond the crude jokes and grumbles that his handful of friends indulged in. He refused to listen to the Führer when he came on the radio; he would not give the Nazi salute. When a pro-Hitler parade passed though his home town of Königsbronn, in southwestern Germany, he ostentatiously turned his back on it and started whistling.
Yet Elser never confided to anyone that his views were hardening. He remained almost entirely solitary: unmarried and estranged from his father. And it was typical of the man that when, early in 1938, he finally concluded that something needed to be done about the Führer, he didn’t look for help.
It was then that Elser displayed his hidden qualities. Other anti-Nazis had wavered for years over where, when and how they might get close enough to Hitler to kill him. Elser took a purely practical approach. The Führer was renowned for his security consciousness; he tended to cancel arrangements or change plans abruptly. To have a chance of getting to him, Elser recognized, he needed to know that Hitler would be in a specific place at a particular time. And there was only one annual certainty in the Nazi leader’s program: each November, he traveled to Munich to speak at an elaborate commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch, the risible 1923 attempted coup that had set his party on the road to power. Surrounded by thousands of Old Fighters—Nazis whose party membership dated to 1922 or earlier—Hitler would swap stories and reminisce before delivering the sort of lengthy speech calculated to rouse his loyalists to a frenzy.
Hitler speaking to his Old Fighters in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich
So it was that in November 1938—10 months before the Germans invaded Poland—Elser took a train to Munich and scouted out the Nazis’ celebrations. He visited the beer hall where the putsch had started. Known as the Bürgerbräukeller in 1923 but as the Löwenbräu by 1939, it was a cavernous underground hall, capable of holding more than 3,000 revelers and selected by Hitler as the perfect site for a centerpiece speech. Elser attended the festivities, took note of the cellar’s layout, and was surprised to realize that security was lax. In a typical piece of Nazi fudge, two groups were at loggerheads over which was responsible for the Führer’s safety; Hitler opted for his National Socialist German Workers’ Party over the Munich police, which put Christian Weber in charge of security. But Weber, a fat and corrupt former nightclub bouncer, was not much minded to take the sort of strenuous precautions that might actually have safeguarded his leader. A convinced Nazi, it simply did not occur to him that others might hate Hitler enough to take drastic action of their own.
While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.
Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.
In April 1939, Elser returned to Munich to carry out a detailed reconnaissance. He made sketches of the beer cellar and took more precise measurements. He also visited the Swiss frontier to work out an escape route, finding a stretch of the border that was not patrolled.
That August, as Hitler stoked up tension with Poland and Europe slipped toward war, Elser moved to Munich and began the final preparations for planting his device. The work involved huge risks and revealed an imaginative side to the bomber’s personality that few who knew him realized he possessed. Taking advantage of the Löwenbräu’s lax security, Elser became a regular customer. Each evening he would take his dinner there, order a beer and wait until closing time. Then he would slip upstairs, hide in a storeroom and emerge after 11:30 to get down to the crucial job of hollowing the pillar.
The bierkeller, showing the extensive damage done by Elser’s bomb. Photo: Wikicommons
The work was astonishingly painstaking and slow. Working by flashlight, Elser first neatly cut a hole in some wood cladding; this job alone took him three nights. Next he attacked the pillar itself. The noise of a chisel striking stone echoed so loudly through the empty bierkeller that Elser restricted himself to single blows every few minutes, timing the descent of his hammer to coincide with the passing of a streetcar or the automatic flushing of the urinals. Every fleck of stone and piece of dust had to be swept up to leave no evidence of his work; then the panel he had cut out of the wood had to be seamlessly replaced before Elser made his escape through a side exit early the next morning. The carpenter returned to the bierkeller evening after evening, working on his plan for 35 nights in all. On one occasion he was nearly caught; a waiter found him inside the building as the place was opening and ran to tell the manager. Questioned, Elser insisted he was simply an early customer. He ordered a coffee, drank it in the garden and left unmolested.
It was typical of Elser that he labored to produce the most efficient bomb he could. By modifying a clock, he created a timer that would run for up to 144 hours before activating a lever; that would trigger a system of springs and weights that would launch a steel shuttle into a live rifle round embedded in explosive. Next, Elser added a second timer to act as a fail-safe, then enclosed the whole bomb in a beautifully built box designed to fit precisely into the cavity he had excavated. He minimized the risk of discovery by lining the cavity with cork, which muffled the noise from the bomb’s clock, and then placing a sheet of tinplate inside the wood panel to prevent any bierkeller worker putting up decorations from unknowingly driving a nail into his delicate mechanism. When he was finished, he returned to the bierkeller with the box he’d made and discovered that it was fractionally too big. He took it home, planed it down and went back again to make sure it fit.
Elser’s research had revealed that Hitler always began his speech in the Löwenbräu at about 8:30 p.m., spoke for about 90 minutes, then stayed to mingle with the crowd. On that basis, he set his bomb to explode at 9:20 p.m.—midway, he calculated, through Hitler’s customary tirade.
Finally, having planted the bomb three days before Hitler was due, sealed it in and removed the last traces of his work, Elser returned to Munich two nights later— just 24 hours before Hitler was due to speak. Then, at a time when it was entirely reasonable to suppose that even the inefficient Weber might have stepped up his security a little, he broke back into the bierkeller and pressed his ear against the pillar to check that his device was still ticking.
Had Elser paid closer attention to the newspapers, he might have felt that all his work had been wasted—shortly before Hitler was due to deliver his bierkeller speech, he canceled the arrangement, only to reinstate it the day before he was due to travel. But then, had Elser read the newspapers, he would also have realized that, as a concession to Hitler’s urgent need to be in Berlin, his speech had been rescheduled. It would now begin at 8 p.m. and last for little more than an hour.
In the event, Hitler stopped speaking at 9:07 p.m. precisely. He declined the efforts of the Old Fighters to have him stay for the usual drink, and at 9:12 hurried out of the Löwenbräu and back to the Munich railroad station. Eight minutes later—when Elser’s bomb exploded in a blinding flash, right on time—the Führer was boarding his train with all his retinue and most of the bierkeller crowd had left the building. It was not until the Berlin express halted briefly at Nuremburg that an incredulous Hitler learned how close he had come to death.
By 9:20 Elser, too, was far from the Löwenbräu. That morning he had taken a train for Konstanz, close to the Swiss border, and when darkness fell he set out to walk into Switzerland. But if Hitler’s luck held that night, his would-be assassin’s ran out. Elser’s April reconnaissance had taken place in peacetime; now, with Germany at war, the border had been closed. He was arrested by a patrol as he sought a way through wire entanglements. Told to turn out his pockets, he quickly found himself in trouble. Perhaps hoping to persuade the Swiss authorities of his anti-Nazi credentials, he was carrying with him sketches of his bomb design, a fuse, his Communist party membership card, and a picture postcard of the Löwenbräu—an incriminating collection of possessions at the best of times, and worse when, minutes later, an urgent telegram arrived with news from the bierkeller.
Elser was taken back to Munich for interrogation. Hitler himself took a close interest in the bomber, asking to see his file and commenting favorably on his “intelligent eyes, high forehead and determined expression.” But for Hitler, the sophistication of the plot was evidence that the British Secret Service was behind it. “What idiot conducted this investigation?” he demanded when told that Elser claimed to have worked alone.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler personally interrogated Elser. Photo: Wikicommons
The bomber was subjected to beatings, hypnosis and torture in an attempt to get at Hitler’s truth; he stuck to his story, and even reproduced a version of his bomb to show the Gestapo he had built it. Eventually, the historian Roger Moorhouse relates, Himmler himself arrived in Munich to continue the interrogation:
“With wild curses, [he] drove his boots hard into the body of the handcuffed Elser. He then had him … taken to a lavatory … where he was beaten with a whip or some similar instrument until he howled with pain. He was then brought back at the double to Himmler, who once more kicked and cursed him.”
Through all this, the carpenter stuck to his story, and eventually the Gestapo gave up and packed him off to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp. Strange to say, Elser was not executed or even badly treated there; although held in solitary confinement, he was allowed a bench and his tools, and kept alive until the last month of the war. It is generally supposed that Hitler wanted him alive to star in a war crimes trial in which he would have implicated the British in the Munich plot.
There are those who say that the Nazis were too efficient to allow a lone bomber to hurt them in this way, and that the whole affair had been stage-managed to provide Hitler with an excuse to clamp down further on the left. Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor held at the same camp as Elser, would later testify that he had heard this story on the prisoners’ grapevine; Elser himself is supposed to have confessed to it. But now that we have the transcripts of the interrogation, and better understand the inefficient and chaotic way that Hitler ran the Nazi state, this theory no longer rings true. The Nazis, in wartime, needed no reason or excuse to stamp out resistance. Today, historians accept that the attempt on the Führer’s life was serious, and that Elser acted alone.
There remains the vexing question of how, or whether, Elser’s life should be celebrated. Can an act of terrorism ever be justified, even when its purpose is to kill a murderous dictator? Might the innocent lives the bomber took in the Löwenbräu have been balanced by those that could have been saved had Hitler died before the war was fully underway?
Himmler, for one, had no desire to wait for those questions to be answered. In April 1945, as the Americans, British and Russians closed in, he had Elser taken from his cell and shot. A week later, the death was reported in the German press, blamed on an Allied air raid.
In the frantic last days of the Thousand Year Reich, few would have noticed the announcement. And six years and more than 60 million deaths later, fewer still would have recalled the name of Georg Elser.
Sources
Michael Balfour. Withstanding Hitler in Germany 1933-45. London: Routledge, 1988; Martyn Housden. Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich. London: Routledge, 1997; Ian Kershaw. Hitler: Nemesis, 1936-1945. London: Penguin, 2000; Roger Moorhouse. Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots Against the Führer. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
August 18, 2011
One Man Against Tyranny
Georg Elser, whose attempt to kill Hitler came within moments of succeeding, commemorated on a stamp. The German phrase means "I wanted to prevent war." Image: Wikicommons
Maria Strobel could not believe it of her Führer. Adolf Hitler and his party—a group of senior Nazis that included Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—had spent more than an hour in her Munich bierkeller. Hitler had delivered a trademark speech, and, while they listened, Himmler and the others had run up a large beer bill. But the whole group had left in a hurry—leaving the tab unpaid and Strobel untippped.
Much annoyed, the Bavarian waitress set about clearing up the mess. She had made only a small dent in the pile of steins when, at 9:20 p.m. precisely, there was a huge explosion only a few feet behind her. A stone pillar disintegrated in the blast, bringing part of the ceiling crashing down in a rain of wood and masonry. The explosion hurled Strobel the length of the hall and out through the bierkeller’s doors. Though stunned, she survived—the person closest to the blast to do so. Eight others were not so fortunate, and a further 63 were so badly injured that they had to be helped out into the open air. As they staggered toward safety, the dais where Hitler had been standing eight minutes earlier lay crushed beneath six feet of heavy timber, bricks and rubble.
Hitler always said he had “the luck of the devil,” and during his years in power he survived more than 40 plots to kill him. The most famous of these culminated in July 1944, when Claus von Stauffenberg managed to place a bomb inside the conference room in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. On that occasion, a table support absorbed most of the blast and the Führer survived to hobble out, his eardrums shattered and his trousers torn to ribbons.
Adolf Hitler
That attempt on Hitler’s life is famous—it was the basis for Valkyrie, the 2008 Tom Cruise film—but it can be argued that it was considerably less astounding, and less courageous, than the bierkeller bombing five years earlier. For one thing, Stauffenberg was well-equipped; he really should have done better with the resources at his disposal. For another, he and his fellow plotters were not convinced anti-Nazis; they may have had an aristocratic disdain for their plebian leader, but their primary reason for wanting Hitler dead was not horror at the barbarism of his regime, but simple conviction that he was leading Germany into the abyss.
The Munich bomb, on the other hand, exploded on November 8, 1939, at the height of the Führer’s popularity and less than three months after the outbreak of World War II—before the final order was given for the invasion of France, and when Russia remained a German ally and the United States remained at peace. Not only that; this bomb was the work of just one man, an unassuming carpenter who was far more principled than Stauffenberg and whose skill, patience and determination make him altogether much more interesting. Yet the Munich incident has been almost forgotten; as late as 1998 there was no memorial, in Germany or anywhere else, to the attempt or to the man who made it.
His name was Georg Elser, and this is his story.
Born in 1903, Elser was just below average height and just above average intelligence. He was not much of a thinker, but clever with his hands: an expert cabinetmaker who never read books, rarely touched newspapers and had little interest in politics. He had voted Communist, and briefly joined the Red Front Fighters’ League—streetfighters who took on their Nazi counterparts, the Brownshirts. But Elser was no Marxist, just a typical member of the German working class in the 1930s. He certainly wasn’t a brawler; for him, the attraction of the Fighters’ League was the chance to play in its brass band. In 1939, the only organization that he belonged to was the Woodworkers’ Union.
Beneath this unremarkable exterior, however, Elser did care—mostly about the way the Nazis and their policies were reducing ordinary Germans’ standard of living. The “economic miracle” that Hitler often boasted of had been achieved at considerable cost. Working hours were long and holidays few. Trade unions and political parties were dissolved or banned; wages were frozen. Meanwhile, members of the Nazi party enjoyed privileges not available to those who refused to join. Elser, who was noted as a perfectionist who took infinite care over his work, found it increasingly hard to make ends meet as real wages declined. Asked later to explain his decision to take on Hitler, he was blunt: “I considered that the situation in Germany could only be changed by the elimination of the current leadership.”
There were only a few signs that Elser might be prepared to take his opposition to Nazi regime beyond the crude jokes and grumbles that his handful of friends indulged in. He refused to listen to the Führer when he came on the radio; he would not give the Nazi salute. When a pro-Hitler parade passed though his home town of Königsbronn, in southwestern Germany, he ostentatiously turned his back on it and started whistling.
Yet Elser never confided to anyone that his views were hardening. He remained almost entirely solitary: unmarried and estranged from his father. And it was typical of the man that when, early in 1938, he finally concluded that something needed to be done about the Führer, he didn’t look for help.
It was then that Elser displayed his hidden qualities. Other anti-Nazis had wavered for years over where, when and how they might get close enough to Hitler to kill him. Elser took a purely practical approach. The Führer was renowned for his security consciousness; he tended to cancel arrangements or change plans abruptly. To have a chance of getting to him, Elser recognized, he needed to know that Hitler would be in a specific place at a particular time. And there was only one annual certainty in the Nazi leader’s program: each November, he traveled to Munich to speak at an elaborate commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch, the risible 1923 attempted coup that had set his party on the road to power. Surrounded by thousands of Old Fighters—Nazis whose party membership dated to 1922 or earlier—Hitler would swap stories and reminisce before delivering the sort of lengthy speech calculated to rouse his loyalists to a frenzy.
Hitler speaking to his Old Fighters in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich
So it was that in November 1938—10 months before the Germans invaded Poland—Elser took a train to Munich and scouted out the Nazis’ celebrations. He visited the beer hall where the putsch had started. Known as the Bürgerbräukeller in 1923 but as the Löwenbräu by 1939, it was a cavernous underground hall, capable of holding more than 3,000 revelers and selected by Hitler as the perfect site for a centerpiece speech. Elser attended the festivities, took note of the cellar’s layout, and was surprised to realize that security was lax. In a typical piece of Nazi fudge, two groups were at loggerheads over which was responsible for the Führer’s safety; Hitler opted for his National Socialist German Workers’ Party over the Munich police, which put Christian Weber in charge of security. But Weber, a fat and corrupt former nightclub bouncer, was not much minded to take the sort of strenuous precautions that might actually have safeguarded his leader. A convinced Nazi, it simply did not occur to him that others might hate Hitler enough to take drastic action of their own.
While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.
Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.
In April 1939, Elser returned to Munich to carry out a detailed reconnaissance. He made sketches of the beer cellar and took more precise measurements. He also visited the Swiss frontier to work out an escape route, finding a stretch of the border that was not patrolled.
That August, as Hitler stoked up tension with Poland and Europe slipped toward war, Elser moved to Munich and began the final preparations for planting his device. The work involved huge risks and revealed an imaginative side to the bomber’s personality that few who knew him realized he possessed. Taking advantage of the Löwenbräu’s lax security, Elser became a regular customer. Each evening he would take his dinner there, order a beer and wait until closing time. Then he would slip upstairs, hide in a storeroom and emerge after 11:30 to get down to the crucial job of hollowing the pillar.
The bierkeller, showing the extensive damage done by Elser's bomb. Photo: Wikicommons
The work was astonishingly painstaking and slow. Working by flashlight, Elser first neatly cut a hole in some wood cladding; this job alone took him three nights. Next he attacked the pillar itself. The noise of a chisel striking stone echoed so loudly through the empty bierkeller that Elser restricted himself to single blows every few minutes, timing the descent of his hammer to coincide with the passing of a streetcar or the automatic flushing of the urinals. Every fleck of stone and piece of dust had to be swept up to leave no evidence of his work; then the panel he had cut out of the wood had to be seamlessly replaced before Elser made his escape through a side exit early the next morning. The carpenter returned to the bierkeller evening after evening, working on his plan for 35 nights in all. On one occasion he was nearly caught; a waiter found him inside the building as the place was opening and ran to tell the manager. Questioned, Elser insisted he was simply an early customer. He ordered a coffee, drank it in the garden and left unmolested.
It was typical of Elser that he labored to produce the most efficient bomb he could. By modifying a clock, he created a timer that would run for up to 144 hours before activating a lever; that would trigger a system of springs and weights that would launch a steel shuttle into a live rifle round embedded in explosive. Next, Elser added a second timer to act as a fail-safe, then enclosed the whole bomb in a beautifully built box designed to fit precisely into the cavity he had excavated. He minimized the risk of discovery by lining the cavity with cork, which muffled the noise from the bomb’s clock, and then placing a sheet of tinplate inside the wood panel to prevent any bierkeller worker putting up decorations from unknowingly driving a nail into his delicate mechanism. When he was finished, he returned to the bierkeller with the box he’d made and discovered that it was fractionally too big. He took it home, planed it down and went back again to make sure it fit.
Elser’s research had revealed that Hitler always began his speech in the Löwenbräu at about 8:30 p.m., spoke for about 90 minutes, then stayed to mingle with the crowd. On that basis, he set his bomb to explode at 9:20 p.m.—midway, he calculated, through Hitler’s customary tirade.
Finally, having planted the bomb three days before Hitler was due, sealed it in and removed the last traces of his work, Elser returned to Munich two nights later— just 24 hours before Hitler was due to speak. Then, at a time when it was entirely reasonable to suppose that even the inefficient Weber might have stepped up his security a little, he broke back into the bierkeller and pressed his ear against the pillar to check that his device was still ticking.
Had Elser paid closer attention to the newspapers, he might have felt that all his work had been wasted—shortly before Hitler was due to deliver his bierkeller speech, he canceled the arrangement, only to reinstate it the day before he was due to travel. But then, had Elser read the newspapers, he would also have realized that, as a concession to Hitler’s urgent need to be in Berlin, his speech had been rescheduled. It would now begin at 8 p.m. and last for little more than an hour.
In the event, Hitler stopped speaking at 9:07 p.m. precisely. He declined the efforts of the Old Fighters to have him stay for the usual drink, and at 9:12 hurried out of the Löwenbräu and back to the Munich railroad station. Eight minutes later—when Elser’s bomb exploded in a blinding flash, right on time—the Führer was boarding his train with all his retinue and most of the bierkeller crowd had left the building. It was not until the Berlin express halted briefly at Nuremburg that an incredulous Hitler learned how close he had come to death.
By 9:20 Elser, too, was far from the Löwenbräu. That morning he had taken a train for Konstanz, close to the Swiss border, and when darkness fell he set out to walk into Switzerland. But if Hitler’s luck held that night, his would-be assassin’s ran out. Elser’s April reconnaissance had taken place in peacetime; now, with Germany at war, the border had been closed. He was arrested by a patrol as he sought a way through wire entanglements. Told to turn out his pockets, he quickly found himself in trouble. Perhaps hoping to persuade the Swiss authorities of his anti-Nazi credentials, he was carrying with him sketches of his bomb design, a fuse, his Communist party membership card, and a picture postcard of the Löwenbräu—an incriminating collection of possessions at the best of times, and worse when, minutes later, an urgent telegram arrived with news from the bierkeller.
Elser was taken back to Munich for interrogation. Hitler himself took a close interest in the bomber, asking to see his file and commenting favorably on his “intelligent eyes, high forehead and determined expression.” But for Hitler, the sophistication of the plot was evidence that the British Secret Service was behind it. “What idiot conducted this investigation?” he demanded when told that Elser claimed to have worked alone.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler personally interrogated Elser. Photo: Wikicommons
The bomber was subjected to beatings, hypnosis and torture in an attempt to get at Hitler’s truth; he stuck to his story, and even reproduced a version of his bomb to show the Gestapo he had built it. Eventually, the historian Roger Moorhouse relates, Himmler himself arrived in Munich to continue the interrogation:
“With wild curses, [he] drove his boots hard into the body of the handcuffed Elser. He then had him … taken to a lavatory … where he was beaten with a whip or some similar instrument until he howled with pain. He was then brought back at the double to Himmler, who once more kicked and cursed him.”
Through all this, the carpenter stuck to his story, and eventually the Gestapo gave up and packed him off to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp. Strange to say, Elser was not executed or even badly treated there; although held in solitary confinement, he was allowed a bench and his tools, and kept alive until the last month of the war. It is generally supposed that Hitler wanted him alive to star in a war crimes trial in which he would have implicated the British in the Munich plot.
There are those who say that the Nazis were too efficient to allow a lone bomber to hurt them in this way, and that the whole affair had been stage-managed to provide Hitler with an excuse to clamp down further on the left. Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor held at the same camp as Elser, would later testify that he had heard this story on the prisoners’ grapevine; Elser himself is supposed to have confessed to it. But now that we have the transcripts of the interrogation, and better understand the inefficient and chaotic way that Hitler ran the Nazi state, this theory no longer rings true. The Nazis, in wartime, needed no reason or excuse to stamp out resistance. Today, historians accept that the attempt on the Führer’s life was serious, and that Elser acted alone.
There remains the vexing question of how, or whether, Elser’s life should be celebrated. Can an act of terrorism ever be justified, even when its purpose is to kill a murderous dictator? Might the innocent lives the bomber took in the Löwenbräu have been balanced by those that could have been saved had Hitler died before the war was fully underway?
Himmler, for one, had no desire to wait for those questions to be answered. In April 1945, as the Americans, British and Russians closed in, he had Elser taken from his cell and shot. A week later, the death was reported in the German press, blamed on an Allied air raid.
In the frantic last days of the Thousand Year Reich, few would have noticed the announcement. And six years and more than 60 million deaths later, fewer still would have recalled the name of Georg Elser.
Gosh, feels like I havent updated this blog for yonks, but still, some things have been happening.
. they already have too many photographers helping, drats. I was so looking forward to it. Dear Son
Here's an interesting article that a friend sent me saying that I will fail point 10. There are loads of reasons why one can be happy but this isn't a bad list. I thought I would quite happy with where I am but when I looked at this list, I could recognise that I am not really following these pieces. So in other words, I can be much happier indeed if I really did this list. I do think I should be always be right, my job entails me needing to be in control, blaming others is far too easy. While I hopefully am not negative or limit myself, i do complain and criticise. And yes, I do like to impress people, am very resistant to change and tend to label things and people. I have major fears and often have a whole list of excuses. But I do give up the past and attachments, sometimes too quickly. And most certainly do not live to other people's expectations.
So as you can see, much to do to be truly happy. But one thing which this list doesn't talk about and that is removal of desire. Its sort of related to 14, but that's one of the crucial Buddhist tenets, son, as soon as you desire or are attached to something, that something has power over you. That can and does lead to unhappiness. And then you start fearing. That's one thing that I gave up on, fear. Don't fear anything or any loss, son. Remember Yoda's quote? “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
See what you can make of it....The problem is that to really get to this happy stage, one has to go through life, this is more appropriate around the middle or end of life rather than the start. For example, ambition, drive, passion etc. etc. are guaranteed to make you unhappy but I wouldn't recommend you give it up, son.
Interesting article none the less.
Love
Baba
http://www.purposefairy.com/3308/15-things-you-should-give-up-in-order-to-be-happy/
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15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy
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Here is a list of 15 things which, if you give up on them, will make your life a lot easier and much, much happier. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress and suffering – and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress free and happy – we cling on to them. Not anymore. Starting today we will give up on all those things that no longer serve us, and we will embrace change. Ready? Here we go:
1. Give up your need to always be right
There are so many of us who can’t stand the idea of being wrong – wanting to always be right – even at the risk of ending great relationships or causing a great deal of stress and pain, for us and for others. It’s just not worth it. Whenever you feel the ‘urgent’ need to jump into a fight over who is right and who is wrong, ask yourself this question: “Would I rather be right, or would I rather be kind?” Wayne Dyer. What difference will that make? Is your ego really that big?
2. Give up your need for control
Be willing to give up your need to always control everything that happens to you and around you – situations, events, people, etc. Whether they are loved ones, coworkers, or just strangers you meet on the street – just allow them to be. Allow everything and everyone to be just as they are and you will see how much better will that make you feel.
“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond winning.” Lao Tzu
3. Give up on blame
Give up on your need to blame others for what you have or don’t have, for what you feel or don’t feel. Stop giving your powers away and start taking responsibility for your life.
4. Give up your self-defeating self-talk
Oh my. How many people are hurting themselves because of their negative, polluted and repetitive self-defeating mindset? Don’t believe everything that your mind is telling you – especially if it’s negative and self-defeating. You are better than that.
“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.” Eckhart Tolle
5. Give up your limiting beliefs
about what you can or cannot do, about what is possible or impossible. From now on, you are no longer going to allow your limiting beliefs to keep you stuck in the wrong place. Spread your wings and fly!
“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind” Elly Roselle
6. Give up complaining
Give up your constant need to complain about those many, many, maaany things – people, situations, events that make you unhappy, sad and depressed. Nobody can make you unhappy, no situation can make you sad or miserable unless you allow it to. It’s not the situation that triggers those feelings in you, but how you choose to look at it. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.
7. Give up the luxury of criticism
Give up your need to criticize things, events or people that are different than you. We are all different, yet we are all the same. We all want to be happy, we all want to love and be loved and we all want to be understood. We all want something, and something is wished by us all.
8. Give up your need to impress others
Stop trying so hard to be something that you’re not just to make others like you. It doesn’t work this way. The moment you stop trying so hard to be something that you’re not, the moment you take off all your masks, the moment you accept and embrace the real you, you will find people will be drawn to you, effortlessly.
9. Give up your resistance to change
Change is good. Change will help you move from A to B. Change will help you make improvements in your life and also the lives of those around you. Follow your bliss, embrace change – don’t resist it.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls” Joseph Campbell
10. Give up labels
Stop labeling those things, people or events that you don’t understand as being weird or different and try opening your mind, little by little. Minds only work when open. “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.” Wayne Dyer
11. Give up on your fears
Fear is just an illusion, it doesn’t exist – you created it. It’s all in your mind. Correct the inside and the outside will fall into place.
“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt
12. Give up your excuses
Send them packing and tell them they’re fired. You no longer need them. A lot of times we limit ourselves because of the many excuses we use. Instead of growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck, lying to ourselves, using all kind of excuses – excuses that 99.9% of the time are not even real.
13. Give up the past
I know, I know. It’s hard. Especially when the past looks so much better than the present and the future looks so frightening, but you have to take into consideration the fact that the present moment is all you have and all you will ever have. The past you are now longing for – the past that you are now dreaming about – was ignored by you when it was present. Stop deluding yourself. Be present in everything you do and enjoy life. After all life is a journey not a destination. Have a clear vision for the future, prepare yourself, but always be present in the now.
14. Give up attachment
This is a concept that, for most of us is so hard to grasp and I have to tell you that it was for me too, (it still is) but it’s not something impossible. You get better and better at with time and practice. The moment you detach yourself from all things, (and that doesn’t mean you give up your love for them – because love and attachment have nothing to do with one another, attachment comes from a place of fear, while love… well, real love is pure, kind, and self less, where there is love there can’t be fear, and because of that, attachment and love cannot coexist) you become so peaceful, so tolerant, so kind, and so serene. You will get to a place where you will be able to understand all things without even trying. A state beyond words.
15. Give up living your life to other people’s expectations
Way too many people are living a life that is not theirs to live. They live their lives according to what others think is best for them, they live their lives according to what their parents think is best for them, to what their friends, their enemies and their teachers, their government and the media think is best for them. They ignore their inner voice, that inner calling. They are so busy with pleasing everybody, with living up to other people’s expectations, that they lose control over their lives. They forget what makes them happy, what they want, what they need….and eventually they forget about themselves. You have one life – this one right now – you must live it, own it, and especially don’t let other people’s opinions distract you from your path.
