Book: ‘The Diaries of Friedrich Kellner’
I recently read the second and final volume of the biography of Adolf Hitler by German historian Volker Ullrich. It is entitled Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945. Roger Abrams, writing in the New York Journal of Books, calls Ullrich’s work “a remarkable treatise on the malevolence of power in modern times.”
Early in the volume, Ullrich commends the diaries of Friedrich Kellner. Kellner was a court official in the western German town of Laubach who had no special access to wartime information. Kellner was repulsed by the Nazi regime and kept detailed diaries based on what he read in the German press and by talking to people. He hoped his diaries would be a warning to future generations about blind faith.
Ullrich explains that Kellner’s diaries:
show that it was entirely possible for normal people in small-town Germany to see through the lies of Nazi propaganda and learn of things like the ‘euthanasia’ murders of patients in psychiatric institutions and the mass executions carried out in occupied parts of eastern Europe."1
The Kellner diaries were published in 2011 in German and now are available in English. The diaries are also the subject of a touching
2007 TV documentary on YouTube created by Kellner’s American grandson.
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Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Downfall (p. 6). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
Jaron Lanier: Why to Delete Your Social Media Accounts
One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Kindle Locations 308–310). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Lanier is a pioneer in virtual reality, a term he coined. He now works for Microsoft. Lanier knows from the inside how manipulative social media can be.
You can hear Lanier on this Microsoft podcast entitled “Jaron Lanier: Father of Virtual Reality, Renaissance man.”
The Person Best Suited to Us
Alain de Botton writing in The New York Times:
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
Film: ’Steal the Sky’
Steal the Sky is a 1988 HBO movie directed by John D. Hancock and starring Mariel Hemingway and Ben Cross. The film is based on the true story of Iraqi fighter pilot Munir Redfa, who defected by flying a MiG-21 fighter jet to Israel in 1966.
In the film, a beautiful American-born Israeli spy Helen Mason (Mariel Hemingway) is sent to Iraq to coerce an Iraqi pilot into hijacking a Soviet-made fighter jet for Israeli defense research. She seduces Munir Redfa (Ben Cross) in order to blackmail him. There are unexpected results when Helen finds herself falling in love with him, endangering the mission, while he is torn between his love for her and his loyalty to Iraq.
Sadly, Ben Cross, best known for playing a runner in the 1981 Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire, died in 2020 in Vienna, Austria. He was 72.
This is among my favorite films. It’s available on YouTube.
Ian Kershaw: Hitler Biographer
Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world’s leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.
I am sharing here two quotations from one of Kershaw’s books about Hitler:
The first argues that Hitler’s rise to dictatorship might not have happened. This shows the importance of constant vigilance.
There was no inevitability about Hitler’s accession to power. Had Hindenburg been prepared to grant to Schleicher1 the dissolution that he had so readily allowed Papen2, and to prorogue the Reichstag for a period beyond the constitutional sixty days, a Hitler Chancellorship might have been avoided. With the corner turning of the economic Depression, and with the Nazi Movement facing potential break-up if power were not soon attained, the future – even if under an authoritarian government – would have been very different. Even as the cabinet argued outside Hindenburg’s door at eleven o’clock on 30 January, keeping the President waiting, there was a possibility that a Hitler Chancellorship might not materialize. Hitler’s rise from humble beginnings to ‘seize’ power by ‘triumph of the will’ was the stuff of Nazi legend. In fact, political miscalculation by those with regular access to the corridors of power rather than any actions on the part of the Nazi leader played a larger role in placing him in the Chancellor’s seat.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (p. 424). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
The second quotation is about the opening of the Dachau Concentration Camp. Dachau is a small town just outside Munich. Kershaw explains that ordinary Germans knew of the camp’s existence. There was even a press conference about the camp’s opening and people feared being sent there. In other words, ordinary Germans knew no matter what some said after the war. Dachau is small. It is impossible to believe that town folk did not know what the camp was about.
Just outside the town of Dachau, about twelve miles from Munich, the first concentration camp was set up in a former powder-mill on 22 March3 . There was no secret about the camp’s existence. Himmler had even held a press conference two days earlier to announce it. It began with 200 prisoners. Its capacity was given as 5,000. It was intended, stated Himmler, to hold the Communist and, if necessary, Reichsbanner and Marxist (i.e. Social Democrat) functionaries. Its establishment was announced in the newspapers. It was meant to serve as a deterrent, and did so. Its dreaded name soon became a byword for the largely unspoken horrifying events known or presumed to take place within its walls. ‘Keep quiet or you’ll end up in Dachau’ was soon to join common parlance. But apart from the political enemies and racial targets of the Nazis, few were disconcerted at the foundation of the camp, and others like it. The middle-class townsfolk of Dachau, watching the column of their Communist fellow-citizens from the town being marched to the nearby camp as political prisoners, thought them troublemakers, revolutionaries, ‘a class apart’, simply not part of their world.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (p. 464). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition (footnotes omitted).
Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler is superb:
Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris: 1889-1936: Hubris
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Kurt von Schleicher was a German general and the last chancellor of Germany (before Adolf Hitler) during the Weimar Republic. A rival for power with Hitler, Schleicher was murdered by Hitler’s SS during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. ↩︎
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Franz von Papen was a German conservative politician, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer. He served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. ↩︎
Books: Volker Ullrich’s Two-Volume Biography of Hitler
Volker Ullrich, a German historian, is the author an excellent two-volume biography of Hitler in German. Jefferson Chase translated both volumes into English.
The first volume Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (German: Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889-1939), published in German in 2013, was published in English in 2016 and covers up to 1939.
The second volume Hitler Vol II: Downfall 1939-45 (German: Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Untergangs 1939-1945) was published in English in 2020 and covers the remainder of his biography.
The book became a bestseller in Germany upon its publication.
I am sharing here three quotations showing:
- The establishment of the Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich was well-known as was its sinister purpose;
- Hitler had broad support in German society at the time in support of his aims; and
- Without Hitler, there would have been no Holocaust.
In other words, one person can make a big difference, in this case to the world’s detriment.
Reviewing the second volume of Ullrich’s biography of Hitler, Jennifer Szalai, a New York Times book critic said that “the narrative moves swiftly, and it will absorb even those who are familiar with the vast library of Hitler books.” I agree.
At a press conference in Munich on 20 March [1933], Heinrich Himmler announced the establishment of a concentration camp in a former munitions factory near the small city of Dachau. Initially, as a state facility, Dachau was guarded by Bavarian police, but on 11 April the SS assumed command. The Dachau camp became the first cell from which a national system of terror germinated. It was a kind of laboratory, under the direction of the SS, where experiments could be carried out with the forms of violence that would soon be used in the other concentration camps within the Reich. The German media reported extensively about Dachau, and the stories that were told about what went on there acted as a powerful deterrent to opposition to the Nazis. “Dear God, strike me numb / Lest to Dachau I do come” was an oft-repeated saying in the Third Reich.
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, Location 9939. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The second volume of this biography covers Hitler’s “years of downfall.” It encompasses the relatively brief period from his unleashing of the Second World War in the summer of 1939 to his suicide in the air-raid bunker of the Reich Chancellery in the spring of 1945. It has been said, correctly, that Hitler and National Socialism “found themselves” in the war. As a magnifying glass does with sunlight, armed conflict focused the criminal dynamics of the Nazi regime and the man at its head. War gave Hitler the opportunity to act on his ideological obsessions and realise his homicidal aims: the conquering of “living space in the east” as a basis for German domination of first Europe, then the world; and the removal of Jews from Germany and, if possible, the whole European continent. On the other hand, as we will see, Hitler would never have been able to realise these goals as much as he did without willing helpers in almost all the institutions of the Nazi state and broad parts of German society.
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Downfall (p. 1). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted).
Without Hitler, this much is certain, there would have been no Holocaust. His fanatical anti-Semitism was the engine driving genocide. While it may have been difficult to tell sometimes when Hitler was play-acting, the Führer was always deadly serious when he vented his maniacal hatred of Jews.
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Downfall (p. 611). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Vintage Images of Washington
I recently discovered the Streets of Washington blog and Flickr feed where you can find many vintage and hard to find images from postcards and other ephemera about historic places in the Washington, D.C. area. It is fascinating to see how the nation’s capital has evolved.
The author, John DeFerrari, is a native Washingtonian with a lifelong passion for local history. He is also a trustee of the D.C. Preservation League.
This is clearly a labor of love. These images are absolutely worth perusing and preserving.
Film: ‘The Art Dealer (L’antiquaire)'
The Art Dealer (L’antiquaire) is a beautiful 2015 French film about a young Parisian woman portrayed by Anna Sigalevitch. She’s searching for paintings stolen from her Jewish family during WWII.
Louis-Do de Lencquesaing who is in the hit French series Spiral does a nice job portraying the woman’s husband.
The cinema-photography is excellent and the slow uncovering of unflattering facts reveals what war brings out in human nature even among those not in power.
Nearly 1m Americans Are ‘Kinless’
Paula Span writing in The New York Times:
An estimated 6.6 percent of American adults aged 55 and older have no living spouse or biological children, according to a study published in 2017 in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. (Researchers often use this definition of kinlessness because spouses and children are the relatives most apt to serve as family caregivers.)
About 1 percent fit a narrower definition — lacking a spouse or partner, children and biological siblings. The figure rises to 3 percent among women over 75.
Those aren’t high proportions, but they amount to a lot of kinless people: close to a million older Americans without a spouse or partner, children or siblings in 2019, including about 370,000 women over 75.
TV Series: ‘The Honourable Woman’
‘The Honourable Woman’ is a 2014 British political spy thriller miniseries in eight parts. It was directed and written by Hugo Blick for the BBC and SundanceTV.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is the beautiful, immaculately dressed star of the series. She portrays Nessa Stein, a London heiress whose father was a big-time arms manufacturer and Zionist. Gyllenhaal, an American, does a convincing job of portraying an English woman.
Most of Nessa’s family perished in the Holocaust. She and her older brother, Ephra (Andrew Buchan), are dual citizens of Israel and Britain. On top of this, their mother died in childbirth and their father was murdered in front of their eyes in Jerusalem when they were young children.
The story includes the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli conflict, kidnapping, rape, chronic trauma and high stakes philanthropy and investment.
The New York Times called the series a “smart, moodily complex thriller” and a “lavish homage to John le Carré.”
I had to watch the series more than once to follow all the twists and turns and loved every minute.
Blogging Without a Plan is OK
The author of but she’s a girl . . . writing about the 20th anniversary of her blog:
When I started this blog 20 years ago, I had no real plan in mind. I still don’t. I write about what interests me and makes me happy, and that is the only theme that runs through it. People still seem to find it and discover interesting things to read, but to be honest, I would probably still write if no-one was reading, just to amuse myself.
but she’s a girl . . . is also on micro.blog.
Audiobook by James Taylor
In the audiobook ‘Break Shot: My First 21 Years‘ James Taylor recounts the first 21 years of his life in very personal and moving terms while interspersing his performances of his music.
The audiobook is only 90-minutes long and worth every minute. Here are a couple of highlights that really resonated with me:
- “Memory is tricky. We remember how it felt, not necessarily how it was. Songs grow out of memories.”
- “We want to go back and fix something that has already vanished and can never be corrected. But we can correct it in a song . . . .”
Always Write for Your Audience
From the About Page of Derek Sivers, who I believe pioneered the concept of the Now Page, — a webpage describing what a blogger or website owner is doing “now”:
I always write for my audience, not for myself, so this feels indulgent. When I think of expressing this kind of “about me” stuff in an article, I stop myself because it’s not directly useful to you.
So this is just one big page where I can write all about myself, without feeling the need for it to be useful. And some day this site will be all that’s left of me, so I might as well write my own mini autobiography.
A Substack Publication Shares Subscription Data
SpyTalk is a Substack publication covering national security topics, with an emphasis on U.S. intelligence operations, both foreign and domestic. In other words, spy stuff.
On December 18, the publication shared some interesting subscriber numbers:
Subscriptions more than doubled, from 4,840 in the last week of December 2021 to this week’s 10,474. Fully paid subscriptions . . . rose nearly 25 percent, from 510 to 636.
The publication charges $99 for a year or $9.95 for a month so that would translate to gross income of about $6,300 a month. Less than 1% of subscribers pay.
Need for Jewish Homeland Recognized Long Before the Holocaust
Theodor Herzl wrote in 1896, more than 40 years before the Holocaust:
My happier co-religionists will not believe me till Jew-baiting teaches them the truth; for the longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out.
Herzl, Theodor. Der Judenstaat. English, Location 873 . Kindle Edition.
Herzl envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century. He argued that the best way to avoid antisemitism in Europe was to create this independent Jewish state.
’Core Reason for Photography’
The core reason for photography: what can’t be explained in words can sometimes be expressed as imagery.
Film: ‘Ida’
Anna, a young woman training to be a nun in 1960s Poland is on the verge of taking her vows when she meets her only living relative for the first time and learns that she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Together they discover what happened to Anna/Ida’s family.
This jewel is only 82 minutes long and every moment makes good use of the viewer’s time. The story is one example of the decimation of Poland’s Jews during World War II. But in the end, this is not a film about Poland or the Holocaust – but about life.
The film, which came out in 2013, is in black and white. The places photographed are ordinary yet the cinematography is stunning. Each scene looks like a black and white photograph made by a Magnum photographer using a Leica camera. Łukasz Żal is a superb, young cinemaphotographer born in Koszalin, Poland.
Ida is played by Agata Trzebuchowska. Her character is sweet, innocent and beautiful. Her aunt Wanda – Agata Kulesza – is also a fine actress.
Pawel Pawlikowski directed the film. He was born in Warsaw in 1957. At the age of 14, Pawlikowski left Poland to live in Germany and Italy, before settling in Britain. In 2004, he directed My Summer of Love with Emily Blunt and Natalie Press.
This film touched me deeply and left me thinking for a long time about what’s important and what’s not. It is among the best films I have seen.
Blogger Describes Move from Squarespace to Ghost
Blogger Chris Lloyd moved his blog from Squarespace to Ghost and is happy with Ghost. Still he shares Ghost’s negatives:
- Bulk editing of posts - Maybe not essential when you are just starting, but you can’t bulk edit posts, for instance, to change tags. This functionality exists in WP and would be very helpful. I suspect you can do it if you are self-hosting or can code.
- Images - It is primarily a text-based tool. So probably unfair to judge it on images, but there are two areas I find annoying. It does not store images you have used (like WP does), so if you want to use a separate post, you need to upload it again. There doesn’t seem to be a way to move an image from one post to another if you decide to combine two drafts. Only small things, but a little annoying.
- Coding - Any changes to the theme require coding. That means you cannot edit anything if you don’t know how to code.
- Links - Probably my ignorance, but I can not find a way to set it up, so external links open in a new tab.
[…]
- No app - There is no native app for editing on your phone. Although it is relatively good on safari on a mobile
Hitler’s Last Direct Order
The last direct order to be personally signed by Hitler in the bunker was transmitted to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner at 04.50 on 24 April [1945] . Now in private hands, the original reads:
“I shall remain in Berlin, so as to play a part, in honourable fashion, in the decisive battle for Germany, and to set a good example to all the rest. I believe that in this way I shall be rendering Germany the best service. For the rest, every effort must be made to win the struggle for Berlin. You can therefore help decisively, by pushing northwards as early as possible.
With kind regards, Yours, Adolf Hitler”
The signature, in red pencil, looks remarkably normal, considering the circumstances.
Roberts, Andrew. The Storm of War (p. 553). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted).
Why Creating Links to Open New Browser Windows is Probably Not a Good Practice
I want to thank Sven Dahlstrand for taking the time to explain to me why opening external links in a new tab is probably not a good practice. Sven helpfully referred me to a page written by usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Anna Kaley explaining:
Since 1999, it’s been a firm web-usability guideline to refrain from opening new browser windows for several reasons. All of these also apply to opening new browser tabs and are still valid today:
- More windows or tabs increase the clutter of the user’s information space and require more effort to manage.
- New windows or tabs can cause disorientation, with users often not realizing that a new window or tab has opened. This problem is exacerbated on mobile, where the old window is never visible.
- Less-technical users struggle to manage multiple windows and tabs, especially on mobile. (On tablets, where users can have both multiple windows and tabs for the browser, it’s even more confusing.)
- New windows or tabs prevent the use of the Back button for returning to the previous page and force the user to spend effort to find their way back to the previous content.
- New windows or tabs are not inclusive for blind or low-vision users — especially when they open outside of the area that’s magnified.
I had been opening external links in a new tab in the hope of keeping visitors on my site but I had not thought about the confusion this can cause, especially on mobile:
Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the _Back _button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed-out _Back _button.