I'm going to let them rest in peace today:
"Natick museum acquires message to Adolf Hitler" by Laura Crimaldi Globe Staff July 27, 2015
Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command radioed the message to the fuhrer just before 1 a.m on April 23, 1945, as the Nazi leader hid from the advancing Red Army in a Berlin bunker. Hermann Goering said if he did not hear from Hitler shortly, he planned to enact a secret 1941 decree and take control of the German government.
Hitler reacted by denouncing Goering as a traitor and ordering his arrest. Seven days later, Hitler committed suicide.
On Tuesday, this important artifact from the Third Reich’s final days goes on display at the Museum of World War II in Natick. It will be added to the collection that covers the end of the war, said museum founder Kenneth Rendell.
Rendell purchased a transcription of the message on July 7 for nearly $55,000, beating out a “determined bidder” from Germany.
“It’s the part of the Third Reich which I really enjoy, which is seeing it come apart,” Rendell, 72, said Friday. “This telegram sent Hitler into a rage. His trusted adviser, his second-in-command had turned on him. . . . I just couldn’t let it go.”
I'm told it “really spoiled [Hitler’s] day.”
Related:
"Philipp Missfelder, 35; rising German politician.... Mr. Missfelder’s admiration for Israel and his repeated calls to fight anti-Semitism drew a tribute from the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee. “Philipp Missfelder was a dear friend of the [United States], of Israel, and of the Jewish people,” said Deidre Berger, director of the A.J.C. Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations."
Maybe that brightens Hitler's day just a bit, 'eh?
Boston College history professor Devin Pendas said the contents of Goering’s message have been known since at least the 1960s, but that original documents like it are hard to find in the United States. “The thing about the end of the Third Reich . . . is that there’s so much paranoia and mistrust,” he said....
I have a government that collects all its citizens communications while creating, funding, and directing the very "terrorists" it claims to be fighting.
The document joins other artifacts about the unraveling of the Third Reich on display at the Natick museum.
I hope there aren't any, you know, flags on display.
Some notable items include a memorandum in which Speer wrote that the war was lost and Germany must try to protect its infrastructure, and an order from Hitler commanding the Nazis to do just the opposite, Rendell said. The museum also has a portion of the blue sofa where Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide by ingesting cyanide, he said. Hitler also shot himself with a service pistol.
You can see a program on it somewhere nearly every day on AmeriKan TV.
“[Goering’s message] fit into the whole story that I have about the end of the war,” Rendell said. “This is one of the key pieces.”
The document’s journey from Hitler’s Berlin bunker to its new home in Natick winds through South Carolina....
Of course.
After the fall of Berlin, Army Captain Benjamin Bradin entered Hitler’s bunker and found it had been ransacked by the Soviets, said his grandson, retired Army Special Forces Colonel Stuart Bradin. The elder Bradin scooped up documents, including Goering’s message, from atop a desk and brought them home to South Carolina. “People need to be able to see this stuff,” he said.
Nicholas Best, who wrote about the end of World War II in “Five Days that Shocked the World,” said translations of Goering’s message to Hitler have become garbled over time.
“It’s really interesting to see the original wording in German, so different to the translations, and written when Hitler’s whole world was crumbling around him,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I wonder how much more American loot from [World War II] is lying unexamined in strongboxes!”
And that's where this post is going now.
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