I’ve just passed this on to a friend who was having problems getting citizenship despite her father being born in Berlin. She was told that he had renounced German citizenship voluntarily (he was a Jewish toddler when he left in the 1930s). He isn’t that interested in fighting this battle, but as my friend is a trans woman she would like to have a legal way out of Britain if the shit hits the fan.
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Not sure whether to put this here or in BLM Too:
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Can’t get this to play. Is it the same Central Park history Amber Ruffin brings up in the video posted here?
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No, it’s about Seneca Village, which was destroyed by eminent domain to create Central Park in NYC.
Let’s see:
Oh my word, they require every single bit of the URL, no shortening allowed. Sorry about that!
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That’s also in the Ruffin video, around the 2:30 mark. She covers a lot in it, so the title’s a bit misleading. I’ll check out the TikTok, too!
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Oh darn! I’ve been so busy I haven’t kept up with TV talk show comedians. Guess I should watch Amber’s full video!
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There’s a wiki article on it too.
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Well, let’s see if geography classes (if they still exist) get targeted next:
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I have many doubts about this tale.
Why risk an aircraft and crew to thumb your nose at the enemy? Better to allow the Germans to believe that their ruse was working, and maybe they’d waste more resources to build more fake runways.
The wooden bomb, if legit, is probably a training bomb.
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They did build fake airfields and V1 launch sites iirc. The fact that they weren’t defended would be a giveaway when you bombed them but I don’t think that was their purpose in general. Note to keep the enemy guessing where attacks were coming from.
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No doubt they built fakes, and they required resources to do so. If the Germans were convinced their fakes/decoys were working they’d keep making them, wasting resources, and the allied intelligence operatives would have a good idea what to look for. But once the Germans knew the game was up they’d do something else, and the intelligence operators would have to start over too.
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Mostly fakes had limited, short term goals: before a major offensive for example in order to have the opposition spread their defences. So you’d have blow up/wooden tanks massed somewhere you weren’t.
Continuing observation would expose that they didn’t behave like real buildups.
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I understand this is disputed among military historians. And it seems that around every Scheinanlage built in Germany and occupied Europe there is at least one story about a wooden bomb being dropped in local folklore.
But there are indications that this actually happened a couple of times, maybe done just for the hell of it by reconnaissance units, possibly as part of SOE operations.
One Pierre Antoine Courouble researched and wrote a book about it, but it seems it was only published in France and Germany.
Edit: corrected name of author.
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The Spiegel article did a nice summary there. Probably urban legend, nothing definitive.
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So much for " there are indications that this actually happened a couple of times, maybe done just for the hell of it by reconnaissance units, possibly as part of SOE operations"?
My reading of the Spiegel article was that if it happened, it could be attributed to SOE units since the classified nature of their operations would make it hard to verify records. Hardly compelling evidence.
The article described instances where found wooden bombs were smoke bombs, or trainers that actually came from German Heinkel HE-111 bombers dropping bleach-filled bombs.
My German may be a little rusty though. It still would be a dopey thing to do deliberately, but having seen soldiers doing unsanctioned dopey things before I couldn’t rule it out.
The Krupp Scheinanlage (or rather what’s left of it) is basically just around the corner. When things get a bit more normal-ish, Covid-wise and flooding-wise, I might try to get hold of one of the local hobby historians and see what’s what.
https://bodendenkmalpflege.lvr.de//de/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/nachtscheinanlage_velbert.html
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