The Last Bass Outpost

The Hobbit liberator cometh!!!

 Perhaps you can intercept the one I send to Uwe as it wings its way over Holland 

With Rotterdam so nicely rebuilt and all, that would be a pity, really. 

Well-done alright!

That's the one with the motorcycle policemen, right?

All according to Geneva Convention!!! Among the horrible German crimes during WW II, treatment of Western Allied (treatment of Russian POWs was shameful and diabolic, two out of three died) POWs was one of the few salient points of relative light. With grave (no pun intended) exceptions such as the lynching of bomber crews after bail-out or the mass shooting of freshly captured English and American POWs by Waffen SS units in 1940 in France and in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and Luxemburg. Or jewish (or jewish-looking or -sounding) GIs captured during the Battle of the Bulge shipped off for mining work under disastrous conditions.

It certainly wasn't fun being in a German Stalag as a Yank, Tommy or Froggie from 1940-45, but odds were severely against you either starving to death or being shot (unless during an escape). There was some grudging respect which prevented worse things from happening and it probably says a lot that in those camps the German guards surrendered to the inmates as the Allies approached in 1945 and that those inmates as die neuen Herren did then not run a vendetta against their former captors. There was even a POW camp for English soldiers in the middle of Auschwitz, that hell on earth, and it was (only) there that food rations were sufficient and no one was murdered.

That one guy reminds me so much of a young Malcom McDowell, it's uncanny.



And of course McDowell (forever typecast after his brilliant Alex-role in Clockwork Orange) would have been exactly the guy to cast as an SS officer in a movie.

The skull wasn't only used by the Waffen-SS but also by regular German Wehrmacht tank crews who - unlike the Waffen-SS - also wore black uniforms (only the Allgemeine SS did that, the Waffen SS in the early years looked like Wehrmacht and in the later years sported a look very similar to how US troops look today) which added to the confusion. I think it goes back to medieval mercenary/Landsknecht times.


Whenever I look at US uniforms today, I wonder whether that one solitary picture (notwithstanding very low ratings on the pc-o-meter) that is hanging on the wall at the Military Academy of Westpoint to this day - and not a US soldier by any means - has perhaps had a sartorial creeping (or creepy?) effect over the decades ...

Freiherr Doktor Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a fetching-looking young man of blue-blooded pedigree was until very recently the German Minister of Defense. He had been a shooting star/rainmaker with an attractive blond wife, sweet kids, a castle in northern Bavaria, the works.







Beloved by soldiers and with regular trips to Afghanistan where - critics murmured - he looked perhaps a little too dashing in his battle fatigues,



especially when he brought his wife, Stephanie (a princess of Bismarck pedigree, no less!), along in combat look too (I hasten to add: she paid the flight ticket herself).



Great things were expected from them, could they be the conservative Obamas of Germany in the future? After all, we haven't had a blue-blooded head of state since Kaiser Wilhelm II's somewhat hurried departure to exile in The Netherlands in 1918.



And the Austrian who followed him some years later was - in hindsight - an unfortunate choice, good to German shepherd dogs as he may have been. He wasn't even blue-blooded either.

For the "fabulous Guttenbergs" as a news magazine called them



"The sky was the limit.", to quote Tom Petty.

It all went pear-shaped three weeks ago when via the internet it came out that Baron and Doktor zu Guttenberg had cut and pasted his doctoral thesis (a comparative law work covering US and European unification from a constitutional angle) - or, even worse, had someone else do it for him - from other works (more than 70%) without citations. In Germany and with Karl-Theodor's education and academic title-conscious conservative constituency that is tantamount to being caught having sex with non-consenting, minor-aged animals you are closely related with. And not paying tax while doing it. He wriggled and writhed, stumbled and fell. First gave up the Doktor title and then as criticism even in conservative quarters did not die down (in his career he had gained some sort of notoriety in doing away with subordinates who had made alleged mistakes that might have hurt his image, "Drown him in ze castle trench, sofort!", old habits die hard) he did the inevitable and stepped down. Who knows what else might have come out, you never know what goes on in the stables in those lonely castles and who belongs genetically to whom.  

Why am I boring you with this? Our former Verteidigungsminister, der Herr Baron, never made a secret that he loved AC/DC, but when he had his honorable dismissal before the troops ("der Große Zapfenstreich") his musical request was even more unexpected, a piece from noted English classical composers Blackmore/Gillan/Glover/Lord/Paice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zij_DYyFrE&tracker=False

You can't argue with the man's taste, conservative or not. Come to think of it, however, and given the unfortunate academic events surrounding his political demise, a song that uses similar notes as Smoke on the Water, albeit performed by Humble Pie would have perhaps been even more apt?



I saw a splendid version of that song performed by an erstwhile lead guitarist of Humble Pie yesterday, but that, children, shall be the topic of another thread.

Let's not ignore the possibly prophetic content of Smoke on the Water though: Smoke has the habit of settling down eventually and water cleanses from guilt, der Freiherr kommt vielleicht zurück?!

Uwe

Weren't fiendish experiments against creation and nature an Axis speciality? You Amerikaner always learn ze wrong zingsss from uzz ...