Howard K Smith
Most of you from my generation remember Howard K Smith as a distinguished -looking newsman and co-anchor of ABC News, at least that's the way I remember.him. Smith was a contemporary of people like Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow. Like them, he spent his share of time overseas during World War II. In Smith's case, he took a job working for CBS in Berlin in January 1940, a few months after the start of the war and stayed there until just before America was drawn into the war and he was able to leave-virtually on the eve of Pearl Harbor; hence the name of the book, "Last Train From Berlin" Published in 1942, while the war was ongoing, it is a fascinating read.
Perhaps, the most eerily fascinating part of the book is in the chapter, "The Eternal Jew", as he describes the plight of the Jews in Germany. In 1941, Smith describes the final measures against the Jews including the forced wearing of the yellow Star of David with the word, "Jude" inscribed (September 1941). He describes an elderly female couple living in the apartment next door and the day when the police came to collect them. They were suddenly gone never to be seen again. The most Smith knew at the time was that the Jews were being transferred east and probably put to work in manual labor details like building roads.
At the time, Smith (and the other foreign correspondents) did not know that the Jews were being sent to their mass extermination. They did not know of the Wannsee conference held in a villa in the fashionable Wannsee suburb of Berlin, convened by Reinhard Heydrich in January 1942 that discussed the final solution. By the time of that conference, Smith had left Berlin for Switzerland.
Smith died in 2002.
WWII was the defining event of the 20th century. I'm happy to learn that Howard K Smith was yet another one who wrote about it as personal experience of what he saw.
ReplyDeleteAmong other things, it ended was the "science" of eugenics, that was widely held (like global warming now) but especially embraced in Germany. It turns out that the differences among the races is very small and the range of capabilities within races is very wide. So much for superior or inferior races. It has been discredited.... but only after the death of tens of millions of people.
It resulted in the ascendency of the US as the world leader which lasted decades until Obama lost it all.