i was a little apprehensive to watch this because it’s four minutes long and i have a short attention span, but within the first 30 seconds i was hooked.
In 1943, a team of ingenious Italian doctors invented a deadly, contagious virus called Syndrome K to protect Jews from annihilation. On October 16 of that year, as Nazis closed in to liquidate Rome’s Jewish ghetto, many runaways hid in the 450-year-old Fatebenefratelli Hospital. There, anti-Fascist doctors including Adriano Ossicini, Vittorio Sacerdoti and Giovanni Borromeo created a gruesome, imaginary disease.
The doctors instructed “patients” to cough very loudly and told Nazis that the disease was extremely dangerous, disfiguring and molto contagioso. Soldiers were so alarmed by the list of symptoms and incessant coughing that they left without inspecting the patients. It’s estimated that a few dozen lives were saved by this brilliant scheme.
The doctors were later honored for their heroic actions, and Fatebenefratelli Hospital was declared a “House of Life” by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
In the heat of battle, photographer Horace Bristol captured one of the most unique and erotic photos of WWII.
Bristol photographed a young crewman of a US Navy “Dumbo” PBY rescue mission, manning his gun after having stripped naked and jumped into the water of Rabaul Harbor to rescue a badly burned Marine pilot. The Marine was shot down while bombing the Japanese-held fortress of Rabaul.
“…we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.”
“And well, there was his butt, and I had a camera. I mean I AM a historian.”
That is the BEST EVER quote about the nature of historians I’ve ever seen
She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance,
though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years
younger.
When she rode her bicycle down the
streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi
officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the
woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a
secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun
and was preparing an execution.
The Dutch
resistance was widely believed to be a man’s effort in a man’s war. If
women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little
more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.
Yet
Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were
rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi
occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With
Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged
bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their
bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the
country and sometimes out of concentration camps.
In
perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or
bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest — and
“liquidated” them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the
trigger.
“We had to do it,” she told one
interviewer. “It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the
good people.” When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill,
she demurred: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”
My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up
this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?
Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”
so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76
Okay I’m just editing my reblog to add this picture of Juan Pujol Garcia because I feel that it adds so much to the story to picture him doing ALL THE ABOVE with this expression:
What a legend.
Thank you Jess for this extremely important addendum.
he’s my hero and also adorable
This is…holy fucking shit, I have no words for how much glee this story brings me. It’s like Mother Night but not soul-crushing
He was Catalan and his real name was Joan (not Juan) Pujol i Garcia.
After the fascists won the Spanish Civil War, Spanish names were mandatory, since the Catalan language and culture were completely banned by the fascist regime, but he referred to himself as Joan. So let’s refer to him as Joan as he would have wanted, and not use the name that the Spanish fascists imposed.
Here’s an interesting interview with him from the year 1984 (in Catalan)
“In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
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