THE STALAG INCONGRUITY

Those of you who were sentient in the 1960s or had access at a later date to reruns on various networks or streaming services are no doubt familiar with the sophisticated recounting of events in a WWII German POW camp in the TV comedy series Hogan's Heroes. A key ingredient to the success of the show was the outstanding portrayal by Werner Klemperer (see photo below) of the fatuous and incompetent camp Kommadant Col. Wilhelm Klink.

Klemperer was a Jewish refugee whose family had fled to the United States prior to World War II, and he served in the US Army during that conflict. At first blush, he would not appear to be the type of person who would embrace participation in a TV series featuring the lighter side of the Third Reich.

Klemperer, however, made it quite clear that he would only take the role on the condition that his character remained a complete buffoon. He informed the producers that he would leave the show immediately if there ever was an episode where Klink was portrayed as a hero. Klemperer never had to carry out this threat, and after the series, he continued with a distinguished and respected acting career as well as working as a narrator for orchestras.

Anti-Semitism would not have fared well on the set of Hogan's Heroes. The bumbling Sergeant Schultz ("I know nothing") was portrayed by John Banner, who was Jewish. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The role of the French corporal Louis LeBeau was done by Robert Clary, a Buchenwald survivor who had immediate family members murdered at Auschwitz. Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. Howard Caine, another Jewish World War II veteran (US Navy), did a brilliant job portraying Major Hochstetter of the Gestapo.

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THE PROSAIC ORIGIN OF CANDY APPLES

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Candy apples were not developed as a novelty taste treat. Instead, the apples were coated with boiling sugar syrup originally as a way of keeping the apple fresh for months without refrigeration, as the heat kills all the bacteria on the exterior and the coating seals the apple from further contamination. The delightful sweet flavor is just an added bonus.

British candy apples usually are sealed in treacle, while American candy apples are most likely dipped in caramel or in red-tinted sucrose flavored with cinnamon. Often, sadistic candy apple preparers ruin the whole thing by adding nuts to the coating.

The best apples to use have a rough, not a smooth, skin, as the sugar sticks to them better. Small, crisp apples like Macouns or Pink Ladies also work better than the mealy varieties like Jonathans or Galas.

THE DEATH DEALER

Single individuals, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, were responsible for the deaths of millions of people. However, they did so primarily by decree, and not by personally performing each killing. Arguably, the persons who directly slew the most individuals would be the toggliers aboard the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, when considering who was the most prolific killer who personally dealt death on an individual one-on-one basis, the Guinness World Records awarded that honor in 2010 to General Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin--Stalin's chief executioner from 1926 to 1953.

Blohkin was the head of the Kommandatura Branch of the Administrative Executive Department of the NKVD of the Soviet Union--the agency in charge of "black work" for the government. Under his tutelage, his agency supervised an estimated 828,000 executions.

Blohkin, however, was not just a bureaucrat who sat in his chair while ordering others to do the dirty stuff. He personally performed at least 10,000 slayings, and perhaps a lot more.

His most infamous stint involved the murder in April of 1940 of 7,000 Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest in Poland. Blohkin established for himself the goal of killing at least 300 prisoners each night. He set up an assembly line system where each prisoner was brought to a specially designed soundproofed shed equipped with a sloping concrete floor and a drain. Once the prisoner entered the shed, Blohkin immediately shot him in the back of the head. Blohkin's assistants then removed the corpse and quickly hosed down the floor prior to bringing in the next victim. This ritual was performed from dusk to dawn for 28 consecutive nights.

Blohkin carried a briefcase full of German Walther pistols with him to use for the Katyn killings. He thought the weapon more reliable than the Soviet-issue TT-33 and, if things went south, he wanted the murders to be attributed to the Germans instead of to the Russians.

Blohkin was forced to resign after Stalin died in 1953. He descended into alcoholism and insanity and purportedly committed suicide in 1955. Of course, during that period of time, a lot of Stalin's myrmidons committed "suicide" under mysterious circumstances.

YOU'VE GOT TO BE KITTYING ME!

In 1879, the postal authorities in Liège, Belgium recruited 37 new mail carriers to transport cards and letters to the surrounding villages. The carriers were "plucky" house cats, who were released with a waterproof bag of mail tied to each one. Each feline was then supposed to run to the appropriate village and exchange its cargo for a saucer of milk.

Amazingly enough, this innovative project did not prove to be an unqualified success.

The American government would of course not blunder into trying anything this foolish. It would instead first award some researcher a $1.5 million grant to conduct a feasibility study.

THE UNSANITIZED SLEEPING BEAUTY

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Fans of the 1959 Disney film classic Sleeping Beauty would probably notice a few discrepancies in the story line between it and the original tale published in 1636.

In the original version, the Sleeping Beauty, also known as Talia, is poisoned by a flax splinter in her finger. Her family members abandon their castle, leaving her body behind. When the obligatory prince enters the castle and encounters her inanimate body, he rapes her instead of kissing her. This meeting produces two twins, who are raised by fairies, since Mama is still in a coma. Eventually, the male child sucks on Talia's finger and removes the poisonous splinter. As a result, Talia awakens. The prince eventually returns for a second helping but finds her up and about. He confesses his prior escapade to Talia, and they both then have a weekend of passionate sex, with Talia conscious this time around. 

The prince's wife disapproves of this dalliance, and she captures the twins. She orders her cook to kill them and turn them into a casserole, which the wife then feeds to the prince. She informs him of the source of the meat in the meal after he is done.

The wife is really irritated when she discovers that the cook did not actually kill the kids but instead substituted goat meat for the casserole. She orders that Talia be captured and burned at the stake. However, the prince intervenes, kills his wife, and marries Talia where he, Talia, the twins, and the cook live happily ever after.

A rapist and wife murderer--you would have hoped that Talia could have done better.

THE DEADLY TRI-STATE TORNADO

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The Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, was the most destructive twister known in American history. This tornado, most likely an F5, started in Missouri, tore across southern Illinois, and finally dissipated in Indiana. It killed at least 695 persons, mostly in southern Illinois. Another 100 died in other tornadoes spawned by the same storm system. The small community of Murphysboro, Illinois, by itself had 234 fatalities.  The tornado destroyed, among other things, nine schools (many of the fatalities were school children) and over 15,000 homes. 

Most single tornadoes dissipate before they go five miles on the ground; reports of tornadoes with longer paths are usually found afterwards to have been based on a series of twisters.  The Tri-State Tornado appears to have been a legitimate single tornado which traveled over 200 miles.  The funnel was so wide that most observers did not even recognize it as a tornado but thought it a bank of fog instead.

Looting and theft from the dead were rampart afterwards, much to the shame of decent Midwestern citizens.

For additional information from ustornadoes.com on this disaster, please click here, or, for an even more detailed account replete with numerous photographs, see this article on Stormstalker.

MING--THE LORD OF THE RINGS

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The eldest documented living individual animal in the world was a 507-year old ocean quahog clam dredged up from the waters of northern Iceland in 2006. The clam was named "Ming" for the Ming Dynasty, which was in existence when the mollusk was born in 1499.

Zoologists calculated the age based on the number of annual rings on the shell which, in the case of clams, is a very reliable indicator. Unfortunately and ironically, in Ming's case, the scientists shellfishly froze him* to death before they counted his rings and discovered his hoary age. It is quite possible that Ming could have lasted a good deal longer if he had been left unmolested. Of course, considering the quantity of quahogs which are harvested by fishermen each year who do not bother to count their rings, there may well have been even older individuals caught whose advanced years were never suspected.

Some colony animals like coral or sponges may live much longer than a half of a millennium, and there is a weird jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) which achieves a type of immortality by cycling between an adult and polyp phase over and over again. However, for single individual creatures which start out small, grow to adulthood, and then eventually die, Ming at the moment has the record for longevity of all the animals on the earth.

If you wish to read more about Ming as well as see an actual photo of him (the picture above is just your ordinary run-of-the mill generic quahog), please click on the ScienceNordic webpage.

*It is hard to tell the sex of clams, and sometimes they even change gender during the course of their lives. Thus, the use of the masculine pronoun for Ming is somewhat arbitrary.