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[history8524]

This is a diorama of a decomposed German soldier next to his machine gun and personal items.

This is a diorama of a decomposed German soldier next to his machine gun and personal items.

Artist: Dilip Sarkar Mbe. He wrote the following about this model.

"As an historian I have been heavily involved with the identification of 'missing' Second World War dead for many years. That millions remain missing, however, is little-known - as are the varying policies and levels of enthusiasm reflected by various governments.

I work especially closely with the Royal Netherlands Army Recovery & Identification Unit, which processes around 40 cases annually. A few years ago, a 19 - year old panzer grenadier was recovered from the sandy soil between Arnhem and Nijmegen. 

This diorama, based upon the vintage Airfix 1/6 scale skeleton and Dragon Action figures bits, was for a magazine article raising awareness of the issue, and inspired by the discovery of Gunther - whose mortal remains I saw laid out in the lab. So, not your typical diorama, I guess, but hopefully thought provoking…"

For the experts, it was already clear that it's a German model. However, the picture is doing rounds on social media as stated otherwise. Users are claiming that it is the body of an Indian soldier who sacrificed his life defending his motherland during the Kargil war, in 1965: "This is the remains of Hem Singh Jadav of Firozabad who fought till the end with the enemy in Kargil war. His fingers were on the trigger even after his death."

Some also claimed it was a Turkish soldier.

My guest.

[history8524]

Do not eat the sandwiches!

Do not eat the sandwiches! Alice Thomas – The Third Victim of Mulitple Murderer Annie Hearn Cornwall. Both Alice and William Thomas each complained of feeling unwell slightly after they and Annie Hearn had eaten. They had taken a trip to Bude, a small seaside town in Cornwall, and had brought along tinned salmon sandwiches prepared by their guest Annie, who had experienced very tough times recently. Her Aunt had passed away five years earlier in 1926 after Annie and her sister, Minnie, had moved to the area to care for her. And only last year, Minnie had suddenly passed away. By the time the trio had arrived back at the Thomas’ home, Alice was considerably worse – so much so that her husband sought the help of the town doctor, Graham Sanders. He examined Alice and stated she had nothing worse than general food poisoning and fully expected her to recover. She initially did show signs of recovery, and a week after first falling ill, Alice had built up the strength to venture downstairs and enjoyed a meal that Annie had prepared. That night however, Alice began to experience terrible pain, even becoming delirious. Dr. Sanders saw her the following morning and immediately had her transferred to a hospital. 24 hours later, Alice Thomas was dead. A post-mortem quickly revealed that Alice had lethal amounts of arsenic in her organs. Her death was ruled, murder by poisoning. Suspicion fell almost instantly on Annie. When William Thomas defended Annie, some people began to wonder if he too was guilty of his wife’s untimely death. Annie insisted she was innocent of any wrong doing, stating the same thing in a letter she sent to William a week after she had disappeared. It was discovered she had traveled to the town of Looe and assumed she had thrown herself from the cliffs. Local fishermen insisted to the police, if the woman had thrown herself from these cliffs, they would have either found her body or it would have washed up on the shore. Detectives made it known to the public that they suspected Annie to be alive and that they wanted to talk to her if she was seen. Investigators had also exhumed the bodies of her aunt and her sister, who had both died after suffering similar symptoms as Alice Thomas. They discovered that both of her relatives did indeed have high levels of arsenic in their bodies. She was eventually discovered working as a housekeeper in Torquay under the name, Mrs Faithful and was arrested. ​During the trial, the prosecution argued that Annie had used weed killer to poison Alice Thomas, but her defense stated that this would have stained any food it was added to a bright blue/purple color. And while arsenic was present in Alice’s body, there was no evidence that Annie had been the person who was responsible for this. They also argued that the levels of arsenic in her aunt and sister’s body was most likely due to them having been buried in Cornwall, which was known to have high levels of the natural arsenic in its soil. Annie Hearn was ultimately found not guilty and seemed to vanish out of the limelight. It is believed that she changed her name again and moved back to Yorkshire. ​The key to who killed Alice Thomas, whether it was her husband (who was never charged) or indeed Annie Hearn, could quite possibly lie within the diary of her Annie’s sister, Minnie. Perhaps tellingly, Annie’s solicitor went out of his way to make sure it was not allowed as evidence in the trial.

[history8524]

Bestiarii (Beast Men)

Bestiarii (Beast Men)

A great modern misconception is that Roman gladiators fought against wild beasts in the arena. But gladiators only fought against other men. Warriors who faced off against lions and bears were a whole other classification entirely. They were known as the bestiarii, the ‘Beast Men.'

To the ancient Romans, no spectacle brought about the same feverish excitement as fights to the death in a packed arena. Thousands flocked to coliseums, placing bets, watching on violently animated, while the most prominent dignitaries from the highest echelons of Roman society acted out their limitless thirst for vile blood-spill - from the safety of the Senator’s seating section. And spectators, be it prince or pauper, took as much enjoyment from men fighting monsters as they did from them fighting one another.

There were two types of bestiarii. One was he who stepped in and faced a wild monster of his own accord, either as a means of making a living, or to see his name in lights via some warped sense of narcotic joy. This Man v Animal event was known as a venatio and was immensely popular, usually preceding the gladiator bouts. The vast majority of venatio events were rigged to be extremely one-sided, sometimes a dozen or more men would torture and kill a lion.

Emperor Commodus was a bestiarus, much to the chagrin of the Senate who would have preferred to see him immersed in more diplomatic duties befitting the Emperor of Rome, rather than see him facing off against an (always limp or injured) animal.

The other type of bestiarii was one who had been sentenced to death via mauling. This was usually a prisoner of war, a criminal, a runaway slave or a person who for one reason or another had lost the right to be part of Roman society. These events were known as Damnatio ad bestias and like venatio were also overwhelmingly one-sided – but this one was in favour of the beasts.

Sometimes men were sent out with just a spear, completely unarmed or even naked, and often didn’t last more than the time it took for an animal to sprint across the sand and lunge at them. If they did manage to slay the beast against all odds, another one was usually unchained and let loose into the arena, wild with frenzied hunger and terrified by the deafening noise. This usually finished off our hero.

Historical distance can often desensitize us to human suffering or make it an object of humour or curiosity, so it’s hard for us to contemplate the veritable dread these doomed men felt in the days leading up to their fate. Some were known to find inventive ways to cheat their grisly demise by committing suicide in the morning of their execution. Roman statesman Symmachus tells of 29 Saxon slaves, given to Rome as a gift, strangling each other to death in their cells the night before their scheduled downfall.

Scholae bestarium were schools where young bestiarii who wanted to make a life of it went and learned the trade. Here, they would learn how to fight, how to wield weapons, and animal trainers would teach them the most efficient way to kill a wild animal that they might one day face off against in the arena. Exotic animals transported in from the four corners of the earth, including lions, bears, dogs, tigers, wolves, rhinos, hyenas, boars, bulls.

In the arena, the most common attack method utilized by a bestiarii was to attempt to blind the animal by spearing it in the eye, then attacking the throat while it was stunned. But many, merely froze in one spot and meekly accepted their fate, letting the animal get its inevitable rip at their throat as quickly as possible. This resulted in irritated and unimpressed spectators - usually not good news for the next man up who might now have a bear thrown in alongside the lion he's about to face, in a morbid effort to pacify and appease the bloodthirsty mob.

"Man is slaughtered, to kill is an exercise and an art. Men offer themselves to the wild beasts, men of ripe age. They fight with beasts, not for their crime, but for their madness." Cyprian, Ad Donatus, VII More stories here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/StoryHub

[history8524]

THE FORGOTTEN WHITE SLAVES

They came as slaves: human cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands, men, women and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive then had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.

But are we talking about African slavery? King James VI and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbour.

The Irish slave trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.

By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade.

Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.

Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (£50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than £5 Sterling). If a planter whipped, branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce.

Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls (many as young as 12) with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more, in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded this chapter of Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.

But, why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?

Or is their story to be the one that their English masters intended: To completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

[history8524]

Marie Fikáčková - a serial baby murderer 1955

Marie Fikáčková was born on 9th September 1936 in Sušice, in Czechoslovakia. She grew up in a dysfunctional family but was able to graduate from medical school in Central Klatovy with good grades and in 1955 worked as a nurse in the maternity department of the hospital in Sušice, in the Pilsen region. She was regarded as very competent, and was promoted to head nurse of that ward not long before her arrest. She had been married and divorced.

Marie was suspected of killing two newborn babies in the neonatal unit of the district hospital in Susice on the 23rd of February 1960. She was arrested four days later. Autopsies on the two baby girls revealed that the cause of death as severe brain injuries and fractures. The pathologist who carried out the autopsies concluded that the two children had died in quick succession from similar injuries. According to court files, one child who was just 20 hours old had head injuries and two broken arms which could only have been caused deliberately.

On the same day two other newborns were discovered with similar injuries from which both died. The file also contained her admission that she used violence against a dozen other infants, whom she described as “attack survivors”. The apparent motive for this violence was that she could not tolerate crying babies. In a statement she said "When you press the head I felt my fingers sink into the head, but I did not feel at this moment no cracking cranial bones, I only felt that hitting the head. After a brief excitement, I calmed down and I worked at folding napkins in the inspection room."

Court psychologists and psychiatrists found her to be sane, but with a tendency to depression, hysteria and uncontrolled outbursts of anger, the later born out by the nature of the crimes. She came to trial at the beginning of October 1960 and was convicted on both counts. She sentenced to death on 6th October. Her appeal was heard in early 1961 and was rejected, as was her petition for clemency to the President. She was hanged in Prague’s Pankrac prison on Thursday the 13th of April 1961.

Czechoslovakia used the short drop method of hanging and no details of executions were made public. She would be the first woman to die on the indoor gallows. Marie would have been led into the execution room, stood on the tiny trap door near the far wall and had a simple halter noose attached to a projecting metal bar, placed around her neck. It is unlikely that she was hooded or blindfolded. The executioner would now go into the adjoining room and push the lever towards the wall. See photos below. Only one other woman would die on these gallows, Olga Hepnarová on the 12th of March 1975.

Her case was in the media again in 2007 when it was claimed that she had committed as many as ten murders, which would have made her the worst female serial killer in Czech history. However, there is only indirect evidence linking her to the other crimes. According to journalist Stanislav Motl, who dealt with the case, the court did not have a chance to prove more murders among other things because the little bodies were not autopsied. Motl also claims that the case played a political role because of the misconduct hospital staff.

He stated that "After a thorough study of all the materials I have come to the conclusion that she apparently hated children crying. I myself consider it the greatest mass murderc. While she was convicted of two murders, there are another 10 dead children. The worst thing is that she was murdering still, while I was searching on - some children were strong and survived the abuse and now they are mentally handicapped. "

The details of the case were largely suppressed from the state run media by the Czech government, because of the lack of confidence in hospital safety procedures at the time and for fear of panic among pregnant women. Parents of the dead children were told that their child had died from postpartum shock or heart failure.

However, Stanislav Motl eventually got one the medical report that said that the infant had a crushed head and hands broken.