The History Blog

A Swedish court has ruled that Anders Högström, the man Polish authorities suspect commissioned the theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the gate to Auschwitz, can be extradited to Poland.

Högström founded Sweden’s National Socialist Front party in 1994, but left the party 5 years later in the wake of a rash of bank robberies and assaults by far-right groups, one of them resulting in murder. He denies the charges of being a mastermind, but fully admits to having acted as middleman between the five Polish thieves and the ultimate buyer. His defense is a little rich for my blood:

“I was asked if I wanted to take the sign from one location to another,” he said during an interview with the daily Aftonbladet. “We had a person who was willing to pay several millions [of kronor, or hundreds of thousands of dollars] for the sign.”

But after discovering that the money from the sale would fund a violent campaign aimed at disrupting Sweden’s upcoming parliamentary election, Högström said he decided to inform police about the plot. “That was not something I wanted to be involved in or carry out in any way,” said Högström, who quit the far-right movement in 1999.

He had scruples, you see, in the middle of arranging for the “Arbeit Mach Frei” sign to be cut into 3 pieces and sold to some neo-Nazi buddy of his. Ugh.

The Polish police think he was a lot more involved that that. They say Högström’s phone call came while they were already in the process of arresting the thieves. Also, the leader of the thieves has known Högström for 2 years, since he worked on Högström’s estate in southern Sweden. They’ve apparently stayed in touch all this time.

The Polish authorities think Högström commissioned the theft personally, then only called to fess up when his thieves told him the publicity was so huge they were bound to get caught.

Högström has 3 weeks to appealing the court’s ruling. If he doesn’t or his appeal is denied, the authorities have 10 days to come and get him. He’d then be sent to Poland for trial, but any prison time he does will be done in Sweden, as stipulated in the extradition agreement.

A team of researchers from Australia and New Zealand universities have successfully extracted DNA from the fossilized eggshells of extinct birds. Don’t fear the devilish, door-opening cunning of the velociraptor quite yet. The oldest eggshell was from an emu that lived 19,000 years ago.

“We were able to obtain DNA from both thin (duck) and thick (elephant bird) eggshells, which suggests that thickness may not play a significant role in the recovery of DNA from eggshells,” lead author Charlotte Oskam told Discovery News.

“Furthermore, we were able to isolate DNA from eggshells from three countries, each with very different climate conditions,” added Oskam, a researcher at Murdoch University’s Ancient DNA Lab.

The 19,000 year-old emu eggshell was from Australia, as was an owl eggshell. They also got DNA from the fossilized eggshells of extinct moas and ducks from New Zealand and extinct elephant birds from Madagascar.

The combination of calcium carbonate and a strong organix matrix in the eggshells decays very slowly. The strength of the structure protects the embryos from decay after the egg is laid, and keeps on protecting the eggshells long after the nest is empty.

Oskam explained that the “moa eggshell has 125 times lower microbial contamination when compared to moa bone. This highlights eggshells as an attractive substrate for ancient DNA work, especially whole genome studies.”

Successful DNA extraction isn’t going to lead to any cloned giant moas coming back, not this time anyway. Instead the research team is hoping the genetic information will fill out the evolutionary histories of these animals, and also be a useful non-invasive way of examining the genetic profiles of living animals.

Dinosaur eggs are still way off. Eggs that old (dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago) have become fully mineralized, so DNA extraction is so far impossible.

Scientists have confirmed that 51 decapitated bodies found last July in a mass grave near Weymouth, Dorset, were indeed Vikings.

Isotope analysis of their tooth enamel confirmed that they came to Dorset from Scandinavia. At least one of the beheaded men lived most of his years in the Arctic circle, in fact. They probably came to England in a raiding party and encountered Saxon resistance. Effective Saxon resistance.

Archaeologist believe the men were from a captured raiding party and were taken to the site by Anglo-Saxons defending their land for the specific purpose of putting them to death. Ms Boston added: “The location is a typical place for a Saxon execution site, on a main road and a parish boundary and close to prehistoric burrows.”

Teeth from ten individuals were examined by Dr Jane Evans and Carolyn Chenery at NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory in Nottingham. Dr Evans said: “Isotopes from drinking water and food are fixed in the enamel and dentine of teeth as the teeth are formed in early life. The isotope data we obtained from the burial pit teeth strongly indicate that the men executed on the Ridgeway originated from a variety of places within the Scandinavian countries.

“These results are fantastic, this is the best example we have ever seen of a group of individuals that clearly have their origins outside Britain.”

Their deaths were not easy ones. Bone evidence indicates that their necks and jaws were hacked at repeatedly, not removed in one clean blow. One body’s hands were cut through, probably a defensive wound incurred while trying to grab the sword that was coming for his neck.

Others were wounded on the pelvis, stomach and chest. There are more bodies than heads, which suggests that 3 heads might have been put on spikes or displayed outside of the grave in some gruesome manner.

The research team also narrowed down the date a death a little more, to from between 910 and 1030 A.D., so towards the end of the Viking raid period. By 1016, Danish King Cnute had conquered most of England and the raids stopped, mainly because he was the boss of the raiders too.

Scientists are hoping to learn from further studies of the remains, like more details about their long-term health issues, diets, general lifestyle.

The Cave Canem project launched last November to microchip, treat and neuter the stray dogs that populate the ancient city of Pompeii. When last we saw our brave canine heroes, they were still in the process of being rounded up by the Italian animal welfare groups and the adoption website didn’t exist yet.

Now all the rounding up has been done and the website is up and running. On the site you will find a lovely photo gallery of the pups up for adoption (with the ones already adopted marked as such). They all have adorable Pompeiian names.

The best part of the site, though, is the backstory written by one Stella Pende for each dog. They tie each dog in to the city of Pompeii and its mythology. The anthropomorphic characterization is gloriously lurid at times.

Meet Polibia:

In the quarter of the ancient baths at Pompeii, where I roam freely, they call me Polibia. I am two years old and like each respectable member of my family, I am a freed-slave and when possible I choose this humid warmth area that gives body to my fur and soothe my poor tired paws. My doggy friends at Pompeii say that I am magic because, suddenly one morning, my tail awoke with a white wisp, but they don’t know the truth. One night at the bath I was immersed in the warmth of the pool, when, Apollo the Beautiful, revealed himself showing his muscles and vigour on the purple glitter coach, wrapped in a cloud of smoke. But he was also very annoyed to find a hairy freed-slave in his favourite waters. So, furious, he caught me by the tail and threw me out of the bath and this divine touch lightened my tail tip.

Mythological backstory animal abuse! Damn you, muscular and vigorous Apollo. Damn you and the purple glitter coach wrapped in a cloud of smoke you rode in on.

Sadly only the first page of the dog stories is translated into English. The rest of them are just as fabulous, so fire up Google Translate and go to town.

If you’re in Europe and/or able to get to Italy in person, you can apply to adopt one of these historic honies. The requirements and forms you need are on this page. If I could, I would snap them all up myself.

The outstanding website Heritage Key is running a series of London-themed challenges for bloggers. There are neat prizes to be won, but most of all, much love for London’s marvelous wealth of history to be expressed.

I missed the first challenge because I got all freaked out under pressure and went completely blank, so I’m hoping I can squeak in just under the deadline for The Most Important Ancient Site in London challenge.

For my most important ancient site in London I choose (drumroll please) Drapers Gardens. This soggy patch of land on Throgmorton Avenue had the great fortune of being deemed basically undevelopable until 1967, when the Drapers Company decided to build an office tower on their garden space.

When the eponymous skyscraper was demolished in 2007 in preparation for a new building to be erected on the spot, an archaeological survey stumbled on a massive treasure trove of daily life in Roman London from the 1st to the 4th century A.D.

Drapers Gardens’ sogginess had not only kept this mother lode from being obliterated by two millennia of development and redevelopment, but it also helped keep these objects in an exceptional state of preservation.

Among the treasures are 19 metal vessels from the mid to late 4th c., possibly hidden in a well by a wealthy family fleeing one of many Saxon raids on the city, or they may have been left behind intentionally as part of the ritual closing of the well. The vessels are made from copper and lead ore and include wine jugs, dishes, ladles, even a set of three nesting bowls. They’re in such spectacular condition that the articulating handles on some of them still swing.

A total of over 1100 artifacts were found at the site. Other remarkable finds include hundreds of brooches, a wood door with its original hinges, a roman road with wood footbridges over the ditches on both sides, a wooden ruler with the lines marking the Roman inches still visible, an infant burial site and the skull of a brown bear that probably died in the amphitheater nearby.

The dig uncovered not just rare and beautiful artifacts, but really the entire structure of the neighborhood for 300+ years of Roman life in London: streets, alleys, floors, clay and timber foundations of dwellings, waste disposal and plumbing systems. In Rome itself you don’t find this kind of staging because the city has been built and rebuilt so many times, and because timber or clay housing just doesn’t tend to last 2000 years.

The Drapers Garden find is a microcosm of Roman city life, not only a worthy candidate for the most important ancient site in London, but surely in the running for one of the most important discoveries of Roman social history, period.

Pictures courtesy Pre-Construct Archaeology

Researchers examining Giotto’s wall paintings in the Peruzzi Chapel of Florence’s Santa Croce church with ultra-violet rays have uncovered an incredible wealth of detail invisible to the naked eye.

Giotto’s Santa Croce paintings were made on dry plaster, as opposed to frescoes which are painted on wet plaster. That made the color more brilliant when he first applied it in 1320, but dry paintings don’t last as well as frescoes so these beautiful works didn’t have the best start from a preservation perspective.

Then it got worse. The Peruzzi family, who had commissioned Giotto’s paintings for the chapel, decided to redecorate in the early 18th century and whitewashed the walls. Crazy sumbitches.

Restorers in 1840 removed the white paint, but used harsh solvents and wire brushes and all the rest of the horrid arsenal of 19th century “conservation” and so ended up stripping the delicate Giotto paintings. Then to add insult to injury they repainted over some of the damage they did to highlight areas so they could be seen from the ground.

The 19th c. paint was removed by a restoration in 1958, so all that’s left now are the battered remains of Giotto’s own work.

That’s where our team of intrepid researchers steps in. Financed by a grant from the Getty Foundation, the four-month project aimed to utilize non-invasive diagnostic tools to assess the condition of the paintings.

“It was something really astonishing,” said Cecilia Frosinini, co-coordinator of the project that studied the scenes in the lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.

“We knew we could get some very interesting results from our scientific diagnostics but when we looked under ultra-violet light, all of a sudden all these very faint paintings that were ruined by old restorations took on a new life,” she said, pointing to one scene while donning protective eye wear. [...]

“The scenes are again three dimensional … we were able to see all the chiaroscuro effects,” she said. “There were bodies under the garments … they became three dimensional, you could see the folds of the garments, the expressions of the faces.”

Look at the halos. It’s amazing how much of the original gold paint is still there. On the non-UV one you can only see that small sliver of gold on the right of the saint’s nose. Under UV light all of the sudden the entire round stands out.

Unfortunately, the ultra-violent rays which are so illuminating in short bursts would damage the paint if they were focused on it permanently, so this can only be a short-term application. The team plan to use the information from the UV examination as a map for future restorations.

They’re also hoping to snaggle enough grant money to take detailed UV pictures of the entire chapel so they can create an online virtual chapel for the general public to get as close to Giotto’s originals as we can 700 years later.

Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation by historian Ellen Fitzpatrick is a collection of condolence letters Mrs. Kennedy received in the wake of her husband’s assassination.

The outpouring of grief was so enormous — the White House got 800,000 condolences in the first seven weeks alone — that most of the letters were destroyed. Two hundred thousand pages made it to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston where Fitzpatrick found them.

Fitzpatrick was at the Kennedy library researching a different book when she asked to see some of the condolence letters in hopes of getting a sense of how Kennedy was perceived by Americans in his own time. As soon as she started reading, she was hooked.

“It was like the roof came off the building, the walls dropped away, the floor came out from under me. I was absolutely floored by what I’d begun to read,” she said Friday. “I have been teaching American history for 30 years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a collection as powerful and that represented so many ordinary people speaking from the heart about their views about American society, and politics, and the president.”

And she had to get permission from every one of the letter writers to include them in the book. This is probably why nobody’s ever done it before and the letters have remain unpublished all these years. After narrowing her list of thousands of favorites down to 240, she was able to track down 220 of the writers. Out them, only 5 declined to be included.

The excerpts in the article are so moving I wept like babby, but the part that struck me the most was Fitzgerald pointing out that we’ve seen so many piles of books about JFK, the assassination, the administration, from movers and shakers, from conspiracy theorists, from historians and from journalists, but this is the first work to collate perspectives from everyday Americans, and they’re just wrenching.

Writing two days [after the assassination], eighth-grader Mary South described learning that the president had been shot just as she sat down to play the church organ at her Catholic school in Santa Clara, Calif.

“I tried to tell myself he would be all right but somehow I knew he wouldn’t. … the tears wouldn’t stop. The slightly damp keys were hard to play but I offered it up that the President might live,” she wrote.

In return for her letter, she received a small card printed with the words “Mrs. Kennedy is deeply appreciative of your sympathy and grateful for your thoughtfulness.”

“Getting that back felt like: She saw this. Jackie saw this,” South, whose married name is Mary Certa, said in an interview Thursday. “I felt good that I had done something. I just wanted her to know how upset we were and how helpless we felt.”

When one of Fitzpatrick’s researchers called and read her letter, “I started to cry all over again,” said Certa, 60, of Campbell, Calif. “It was like I was right back there in 1963.”

I think this approach brings the sheer emotion of the tragedy to the fore like nothing has after all these decades of Camelot and grassy knolls.

The complete original manuscript of General Theory of Relativity penned by Einstein’s very hand has gone on display today for the first time at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem. Einstein donated the manuscript to Hebrew University in Jerusalem when it was founded in 1925. He left them the rest of his documents in his will.

The manuscript has been kept in a safe at Hebrew University since the founding. A few pages have gone out on display to museums on occasion, but very rarely.

The University lent the manuscript to the Academy to put on a display worthy of its 50th anniversary celebration. The display will be open until March 25th, therefore overlapping the Academy’s anniversary festivities with the 131st anniversary of Einstein’s birth on March 14.

It took Einstein eight years after publishing his theory of special relativity — in which he came up with the famed equation EMC2 (squared) — to expand that into his theory of general relativity, in which he showed that gravity can affect space and time, a key to understanding basic forces of physics and natural phenomena, including the origin of the universe.

But exhibit organizers say the significance of Einstein’s pages of careful script, diagrams, and perfectionist’s scratches will not be lost on casual viewers. They say the display will present the manuscript in the context of the theory’s legacy — which includes everything from modern space exploration to commercial satellite and GPS technology and present-day attempts to create a universal explanation of the forces of nature, a quest that started decades ago and stymied even Einstein himself.

This is the first time the whole 46 pages are laid out in a darkened room, each page gently lit in its own protective casing. You can read every page, every chart, note, and doodle as Einstein wrote them.

In 2006, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg found that 220 pieces worth up to $5 million from its enormous collection had been stolen and sold by a former curator. One of the lost items was a silver pendant of Peter the Great, part of a collection of 1,200 Peter the Great artifacts donated to the museum by the surviving family of Czar Nicholas II in 1947.

In May 2009, Russian authorities contacted the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit to report a Seattle antiquities dealer who was selling a suspiciously familiar Peter the Great medallion online. ICE Agents confiscated the pendant and forensic investigation by Kremlin Museum specialists determined that it was indeed the missing item.

Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Seattle, was in Moscow on Thursday for a repatriation ceremony. His agency, which recovered the pendant, declined to name the antiques dealer who bought and was attempting to resell the piece of art.

“Artifacts of historical or cultural significance allow the public to experience a nation’s heritage, and these items shouldn’t be offered as souvenirs for sale to the highest bidder,” Winchell said in a statement.

Apparently the unnamed dealer is still under investigation, which is why the ICE is refusing to comment.

A man digging the foundation of his new home in northern Syria uncovered a cache of over 250 coins from the Hellenistic era (4th to 1st centuries B.C.).

He gave the coins in their bronze box to the authorities, and they’re now being analyzed and cataloged.

[Youssef Kanjo, the head of archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Aleppo,] added that the box contained two groups of coins, 137 “tetra” drachmas (four drachmas) and 115 single drachma coins.

One side of the tetra drachma coins depicts Alexander the Great, while the other side shows the Greek god Zeus sitting on a throne with an eagle perched on his extended arm.

Some of the coins bear the inscription King Alexander in Greek, while others say Alexander or carry the name of King Philip, most likely referring to his father.

Alexander conquered Syria in 333 B.C., after his defeat of Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Issus. It and the rest of Alexander’s Asian empire became the Seleucid Empire after Alexander’s death and the splintering of his generals.

Alexander coins would have kept being produced under the Seleucid Empire, which would was finally toppled by Tigranes of Armenia 20 years or so before Pompey yoinked Syria for good for Rome in 64 B.C.