BOOKS 

Nora Krug: Replacing German 'guilt' with 'responsibility' to defend democracy

Nora Krug is the author of a bestselling graphic memoir titled "Heimat," which looks into her family's involvement in World War II. DW asked her what we can learn from the generation of "followers" of the Nazi Party

"Heimat" is a loaded German term; it was misappropriated by the Nazis and more recently by the far right. Edgar Reitz, the director of a series of films in the 1980s called "Heimat," told DW in an interview that he wouldn't have called his project that way today; he finds the term to difficult to defend. Why did you pick it for your book?

That's exactly why we decided to call the book "Heimat," because we felt that we needed to claim the term back from the extreme right. The book is both a quest to find out what it means to be German and it's also a commitment to Germany — in a positive sense. I believe it should be possible to both look critically at our past and express love for our country

Your graphic memoir offers a complex, very poetic interpretation of the concept of Heimat. But did you also come up with an easy way to define the term in interviews? 

I don't think I have a clear definition of the word Heimat yet. The goal of the book wasn't to provide easy answers or to understand what being German means, but more an attempt to better understand the German war experience.

And even after the whole process of writing the book, I can't really say that I know what the term Heimat means to me personally, partly because I've been living abroad for all in all 20 years. And it's also a term that changes over time, just as we change and our society changes. And that's how it should be looked at, as something that's not static but that's allowed to change and mean different things to different individuals.

The US version of the book has the title: "Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home"

Did you initially conceive your book for Germans or for English-language readers?

When I first wrote the book, I really had an American audience in mind because, as a German living among non-Germans in America, I had been often confronted with negative stereotypes about Germans, but also with a lack of knowledge of what we do with the legacy of the war. So that's why I wrote the book in English first.

And then I realized that the German publishing world was actually the one that was the most excited about it, because living with this legacy is still such a trauma for the Germans as well.

Read more: 'Maus' cartoonist Art Spiegelman turns 70

Your book details your quest to find out more about your ancestors' involvement in the war; would you encourage other Germans to do that research too?

Everybody has their own way of dealing with the past, so I wouldn't say that there's one way of handling it. But I personally think it's always better to know than not to know. I found it difficult to live with gaps in my family narrative. I wanted to ask as many questions as I could, and find out as much as possible. And now we have so many technological possibilities to find information that wasn't available maybe 15 years ago; certain files have only been made public recently.

We now understand how people ended up joining the Nazi party without having committed  war crimes, so it's something we'd expect to see in most families. Still, you describe the moment you found out that one of your relatives was officially categorized as a "follower" in the denazification as very emotional. Why did it hurt so much?

I had always suspected that nobody in my family had been a major Nazi, because I think that's the kind of information that you can't keep hidden; it would have come up much earlier in my life.

But I grew up with this narrative of my grandfather Willi as somebody who had voted for the Social Democrats all his life, who were the Nazis' major political enemies. So there had always been this myth of him having nothing to do at all with the Nazi regime. So when I found out at the archive that he had actually been a member of the Nazi party, at a time when it was actually not so easy to join, I was very surprised and it was painful, because I saw myself confronted with a side of him that was uncomfortable to witness — of somebody who was opportunistic in his choices, and a bit of a coward.

A picture in the book "Heimat": Nora with her now deceased grandfather

Your ancestors' ambiguous position during the war — they weren't Nazi criminals but they weren't engaged in the Resistance either — not only reflects the case of a majority of Germans, it also makes your book more universal, since we end up thinking, "that could have been my family," or even in a way, "that is me today…"  Was this one of your goals in making the book?

Yeah, exactly. I think that the gray zone of the war, those people who fall in between the categories of Resistance fighters, victims, and major Nazis or war criminals, is the category that is the most important to look at, because it is probably the one that most of us would identify with, and the one that probably teaches us most about how dictatorial regimes work.

That group of people has been overlooked a bit in German society, because it's easy to say "well everybody was a follower and my family was among those people who followed." But I think that's just too easy; the term follower is so much wider. There were followers who saved Jewish lives for instance. And then there were followers who committed terrible crimes. So that's why I feel it's so important to look at individual narratives and try to deconstruct individual myths that maybe circulate in your family.

Read more: Holocaust literature: Beyond the labels of victim and perpetrator

A page from Nora Krug's book

Many Germans claimed they didn't realize what was happening under Hitler. Today we are very well informed of the world's problems, and we are witnessing events in the US that are often compared to Germany in the 1930s. As a naturalized US citizen with a German background, what is your reaction to the current political situation there?

What's going on in the US at the moment is very frightening. And I do think there are parallels in some of the behavior we are witnessing, such as how language has become much more aggressive, which is of course troubling. I'm actually reading Mein Kampf at the moment for the first time in my life, and it's so evident that language is the seed of violence. But I do think that the comparison between Hitler and Trump is too easy to make from a historical point of view, even if some traits of personality are familiar.

Read more: Why the world is turning to Hannah Arendt to explain Trump

And does the election of far-right politicians in Germany scare you more?

I think it's equally scary. As a German, I'm of course very concerned about the developments in Germany. One of the things I find the most concerning is the fact that society is so split today and that it's becoming increasingly difficult to talk to one another, to have a civilized dialogue. I think Germany underestimated what had been going on under the surface for a long time. Now we need to really take it very seriously.

And what is your role as an artist in this context?

One of the most important goals of my book was to give a universal quality to the story, so that it wouldn't only apply to Germany and the Nazi regime and allow readers to project the situation back then to what's happening now, and maybe find ways of replacing the term "guilt" with "responsibility" and think about what we can do today to contribute to a tolerant society and defend our democracy. I used to think that democracy was basically as a state of being. But I realize now that it's a process that's that we constantly need to defend.

GO HERE TO WATCH VIDEOhttps://www.dw.com/en/nora-krug-replacing-german-guilt-with-responsibility-to-defend-democracy/a-49960409

NONFICTION TOO 

Deutsche Bank gives Trump financial documents to New York investigators: report

Germany's Deutsche Bank has reportedly complied with a subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney. The bank has been the US president's lender since the late 1990s.

    

 

Deutsche Bank complied with a subpoena in relation to an investigation into US President Donald Trump's tax records, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The bank reportedly provided the Manhattan District Attorney office with "detailed records, including financial statements and other materials" that the president provided to the bank.

The investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization was launched after the disclosures of hush payments to two women who said they had sexual relations with Trump before he became president. Trump has denied the claims.

Deutsche Bank has been Trump's main lender since the 1990's, according to the paper. Investigators were reportedly heavily reliant on the documents after other lines of investigation were halted by legal action. 

The documents that the attorney's office has obtained are subject to grand jury secrecy rules, according to the report. The newspaper said they may never become public unless the office brings charges and introduces the documents as evidence at a trial.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance did not share details about his probe, but the office told a federal judge earlier this week that it was a "complex financial investigation" that followed reports of "possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization." The investigation included charges of alleged insurance and bank fraud.

Vance did not confirm or deny the newspaper report. Representatives for Trump and Deutsche Bank also did not respond to initial requests for comment from the paper or other media outlets.

They subpoena, Trump sues

Vance launched investigations after Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, told congress that the president would mislead business associates about the value of his assets. 

Two Congressional committees, both run predominately by Democrats, subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for documents related to Trump after Cohen's revelations. Trump sued to block their release.

Trump has called the investigations against him politically motivated. Earlier this week, he said Vance's investigation was "a continuation of the witch hunt." He refused to disclose his tax returns during the 2016 US presidential election and the 2020 election, even though it is standard practice for Republican and Democrat candidates to do so.

kbd/aw (AP, Reuters)   https://p.dw.com/p/3gUrz

NONFICTION

‘Life of a Klansman’ Tells Ugly Truths About America, Past and Present



A Klansman photographed in 1871. In “Life of a Klansman,” Edward Ball recounts the saga of his great-great-grandfather, an embittered racist, in an attempt to understand the history of white supremacy in America.Credit...Private collection/Picture Research Consultants and Archives
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By Walter Isaacson, 

BOURGEOIS HISTORIAN
Aug. 4, 2020

LIFE OF A KLANSMAN
A Family History in White Supremacy
By Edward Ball

When his mother died in 2003, the writer Edward Ball went to New Orleans, where her family had lived for generations, to bury her and sort through her belongings. Among her papers were documents that had been collected by her late aunt, including tales about the man who was known in the family as “our Klansman.”

Ball had already written, in 1998, a deeply reported National Book Award-winning history, “Slaves in the Family,” for which he tracked down descendants of those who had once been enslaved by his South Carolina ancestors on his father’s side. In his new book, “Life of a Klansman,” he follows a similar course, taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side.

The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today. “This is a family story,” he writes. “Yet it is not a family story wrapped in sugar, the way some people like to serve them.” The family is not just his, it’s our nation’s.

[ Read an excerpt from “Life of a Klansman.” ]

Lecorgne, born in 1832, was raised in a New Orleans that was, as it has been throughout its history, very complex racially and ethnically. About a quarter of the population were French-speaking whites, a quarter were English-speaking whites, a quarter were free mixed-race Creoles and a quarter were slaves. The Lecorgnes were in the first category, but they rented a home from a free French-speaking woman of color.

Because he has few documents, Ball indulges in a lot of surmises and speculations, perhaps a bit too many for my taste. He pictures the young boy Lecorgne walking with his family the four blocks to Congo Square, where the slaves were allowed to drum and dance on Sunday afternoons. There is a sexual tension that the boy finds both attractive and appalling. “I think I can begin to see, in Congo Square, a script and a stage, a place where Blackness and whiteness meet,” Ball writes. “Complications ensue. They move apart. Eventually the script calls for a crescendo. Blackness and whiteness collide, and the ending, for our Klansman, is an explosion.”

Lecorgne is the unsuccessful and unpopular middle child of a large family. He tries to make a living as a carpenter, but he descends into what is known in the local parlance as petits blancs, the poor working-class whites. Resentments accrue. When he marries, his wife’s family gives him a household slave as a dowry, but he has to sell her for $500 to afford a home.


The Civil War offers Lecorgne an outlet for his resentments and a chance to finally earn a little respect from his family and neighbors. But even there he fails. After joining one of Louisiana’s militias as a captain, he is demoted to a second lieutenant. On a train trip to Virginia he gets into a melee and, along with much of his unit, is court-martialed. At a public ceremony, he and his comrades have one-half of their scalps shaved and are cashiered. Lecorgne heads back to New Orleans in disgrace.





Under Reconstruction, the city becomes integrated. Blacks can vote, testify against whites in court and sit where they want on the streetcars; a few even attend integrated schools. Lecorgne’s neighborhood in uptown New Orleans, around where Napoleon Avenue meets the river (which is where I grew up), becomes mixed, with Creoles, Germans, Irish, Blacks and mulattoes all living on the same blocks. It’s nice to think what the city, and our nation, might have been had that progression continued. But among the whites, especially the petits blancs, resentments built.

The clubhouses for resentful poor whites are the neighborhood firehouses. Lecorgne joined one just off Napoleon Avenue, the Home Hook & Ladder Company, housed in a Romanesque building with a first-floor facade clad in stone and a second in red brick. Its membership suddenly swelled during Reconstruction to 85 men, far more than were necessary to fight off the neighborhood’s house fires. Instead, as Ball writes, “the firehouses play a big part in the tale of the Ku-klux,” which is what the loose-knit confederation of white supremacist organizations came to be called.

Lecorgne was a minor player in this movement. But for that reason his tale is valuable, both for understanding his times and for understanding our own; he allows us a glimpse of who becomes one of the mass of followers of racist movements, and why.

His one recorded inglorious moment came in early 1873. With Black support, a Republican was elected governor, and the local white militias took up arms to resist his rule. Lecorgne and a group of armed men gathered with the goal of taking over their neighborhood police precinct station, hoping it would spark a wider white uprising. Although the newspapers referred to them as “Ku-Kluxers,” the rebel raiders most likely did not wear robes and hoods. That practice was mainly for rural marauders. They were successful, but the following night the police staged a counterattack. As Lecorgne hid in a staircase, his cousin was wounded and a friend was killed.

Lecorgne surrendered and was carried away to the city jail. In the indictment, which misspelled his name, he is accused of treason and violating federal law for having “unlawfully maliciously and traitorously conspired” to attack state authorities. But a local judge quickly dismissed all the charges. That low point was the high point of his life.

Near the end of his book, Ball makes a fascinating digression. It involves a prominent person of color who lived in New Orleans at the same time as Lecorgne. Louis Charles Roudanez was a medical doctor, trained in France and at Dartmouth, who published The New Orleans Tribune, a daily newspaper for the Black community. An homme de couleur libre, Roudanez married a free woman of color. While researching his own family, Ball decided to look for the descendants of the Roudanez family.

He finds one of the physician-publisher’s great-great-grandchildren, named Mark Roudané, living in a leafy subdivision of St. Paul, Minn. “He was raised white, and he appears white,” Ball writes of Roudané. “In middle age he learned that according to the one-drop rule of blackness, he was not white.” Roudané did not know the tale of his father’s ancestors, or even the Roudanez spelling of his family name, until he stumbled across some family documents when he was 55. As happened with Ball, the discovery of a bit of family history leads Roudané on a quest. “When my father died, in 2005, I was going through his papers and throwing stuff away, and I found an unmarked binder,” Roudané tells Ball. It contained papers showing how his father, who was designated as “colored” on his birth certificate, had forsaken his distinguished roots, changed the spelling of his name as a young man, gone to Tulane by passing as white and then moved to the Midwest. Despite this history, or perhaps because of it, he became a resentful white racist. “When it came to talking about Black people,” Mark Roudané told Ball, “all this venom would come out. I thought, ‘Why is my dad being ugly?’ I didn’t understand it.”

The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance. In Ball’s retelling of his family saga, the sins and stains of the past are still very much with us, not something we can dismiss by blaming them on misguided ancestors who died long ago. “It is not a distortion to say that Constant’s rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible-to-measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now — not just for me and for his 50 or 60 descendants, but for whites in general,” Ball writes. “I am an heir to Constant’s acts of terror. I do not deny it, and the bitter truth makes me sick at the stomach.”

Walter Isaacson is a professor of history at Tulane.

LIFE OF A KLANSMAN
A Family History in White Supremacy
By Edward Ball
Illustrated. 395 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

#HIROSHIMA75
Aug. 6 (UPI) -- On this date in history:
Atomic bomb levels Hiroshima
On Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later an atomic bomb hit Nagasaki and Japan soon surrendered, ending World War II.
THE BIRTH OF THE ATOMIC AGE AND THE COLD WAR

Oppenheimer quotes: the story behind 'Now I am become ...

https://www.wired.co.uk › article › manhattan-project-robert-oppenheimer

 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'. The story of Oppenheimer's infamous quote. As he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”

By UPI Staff

An unidentified newsman stands amid the rubble of Hiroshima in September 1945. On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the city. UPI File Photo | License Photo

The interview portion of this footage, which aired on NBC in 1965, shows American theoretical physicist and "father of the atomic bomb" J. Robert Oppenheimer reflecting on the July 16, 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico. Oppenheimer's quote reveals a more philosophical viewpoint, ending with a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Related Article: Manhattan: History vs. Hollywood

#HIROSHIMA75

CULTURE
How a graphic novel illustrates Hiroshima's atomic disaster

'The Bomb' uses facts and images to tell the complete story. And it's not the first illustrated work to deal with the topic.




German covers of two graphic novels about Hiroshima


On the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a bomb detonated over the city of Hiroshima with an explosive force the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. Over 90% of the city's housing burned to the ground, and over 200,000 people died in the first five years after it detonated.

In more than 470 pages, a new graphic novel, The Bomb (original: La Bombe in French), tells the story of humankind's greatest weapon of mass destruction, the so-called ultimate weapon of World War II: the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

In it, one sees drawings of a city in ruins: people's faces, zombie-like, bearing the signs of terror. But is a graphic novel the right medium to deal with such a catastrophe? Didier Alcante, one of the publication's authors, says the answer is a resounding yes. For him, it is actually the perfect medium to tell the story of such an atrocity. "On the one hand, you can use the text to convey complex scientific content. You can read at your own pace and understand its complexity. And on the other hand, drawings can be used to convey the emotions." Over 20 pages of the book do not include text, relying instead on images to illustrate the force of the atomic bomb'sexplosion.


The destruction of Hiroshima, as reflected in the graphic novel "La Bombe"
Meticulous research on the a-bomb

Part of the book's genius lies in the thorough research done by its authors. The scenes, military operations described and even the characters — from scientists to officers to politicians — are based on factual events and real people. No detail is spared during the explanation of the complex technology behind an atomic bomb, which is explained comprehensibly, yet understandably. Authors Didier Alcante (a Belgian) and Laurent-Frédéric Bollée (a Frenchman) worked for four years with the illustrator and author Denis Rodier (a Canadian) to perfect the publication, which was the culmination of several years of research.


The book "La Bombe" (published in French in March) was published in German in June 2020

"In 1978, I was eight years old at the time, a Japanese boy came to my class. We lived in Belgium and he didn't know a word of French. I helped him at school, we became very good friends and still are today," remembers Alcante. Later, this friend became one of the protagonists in the book. In 1981, Alcante visited his Japanese friend in Hiroshima and had a life-changing experience. "We visited the museum in Hiroshima. There were many photos of corpses, destruction and chaos. What struck me most was a shadow of a person literally fixed to a staircase." This "shadow" was the remains of a person who was about 250 meters from the epicenter and died in the explosion. What was left of him were nothing more than marks on the wall. "It was very formative for me to see a shadow and to know there was someone and now ... nobody, a shadow, a ghost. When I was a young man, I could not believe how such a beautiful country could be destroyed. Later, I started researching, reading and learned a lot about the military system in Japan," says the author.


Author Didier Alcante (r) and his Japanese friend in Hiroshima in 2018
Giving a face to the forgotten

The graphic novel portrays scientists who worked on the Manhattan research project that produced the bomb. One of them is Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who was involved in the construction of the bomb but later strongly advised against its use. "The more I read about him, the more admiration I had for him. He could have taught at any renowned university or won the Nobel Prize, but he made the US military uncomfortable because he was against the use of the bomb. I regret not having described his life in more detail in the book. I could have written 2,000 pages, but the illustrators wouldn't have been happy," laughs Alcante.

In the book, Alcante also tries to capture the unique aspects of Japanese culture. "There is a place where the Japanese father hugs his son, who is returning home from military service after fighting against China. But when my Japanese friend saw the drawing, he said: "The Japanese don't do that. Father and son greet each other respectfully, but they don't hug in a situation like this." And so, through the book, the reader also learns about Japanese customs.


Different customs: The illustration at the left shows father and son hugging; the scene on the right made it into the book, as it depicts father and son greeting each other at some distance
A seminal Japanese manga series

The first graphic novel about the atomic bomb was written in the 1970s: an autobiographical masterpiece by manga artist and writer Keiji Nakazawa, who describes the life of the Japanese before and after the atomic bomb. Nakazawa grew up in Hiroshima, and his stories begin in the first years of the war before the bomb was dropped on his city in his feature titled I Saw It. His character, six-year-old Gen Nakaoka, describes scenes of deprivation and hunger, including siblings fighting over a potato or collecting grasshoppers because there is nothing else to eat. Nakazawa also describes the exclusion and mockery the family is subjected to because their own father is against the war. "They can inflict wounds on my body, but never on my soul," says the father in the book when he comes home with bruises after a police interrogation.


Keiji Nakazawa's "Barefoot Gen" is available in English, as well as in German, as shown here

Nakazawa's memories of that time are impressively portrayed in the longer autobiographical book Barefoot Gen. He was only 1.4 kilometers (less than a mile) away from the epicenter when the bomb detonated on August 6, 1945. In his drawings, the book begins with a rising sun and the words: "Hiroshima began its day like any other, despite the fact that hell was soon to rain down on the city."

Miraculously, he survived along with his heavily pregnant mother, who gives birth a few hours after the explosion, like the mother portrayed in the book. After the birth, she holds her newborn in her hands and says: "When you grow up, you must never allow anything like this to happen again!"

Nakazawa lost most of his other family members in the Hiroshima blast. "I gave my main character the name Gen in the hope that he can be a root and source of strength for a new generation of humanity, a generation that can walk barefoot on the scorched earth of Hiroshima, feel the earth under their bare feet and have the power to say 'No' to nuclear weapons. I try to live with Gen's strength. That is my ideal and I will continue to pursue it in my work," Nakazawa wrote in 1987. Keiji Nakazawa died of cancer in 2012.

Keiji Nakazawa's "Barefoot Gen" is available in English. Didier Alcante, Laurent-Frédérich Bollée and Denis Rodier's "La Bombe" was published in French in March 2020, and in German in June 2020.

DW RECOMMENDS

Japan marks 75th anniversary of the end of Battle of Okinawa

More than 200,000 people died in the battle for Okinawa. The US has maintained a heavy military presence on the island since WWII, with the base highly unpopular with the locals and yet of crucial importance to Tokyo.

Polish classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki dies, aged 86
A titan of classical music, Penderecki was considered Poland's greatest contemporary composer. He is best known for his tribute to the victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, as well as for film scores like "The Shining."


Date 06.08.2020
Author Rayna Breuer (sh)
Related Subjects World War II
Keywords Hiroshima, World War II, Atomic bomb, US, USA, graphic novel, Manga

Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/3gT9e

#HIROSHIMA75

After Atomic Bombings, These Photographers Worked Under Mushroom Clouds

A new book of photos documents the human impact of the bombings that ended World War II — and challenges a common American perception of the destruction in Japan.

A view of Hiroshima in September 1945, weeks after an atomic bomb destroyed the city.Credit...Yoshito Matsushige/Chugoku Shimbun/Kyodo


By Mike Ives Aug. 6, 2020 NYTIMES

In August 1945, a Japanese newspaper sent a photographer from Tokyo to two cities that the United States military had just leveled with atomic bombs.

The photographer, Eiichi Matsumoto, had covered the firebombings of other Japanese cities. But the scale of the calamity that he encountered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he later recalled, was on another level.

At a Red Cross hospital near Hiroshima’s ground zero, he met victims dotted with red spots, a sign of radiation sickness. And on the desolate, rubble-strewn streets of Nagasaki, he watched families cremating loved ones in open-air fires.

“I beg you to allow me to take pictures of your utmost sufferings,” Mr. Matsumoto, who was 30 at the time, said he told survivors. “I am determined to let people in this world know without speaking a word what kind of apocalyptic tragedies you have gone through.”


Mr. Matsumoto, a photojournalist for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper who died in 2004, is among dozens of photographers who bore witness after the bombings, which forced Japan’s surrender and ended World War II.

Some of their images, banned until the American occupation ended in 1952, were eventually exhibited in museums and other venues across Japan. They also became fodder for antinuclear activists waging nonproliferation campaigns.

BELOW ARE SOME OF THE PHOTOS 

THE WHOLE PHOTO ESSAY CAN BE READ HERE 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/world/asia/hiroshima-nagasaki-japan-photos.html

#HIROSHIMA75
THE ATOMIC AGE BORN IN HORROR
From Manhattan to Hiroshima: the race for the atom bomb

Issued on: 06/08/2020 -

A photo from the National Archives of the Japanese December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES/AFP/Fil

Tokyo (AFP)

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki capped six years of top-secret work by scientists from Europe and North America. Here is an overview of how that process unfolded.

- Einstein warning -

In 1939, Albert Einstein signs a letter warning US president Franklin D. Roosevelt of the destructive potential of nuclear fission, which was discovered by the German chemist Otto Hahn. The letter says the process could result in "extremely powerful bombs of a new type". Roosevelt creates the Advisory Body on Uranium.


- Pearl Harbor -

On December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes destroy much of the US Pacific fleet based at Pearl Harbor. The next day, the United States enters World War II.

- The Manhattan Project -

In August 1942, the US officially launches a top-secret programme to develop an atomic bomb. The project, which had been approved the previous year, comes to be known as the "Manhattan Project". Approximately two billion dollars are spent to achieve its goal.

In 1943, Robert Oppenheimer is named scientific director of a secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico that is to build the bomb. The project includes top physicists from the US, Britain and Canada, in addition to several who fled the Nazi occupation of their homelands in Europe.

- Potential targets -

Around spring 1945, possible targets are evaluated and a list drawn up of Japanese cities that could be hit with an atomic bomb. At the top of the list is Japan's seventh-largest city, Hiroshima. Kyoto is rejected as a target owing largely to its historic and cultural importance.

- Conventional bombs -

On March 9-10, 1945, US warplanes carry out massive firebombing attacks on Tokyo and other major Japanese cities. Around 100,000 people die in the capital alone.

- Battle of Okinawa -

On March 26, the battle of Okinawa begins. More than 100,000 Japanese soldiers and a similar number of civilians die over the next three months, while 12,000 US soldiers are also killed. The battle is used by US officials to justify using atomic bombs, since an invasion of mainland Japan is forecast to result in an even higher cost.

On April 12, Roosevelt dies and Harry Truman becomes president of the United States and learns of the "Manhattan Project".

- German surrender -

On May 8, Germany surrenders, but fighting continues in Asia and the Pacific.

- First American test -

Between May and July, components of the atomic bombs are shipped to Tinian, an island in the Marianas chain from where B-29 bombers are able to reach Japan.

On July 16, at 5:30 am, the "Trinity" test takes place near Alamogordo, New Mexico, demonstrating the awesome power of an atomic bomb and marking the dawn of the nuclear age.

On July 25, Truman agrees to a mission to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. It included approval to drop additional bombs as soon as they became available.

- Allied ultimatum -

On July 26, in the Potsdam Declaration, Britain, China and the United States warn Japan that it must surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction".

Japan decides to "ignore" the ultimatum, although the word used - -- mokusatsu -- also translates as "no comment".

- Hiroshima and Nagasaki -

On August 6 the US B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" drops a 9,000-pound atomic bomb over Hiroshima at 8:15 am, killing 140,000 people by the end of December, according to a widely accepted toll. Truman tells Japanese leaders that if they do not surrender "they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth".

On August 8, the Soviet Union declares war on Japan.

On August 9, a second atomic bomb explodes over Nagasaki at 11:02 am, killing 74,000 people.

On August 15, Japanese Emperor Hirohito tells his nation it has lost the war. He remains on the throne during post-war reconstruction of the country.

- First Soviet bomb -

On August 29, 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are destroyed, the Soviet Union successfully tests its own atomic bomb in Kazakhstan and becomes the world's second nuclear power.

burs/ang-jmy/kh-sah/jah

NYT PHOTOS
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/world/asia/hiroshima-nagasaki-japan-photos.html


© 2020 AFP

#HIROSHIMA75
BIRTH OF THE ATOMIC AGE
'Unspeakable horror': the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Issued on: 06/08/2020

Japan this week marks the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Handout Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/AFP/File

Tokyo (AFP)

Japan on Thursday marked 75 years since the world's first atomic bomb attack, which killed around 140,000 people in Hiroshima and left many more deeply traumatised and even stigmatised.

A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing another 74,000 people.

Here are some facts about the devastating attacks:


- The bombs -

The first atomic bomb was dropped on the western city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 by the US bomber Enola Gay.

The bomb was nicknamed "Little Boy" but its impact was anything but small.

It detonated about 600 metres from the ground, with a force equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, and killed 140,000 people.

Tens of thousands died instantly, while others succumbed to injuries or illness in the weeks, months and years that followed.

Three days later the US dropped a second bomb, dubbed "Fat Man", on the city of Nagasaki, killing another 74,000 people.

The attacks remain the only time atomic bombs have been used in wartime.

- The attacks -

When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the first thing people noticed was an "intense ball of fire" according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Temperatures near the blast reached an estimated 7,000 degrees Celsius (12,600 Fahrenheit), which caused fatal burns within a radius of about three kilometres (five miles).

ICRC experts say there were cases of temporary or permanent blindness due to the intense flash of light, and subsequent related damage such as cataracts.

A whirlwind of heat generated by the explosion also ignited thousands of fires that burned several square kilometres (miles) of the largely wooden city. A firestorm that consumed all available oxygen caused more deaths by suffocation.

It has been estimated that burn- and fire-related casualties accounted for more than half of the immediate deaths in Hiroshima.

The explosion generated an enormous shock wave that in some cases literally carried people away. Others were crushed to death inside collapsed buildings or injured or killed by flying debris.

"I remember the charred bodies of little children lying around the hypocentre area like black rocks," Koichi Wada, a witness who was 18 at the time of the Nagasaki attack, has said of the bombing.

- Radiation effects -

The bomb attacks unleashed radiation that proved deadly both immediately and over the longer term.

Radiation sickness was reported in the attack's aftermath by many who survived the initial blast and firestorm.

Acute radiation symptoms include vomiting, headaches, nausea, diarrhoea, haemorrhaging and hair loss, with radiation sickness fatal for many within a few weeks or months.

Bomb survivors, known as "hibakusha", also experienced longer-term effects including elevated risks of thyroid cancer and leukaemia, and both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have seen elevated cancer rates.

Of 50,000 radiation victims from both cities studied by the Japanese-US Radiation Effects Research Foundation, about 100 died of leukaemia and 850 suffered from radiation-induced cancers.

The group found no evidence however of a "significant increase" in serious birth defects among survivors' children.

- The aftermath -

The twin bombings dealt the final blow to imperial Japan, which surrendered on August 15, 1945, bringing an end to World War II.

Historians have debated whether the devastating bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion.

But those calculations meant little to survivors, many of whom battled decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that sometimes came with being a hibakusha.

Despite their suffering and their status as the first victims of the atomic age, many survivors were shunned -- in particular for marriage -- because of prejudice over radiation exposure.

Survivors and their supporters have become some of the loudest and most powerful voices opposing the use of nuclear weapons, meeting world leaders in Japan and overseas to press their case.

Last year, Pope Francis met several hibakusha on visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, paying tribute to the "unspeakable horror" suffered by victims of the attacks.

In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima. He offered no apology for the attack, but embraced survivors and called for a world free of nuclear weapons.

© 2020 AFP

India appoints veteran politician in-charge 

of restive OCCUPIED Kashmir

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

Thursday, 06 Aug 2020 

Barbed wire is seen laid on a deserted road during restrictions in Srinagar, August 5, 2019. — Reuters 

SRINAGAR, Aug 6 — India's federal government named a former telecoms minister today to lead the restive region of Kashmir, where it hopes to accelerate economic development and end years of strife.

Manoj Sinha, a leader in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party, will replace career bureaucrat G.C. Murmu as lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir, a government statement said.

The appointment came a day after authorities ensured that the first anniversary of the revocation of Kashmir's constitutional autonomy passed off without any street protests amid heavy deployment of police and restrictions on public movement.

Last August, Modi's government removed special privileges accorded to Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, took away its statehood and split it into two federally-administered territories by carving out Buddhist-dominated Ladakh.

The move angered Kashmiris as well as Pakistan. India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Today, anti-India militants shot dead a village council head from Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party in Kashmir's Kulgam district, police said.

“He was shot multiple times outside his residence,” a police officer said. — Reuters

Human trials of virus vaccine set to begin in Indonesia

Thursday, 06 Aug 2020 03:22 PM MYT

Minister of State Owned Enterprises Erick Thohir tours the vaccine production facility at the Bio Farma office, amid the Covid-19 outbreak in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia August 4, 2020. — Antara Foto via Reuters

BANDUNG, Aug 6 — Human trials on a potential coronavirus vaccine are due to start in Indonesia next week as part of a collaboration between state-owned pharmaceutical company Bio Farma and China's Sinovac Biotech Ltd, a senior researcher said.

The launch of the vaccine trial comes as Indonesia has struggled to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, with a consistently escalating nuustber of cases.

The phase 3 clinical trial is set to begin on Aug. 11 and will involve 1,620 volunteers aged between 18 and 59, Professor Kusnandi Rusmil, head researcher at Bandung’s Padjadjaran University, told reporters.

Half of the participants will receive the vaccine over a six-month period, while the rest will receive a placebo, he said, noting 800 volunteers had been signed up so far.

“We want to have our vaccines so we can use it for our people,” Rusmil told reporters.

As of yesterday, Indonesia had recorded 116,871 coronavirus infections and 5,432 deaths — the highest in East Asia.

The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a global race for a vaccine, with more than 100 in development and about a dozen already being tested on humans.

As Indonesia seeks to stem an ongoing wave of infections, the government has been vocal about the need to secure sufficient supplies of a vaccine amid concerns some nations may miss out.

Erick Thohir, Indonesia’s minister for state-owned enterprises, sought to reassure the public this week, saying that Bio Farma would be ready by year-end to produce 250 million doses a year should the Sinovac vaccine prove successful.

The Sinovac trial is one of several collaborations to produce a vaccine underway in the world's fourth-most populous nation. — Reuters