Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Book about the world’s most successful art thieves

July 30, 2024July 8, 2024 by philg

Let me recommend The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, a book about a French couple who stole roughly $2 billion (in pre-Biden dollars). Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus hit smaller museums over a 7-year period and hauled everything back to their apartment to enjoy. Since they didn’t try to sell anything, they were tough to catch, but of course they eventually were which is why we have the book (guess which one went to prison and which one successfully escaped by claiming to have been a victim under the control of the other).

Here’s the kind of thing that they might have stolen. I saw it at the North Carolina Museum of Art while I was reading the book and thought that it would look great in the glass display cabinet of any Indiana Jones fan:

(Raleigh-Durham has become an Islamic area, but the museum has a sizable collection of Judaica.)

Breitweiser had a Swiss Army knife and Anne-Catherine had a huge purse. This was sufficient equipment for all of the thefts (which occurred perhaps just a few years before it would have been straightforward to attach an RFID tag to everything in a museum and then put sensors at all of the exits).

Breitweiser points out that art in a museum, rather than a private home, is unnatural:

He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place. He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline. Guided tour groups armed with selfie-stick shanks seem to rumble through rooms like chain gangs. Everything you want to do in the presence of a compelling piece is forbidden in a museum, says Breitwieser. What you first want to do, he advises, is relax, pillowed in a sofa or armchair. Sip a drink, if you desire. Eat a snack. Reach out and caress the work whenever you wish. Then you’ll see art in a new way.

The scale and pace of the thefts:

In the spring and summer of 1995, only a year after their first museum theft together, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine find an incredible rhythm. They steal at a pace as fast as any known art-crime spree has been committed, outside of wartime. They hop between Switzerland and France, trying to keep at least an hour’s drive, and preferably two or three, between any places they hit. Even if they have to visit a couple of spots, museums are everywhere in Europe. And about three out of every four weekends, they successfully steal—a seventeenth-century oil painting of a war scene, an engraved battle-ax, a decorative hatchet, another crossbow. A sixteenth-century portrait of a bearded man. A floral-patterned serving dish. A brass pharmacy scale with little brass weights.

My favorite individual theft described in the book is a crime within a crime:

“Thief!” A word that no thief ever wants to hear shouted at him—shrieked—cuts through the bubbly conversations of the art-buying crowd at the European Fine Art Fair in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht. “Thief!” Even though he’s not stealing at the moment, Breitwieser flinches before realizing that the shouts are not directed at him. He watches as security officers rumble down the carpeted lane between booths. Heads in the exhibition hall turn. A thudding tackle and muffled blows bring even the owners out of their lounge-like areas. Richard Green, the iconic London dealer who is always granted prime placement at the fair, looks on, cigar in his mouth, as the thief is subdued and escorted away, the stolen item recovered. Entertainment over, Green returns to his stand, Renaissance oils arranged on pedestals, prices climbing from a million dollars. The dealer then discovers that one of his pedestals has a large empty space. Breitwieser’s giddy thought, as he and Anne-Catherine pull out of the parking lot a few minutes later, is that his car is currently worth more than the Lamborghinis they pass, if you include the souvenir in their trunk. The frame’s still attached, despite his stealing requirement; freak situations have their own set of rules. The artwork, an innovative 1676 unstill still life by Jan van Kessel the Elder, butterflies flitting around a bouquet of flowers, had hooked Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine from the art-show aisle, well outside Green’s booth. He’d never seen anything like it. The colors were incandescent. The work reeled them into the booth, through a mirage of shimmering hues that seemed impossible until they realized, up close, that the piece had been painted on a thin sheet of copper.

The European Fine Art Fair is a good place to covet items, though not to steal. The security unit is professional, with some undercover, Breitwieser says. Also, a potential deal breaker for Breitwieser, attendees are often searched at the exit, sales documents required. The copper painting sang to him and Green’s comeuppance felt ordained, but attempting a theft with almost zero chance of success is only the act of a fool. Providentially, a fool appeared as if on cue. With two piercing shouts, the fair shifted. The booths nearly emptied as the rubbernecking crested. Breitwieser was as surprised as anyone. Yet in the commotion that followed, he ascended into a sort of art-stealing nirvana, seemingly able to visualize the whole crime from above. The guards at the exit, he intuited, would abandon their post to assist the arrest. He’d bet a prison term on it.

The book says that there are roughly 50,000 art thefts per year, worldwide, with a total value in the single-digit $billions.

If you’d wondered about the veracity of Les Miserables…

In Switzerland, the guards had called him “Mr. Breitwieser.” In France, they shout his inmate number.

Within months of his arrest, the girlfriend has moved on. She’s pregnant with another man’s child and testifies against Breitwieser:

Anne-Catherine, dressed in a long black skirt, is called to testify after his mother, and she doubles down on total denial. She testifies, in a timid voice that Breitwieser says he’s never before heard, that she had not noticed any Renaissance works in the attic. She wasn’t present on his road trips. She never saw any art in his car. The two of them barely dated, she says. They were more like acquaintances. “He scared me,” says Anne-Catherine. Every day she was with him, she felt like his hostage. “He tormented me.”

(The hostage drove away from the apartment most mornings in a car and returned in the evening.)

More: Read The Art Thief.

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Hanna Reitsch’s kamikaze dream

July 29, 2024July 5, 2024 by philg

A third post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg.

The Germans were great at innovation, but the Allies built so many old tech bombers and escort fighters that it was tough for the Germans to exploit their innovations. Regarding 1943:

The Peenemünde facility had been established in the 1930s by Wernher von Braun. A political conformist brought up with right-wing, nationalist values, Braun had joined the Party in 1937, and the SS three years later. After graduating with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied physics, he persuaded the military to fund a development centre at Peenemünde: a location his mother had recommended, knowing it from her husband’s duck-shooting holidays.*

By April 1943 the threat of V-weapons had been prioritized [by the English], and the ‘Bodyline’ organization was convened to develop a response. Peenemünde was now identified as the principal research facility. Working in shifts around the clock, and largely sustained by Spam sandwiches and coffee, Constance Babington Smith’s team was on alert to look out for anything ‘queer’ that might be a long-range gun, a remotely controlled rocket aircraft, or ‘some sort of tube … out of which a rocket could be squirted’.

Peenemünde was [raided in August 1943] with wave after wave of bombers passing over the site without any aerial counter-attack. … British Bomber Command had sent a massive assault force of 597 aircraft to drop between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of high explosives on Peenemünde in Operation Hydra. This was almost the entire bomber fleet – an enormous risk for one mission. Surprise was paramount to mitigate that risk. Once fed and briefed, the RAF pilots had been sworn to secrecy and locked into their hangars. Regular bombing raids on Berlin had been undertaken in the weeks before, in the hope that the Germans would assume this was still the target. A ‘spoof attack’ on the capital by British Mosquitoes was also planned; and fine strips of metal ‘window’ were dropped to blind the German radar.

Five days before Christmas [1943], the US Eighth Air Force started to bomb the V-1 launch sites in northern France, to prevent a winter attack. Eventually they would obliterate every one. ‘The first round of the battle against the flying bomb was an overwhelming victory for the Allies,’ Babington Smith wrote with some flourish.

Without the P-51 Mustang to provide long-range escort, these types of raids required incredible bravery. Forty British aircraft were shot down after the Germans figured out what was going on and sent fighters from Berlin. The bombings made the typical German understand that continued armed conflict wasn’t going to be effective. Hanna came to the same conclusion, but responded differently:

… as the aerial bombing of Germany intensified, civilian morale plummeted and the regime had to apply increasing oppression and compulsion to maintain order. Over the course of 1943, the German courts passed more than a hundred death sentences every week on citizens deemed guilty of defeatism or sabotage.

Unlike Melitta, Hanna had never doubted the aims of the Nazi regime. Even she, however, had now lost faith in the promised certain victory. ‘One after another, towns and cities were crumpling under the Allied air attacks,’ she wrote. ‘The transport system and the production centres were being systematically destroyed … the death toll continually mounted.’

Hanna knew that the precision of these air attacks was critical to the success of her plan. Melitta’s work with dive-sights and dive-bombing techniques had greatly improved accuracy, but Hanna had something more radical in mind. She wanted pilots, potentially including herself, to guide their missiles right down to the point of impact – without pulling out. With shipping targets, one paper outlined, ‘the plane was expected to shatter upon impact with the water, killing the pilot instantly and allowing the bomb to tear loose from the plane to continue under the keel of the vessel, where it would explode’.9 Although the pilots ‘would be volunteering for certain death’, Hanna added, ‘it would be no task for mere dare-devils … nor for blind fanatics, nor for the disenchanted and the life-weary who might see here a chance to make a theatrical exit …’ What was needed, she felt, were measured and honourable men, ‘ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved’.

Why everyone needs a marketing expert:

[Hanna] named the fledgling plan ‘Operation Suicide’.

It seems that having a wife and kids drove at least some men to think of suicide…

Nevertheless, as word of Hanna’s proposed suicide squadron spread, she began to receive discreet enquiries from other zealous pilots, enthused by the thought of sacrificing their lives for Hitler’s Germany. Encouraged, Hanna sought out more volunteers. ‘We found them everywhere,’ she wrote with satisfaction. Most ‘were married and fathers of families and were robust, uncomplicated individuals. As they saw it, the sacrifice of their lives would be as nothing compared with the millions, both soldiers and civilians, who would die if the war was allowed to continue.’

Adolf Hitler was a moderate compared to Hanna Reitsch and pointed out that “There was no precedent in German history and the German public would not stand for it.” Hanna eventually wore him down, however, and she was allowed to work on her pet project. The suicide machine was going to be an air-launched V-1:

Various test and training versions of the manned V-1 had now been developed. Some had twin seats and dual controls for instructor and student, while others were single-seaters. Most had power units and all had landing skids, but landing even an unarmed V-1 remained extremely hazardous. ‘Pilots of an average ability could never be certain of surviving the attempt,’ Hanna wrote bluntly.

By the time that Hanna and Skorzeny reached Rechlin, a prototype V-1 was already ‘nestled’, as Skorzeny described it, under the wing of a Heinkel He 111 bomber, ready for take-off. All went well as the Heinkel lifted from the ground and began its ascent. When the V-1 pilot detached his machine from the bomber, Hanna watched it ‘drop away … like some small, swift bird’. The V-1 flew at twice the speed of its Heinkel mother-plane, tearing away through the sky. After a few wide circles it began a smooth descent. Suddenly the pilot lost control. Moments later the V-1 crashed to earth, its point of impact marked by ‘a column of black smoke rising in the summer air’. While most of the observers still stood watching in horror, Skorzeny impatiently called for another test pilot, before striding off. ‘Always a gentleman …’ Hanna later defended him: Skorzeny ‘demanded more from himself than from his men … [and] won the hearts of the soldiers committed to his care’. Incredibly, although badly injured, the V-1 pilot had survived. The crash was blamed on manual error. A second attempt, the next day, brought a similar result. According to Skorzeny, when the Air Ministry ordered an end to the programme, Hanna ‘could scarcely hold back her tears’.

Hanna persuaded the SS hero Skorzeny to let her fly the machine herself:

Despite her rubber-lined leather helmet, Hanna must have been deafened by the noise of the Heinkel’s engine and the battering of the slipstream on the V-1 as she was dragged into the air. Nevertheless, her release was perfect. As the V-1 engine began to stutter, Hanna dropped from her host and pushed the tiny missile to its cruising speed of around 375 mph. ‘The handling of the machine and its beautiful circles soon showed what an amazing pilot this girl was,’ Skorzeny noted in admiration. Nevertheless he still broke into a cold sweat as Hanna brought the V-1 spiralling down. Since the missile was not designed to land, once the engine cut out she found it cumbersome, gliding down steeply, ‘like a piano’. Moments later she managed a fast but smooth touchdown on her skids, blowing up clouds of dust across the tarmac. ‘Nothing wrong with it at all,’ she proudly told the engineers who rushed up to meet her. Milch reportedly ‘turned pale’ when told of the unauthorized test but, as Skorzeny emphasized, ‘both the idea and the machine had been vindicated’. ‘Passed without incident,’ Hanna recorded simply in her flight report. She and Skorzeny were jubilant, and the project was given clearance to proceed.

The Normandy invasion rendered the project moot because Germany needed all of her pilots for defense.

The Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg:

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Returning to the U.S. from Portugal

July 28, 2024July 7, 2024 by philg

That last of a multi-part series on our three-week June 2024 trip to Portugal (Lisbon and points north)…

The Porto airport is gleaming and quite efficient. Our passports were checked once during luggage check-in, once at an immigration barrier set up on the way to the gates that serve non-EU destinations, and once more at the gate. Except for the final check at the gate, this was all done without a wait on a Friday before a 9:00 am flight (might not have gone as well on a Sunday when the British are returning from their weekend escapes).

The check-in counters still have their Plexiglas coronapanic barriers and, as in Get Smart, humans respond in the predictable way of leaning to one side of it so that they’re able to hear each other:

To my delight, I found a handful of Scientists in the terminal, voluntarily packing themselves into 100-percent full airliners while relying on 3-cent masks to prevent becoming infected with a deadly aerosol virus. Here’s one in University of Virginia Statistics logo wear:

(And he/she/ze/they is wearing a murse?)

Here are a couple more:

The reintegration into a Rainbow-first society begins as soon as a passengers steps onto the United flight. The seatback video screen promotes exactly one class of movies to a passenger who doesn’t touch the screen and search by category:

The Out and Proud collection is all about “modern love”, so the child who views the screen might reasonably infer that a non-LGBTQ+ situation represented “obsolete love”. We landed and were greeted by a “masks mandatory” sign:

After nearly a one-hour wait to clear immigration, it was time for the kids to get a refresher on America’s state religion:

(As noted in a previous post, given that our passports were examined three times prior to departure by qualified Portuguese personnel, why can’t the U.S. just wave in anyone holding up a U.S. passport? That’s how it is done when people disembark a cruise ship in Miami. The U.S. immigration bureaucrats feel comfortable, apparently, relying on Royal Caribbean’s ability to keep track of passengers and their passports.)

We went to a secret restaurant in Newark that is reserved for at least moderately frequent United flyers. I told the kids to go into a public restaurant and tell the staff “We don’t want to eat here. We want to eat somewhere secret.” Everything was going smoothly until they noticed the CNN screen with the word “Trump” continuously displayed (see Do CNN viewers think that Donald Trump is a god? but it also might have been because we landed a day after the first Biden-Trump debate of the 2024 election). The 10-year-old asked me who I thought would win the election. I said that Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice among the Republicans and that it was impossible for me to predict how other Americans might vote, but Biden’s promises of student loan forgiveness and other free stuff was going to be very popular with many voters. (Whenever politics comes up, I remind them that people who situated differently will rationally vote differently and that, for example, their unionized public school teachers are almost certainly going to vote for Biden and they should respect that.) As I hadn’t sufficiently condemned Donald Trump, a couple of elite New Yorkers at a nearby table stepped in to tell the kids that Donald Trump was a convicted felon and that his crimes were too disgusting for them to even hear about (what is the right age for a child to learn about the world’s oldest profession and Donald Trump’s alleged customer status?) and that he was “a racist”. So the kids ended up learning quite a bit about the elite Democrat political faith just while changing planes (even the simplest mask can prevent respiratory virus infection; the Rainbow Flag worship, and the blind rage regarding Donald Trump).

Our Honda Odyssey was waiting for us in the PBI garage (somewhat more expensive than an Uber round-trip, but worth it, I felt, for the shade (our car would otherwise have been on the street or in our driveway)) and, unlike the Sixt rental Mercedes, started right up despite having sat for three weeks.

We got to the house around midnight Portugal time (same as London), but discovered that the upstairs A/C system had shut down. It had been professionally serviced three months earlier, but there was what looked like white jello growing in the condensate drain. I borrowed my engineer neighbor’s Shop Vac with custom PVC connector and managed to clear the clog. The next day… a second air handler shut down with the same issue. I vacuumed out all three lines (significant gunk and water from each) and scheduled an appointment with the professionals… I think what needs to be done in a compressed air/CO2/nitrogen blowout starting at the air handler every 3 months. Plus maybe an IV drip.

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Portugal Diary 7 (Ponte de Lima, Braga, and Porto)

July 27, 2024July 7, 2024 by philg

Ponte de Lima is on the way back from Santiago de Compostela. It’s notable for being one of the oldest towns in Portugal (the bridge goes back to Roman times, for example) and also for being one of the flattest that I found. If you’re tired of having to walk up and down hills just to go to the supermarket, this might be a worthy base of operations. Here’s what it looks like from across the Roman/Medieval eponymous bridge:

The town is part of the coastal Camino from Porto to Santiago de Compostela:

It looks like one can walk (or maybe also bike?) about 70 km on a trail along the riverbank. I found a sign indicating that the north bank path abeam the town was at km 21 of an “ecovia”:

The town has a lot of the usual good stuff of a Portuguese town, including an attractive main square and what looked like a lot of good restaurants. They were running, across the river, an international garden festival, and there was some sort of celebration (on a Monday afternoon) that required a marching band in town.

Speaking of town festivals, we arrived in Braga, Portugal’s 7th largest city, for the end of the annual São João de Braga festival. This has been going on for about 900 years, ever since the establishment of a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The town has a famous cathedral, inside which I found some of the statues that had been carried in processions:

Braga’s star attraction is a 15-minute drive from the center: Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Maybe it is my Jewish heritage, but I can’t figure out why a place would be named for “Good Jesus”. There is no Catholic group that believes in a “Bad Jesus”, right? You’ll want to park at (or Uber to) the top and walk down the stairs, then take the water-counterbalance-driven funicular up.

Side chapels as you walk down the stairs depict events towards the end of Jesus’s life:

There is a beautiful garden above the sanctuary. Just walk uphill.

Braga is nice, but it wasn’t our favorite overnight stop. The pedestrian streets downtown would be great for meeting up with friends and hanging out, but we didn’t have any friends. Braga does have what I think is a private celebration of progressive causes, e.g., Interseccionalidade and Free Palestine:

After two nights in town, we drove out via a beautiful McDonald’s that was absolutely empty for breakfast (possibly just a single lady working). The Portuguese have yet to adopt American breakfast customs, apparently.

We returned out rental Mercedes at Sixt by the Porto airport (mournful saga) and Ubered to downtown. Maybe we’d been spoiled by our time in the Portuguese mountains, but the old town seemed absolutely overrun with tourists. Here’s the train station with its famous tile art:

Would you like to go to a bookstore that inspired J.K. Rowling? Here’s what Livraria Lello looks like inside (Wikipedia):

You’ll need to pay between 8 and 45 euros online, however, and then wait in line for a while before you can begin your shopping process. Here’s what the line looked at around noon on a weekday:

Note that the infamous TERF herself says that she never went to this bookstore, but is someone who denies the miracle of gender transformation a credible source on any subject?

There’s an important church nearby. Here’s the line to get into that one…

Keep in mind that we were there in June and the peak tourist season is July-August. Locals said that the crowds would get much much worse. We found a good escape in the Serralves Foundation, a huge hilly garden (walk down; elevator up) with a contemporary art museum in a residential area. Once you’re there, it is a 30-minute walk or quick Uber ride to the mouth of the Douro River. This is a high quality beach by European standards, though the water is much too rough and/or cold by Florida standards.

We finished our trip with the classic Francesinha dish:

We could have had a second one for breakfast at the airport (well, maybe they don’t serve it all day, despite the name):

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A modern marriage and child-rearing story

July 26, 2024July 6, 2024 by philg

“A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave” (The Free Press) is worth reading for the window that it provides into modern American marriage.

We consider ourselves smarter and more evolved than people in the past, but the story starts with a successful 33-year-old man deciding to reject 10,000+ years of human convention and marry a woman old enough to be a grandmother:

Catherine Youssef met Allan Kassenoff in New York City in 2005. He was an upstart, 33-year-old patent litigator; she was an associate at his law firm, four years his senior, and had already served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

She would start trying to have her first child, in other words, in her late 30s.

After they got married, Catherine wanted kids “ASAP,” Allan told me; she wanted to do IVF straight away, he said, before they’d even started trying naturally. He wanted to have kids, but he also wanted to at least try to get pregnant without medical intervention, given the expense of IVF—but Allan caved, he said, because Catherine, who was nearing 40, was so adamant. Allan says they underwent several rounds of IVF, estimating that in total the couple spent upward of $200,000 on fertility treatments.

Then, less than two years into their marriage, Catherine was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer and received treatment. According to her therapy records, which Catherine shared with her suicide note, she later told a therapist that Allan “showed that he was not good at handling stress” during this time.

While she recovered, the Kassenoffs decided to adopt. They contacted an adoption attorney, who matched them with a woman in Florida who was pregnant but unable to look after a baby; in July 2009, the Kassenoffs became parents to Ally, who was delivered to them straight from the hospital where she was born.

Soon thereafter, Allan says Catherine wanted to try IVF again—and threatened to do it “with or without me.”

He went along with it, but told me he was “nervous, because of how bad our relationship was.” He didn’t think bringing another child into the family was “the best thing in the world.”

This time, the IVF worked: less than a year after she adopted Ally, Catherine got pregnant. The Kassenoffs’ second daughter, Charley, was born in February 2011—and was quickly followed by a third, JoJo, in August 2013.

So… adoption throughout human history was mostly done in the context of strong family bonds, right? A man might adopt a nephew or niece or the children of a widow whom he married. Getting hold of a baby from a stranger 1,000 miles away is a new idea, I think. Obviously, IVF is also a relatively new idea.

I don’t want to spoil the article, but the mom in this story turns out to be unethical and takes tremendous risks. What job does she get?

But by March 2015 she was employed again, working for Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Special Counsel for Ethics, Risk, and Compliance.

The au pair turns out to have the clearest perspective on the situation:

Celine Dublanchet, who became the Kassenoffs’ au pair in October 2016, also made disturbing allegations about Catherine. According to court documents, Dublanchet said Catherine once locked Ally [the adopted child], then 7, in the basement by herself for two hours as a punishment, and on another occasion made Ally go outside alone after dark to “clean the garden” in the middle of winter.

Dublanchet claimed that Ally slept on a mattress on the floor in her room, while the other two children [the genetic offspring] slept in Catherine’s bed every night. Every morning, she told me, Ally had to make her mother’s bed.

“Ally was Cinderella,” Dublanchet later wrote to the court, “her two sisters Anastasia and Drizella, and Catherine the horrible stepmother.”

The wife seems to be aware of “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” in family court:

After a trip to the hospital on May 11, 2019, Catherine texted a friend: “If I had a mark or a bruise or something, it would be easy.”

“You don’t need a bruise to divorce him,” the friend texted back.

“Just to get full custody,” Catherine replied.

On May 15, 2019—mere days after Catherine sent the text that began, “If I had a mark or a bruise”—Allan says his eldest daughter went to school and told her teachers that her dad had kicked her a couple of days earlier. The school immediately launched a Child Protective Services investigation.

The next morning, Saturday, May 18, Allan woke to an email from Catherine’s friend Wayne Baker, informing him that she had obtained an order of protection, barring Allan from contacting her or the kids. Allan says he believes the entire story about “the kick” was fabricated by Catherine, and she told Ally exactly what to say to school officials—all so that she could get custody of the kids.

When I asked Ally—now almost 15—about it, she supported Allan’s version of events, saying her dad had not kicked her; what she’d said to the school wasn’t true. “My mom told me to, like, always say bad stuff about my dad,” she told me.

The article provides a window into what it costs to settle the question of who gets the cash-yielding children in a U.S. family court (in a European country, the cost is often minimal because the law specifies a custody arrangement that is difficult to deviate from and child support profits are capped so there isn’t a huge financial incentive to get hold of the kids).

The judge also appointed psychologist Marc Abrams—who had worked in the Westchester County courts system for over two decades—to offer a neutral assessment of the parents and recommend a custody agreement. Though the report is confidential, Abrams revealed during a July 2020 temporary custody trial that he recommended Allan have sole custody of the kids—and that he believed Catherine had an “unspecified personality disorder.”

Catherine, along with two other women, filed complaints against Marc Abrams, the psychologist who recommended Allan have custody, alleging professional misconduct and inappropriate behavior toward women. Abrams denies these allegations, calling them and any others “defamatory.” After an investigation, the panel of court-approved mental health professionals removed him, meaning he could no longer provide court evaluations—a lucrative gig, with each case paying around $50,000.

That’s just for the psychologist. What about the divorce litigators? The article just says “after millions of dollars, and over 3,000 court filings, the divorce still hadn’t been finalized.” (The decision to get married also cost the man his $1 million/year job and career.)

For the full story, which has quite a few additional twists, read “A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave”.

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Santiago de Compostela and End Stage Christianity

July 25, 2024July 6, 2024 by philg

Santiago de Compostela is the holiest Christian site in Europe, being the supposed burial place of St. James, and pilgrims have been walking there for more than 1,000 years. Suppose that a pilgrim spends a weeks or months walking from France or Portugal to this sacred site, what does the committed Christian find on entering the old city? An official rainbow crosswalk and streets covered in sacred Rainbow Flags:

Here’s a different crosswalk in which we can see the directional sign for the Camino and a Rainbow-enhanced crosswalk in the same frame (multiple pilgrimage routes enter the city at different points):

Suppose that the tired pilgrim wants to rest in a park and be fresh before transitioning (so to speak) over this sacred pavement?

The rested pilgrim will walk past a Queers for Palestine display after entering the city:

The Praza do Obradoiro, adjacent to the Cathedral, is the traditional gathering place for pilgrims. It has been decorated with two Joe Biden-style official trans-enhanced Rainbow Flags (the “True Flag”?):

What if the pilgrim wants some ideas from the city’s official tourist office, a few steps from the Cathedral?

Perhaps the Christian pilgrim is tired and needs refreshment? It will be served by someone in a sacred outfit:

Pilgrims can dine with an overhead canopy of Rainbow Flags:

If they have money left over, they can buy souvenirs:

A variety of stores practice Rainbow-first Retail:

(“Orgullo” means “Pride” in Spanish)

Can the pilgrim prepare for the rigors of Rainbow Flag worship while on the road? Absolutely! If the pilgrim happens to walk through Celanova, Spain, for example, he/she/ze/they will find that the former monastery is now a town hall and that a Rainbow Flag is larger and higher than any of the government flags (tough to see because it had been rolled up by the wind, but it is in the upper right corner):

There were rainbow flags in Ourense as well, but Pontevedra, Spain has gone a little farther with its town hall:

The transition from traditional Christian to Queers for Palestine is encapsulated neatly in Pontevedra in which pro-Palestinian graffiti is adjacent to a ruined monastery:

A clothing store in Pontevedra practices Rainbow-first Retail:

Based on the above, is it fair to conclude that the inevitable End Stage of European Christianity is Rainbow Flagism and/or Queers for Palestine? Spaniards were willing to fight for centuries to make the Iberian peninsula completely Christian. Now Spain is covered in the sacred symbols of Rainbow Flagism and is on track for a conversion to Islam via immigration demographics.

For readers who ask “Didn’t you take pictures of anything other than rainbow flags in Santiago de Compostela?” here are some photos inside the Cathedral (get there 45 minutes prior to a mass if you want a seat, even though there are at least four masses per day; no need to dress up because the masses accommodate pilgrims who might have arrived dusty):

Here’s the apparently-never-used front entrance:

Don’t skip the Cathedral Museum because it gives you the chance to look over the main square where the pilgrims gather underneath the Trans-enhanced Rainbow Flags. Try not to show up on a Sunday afternoon/Monday morning as I did because most of the museums are closed all day Monday and may close early on Sunday. I had especially wanted to go to the pilgrimage museum, but will have to some that for another Pride.

Here’s an image taken from a balcony that is accessible only from the Cathedral Museum:

Does it make sense to do the pilgrimage? I’m not sure if modern pilgrims have mental space to reflect the way that pilgrims did 1000, 500, or even 50 years ago. Why not? The smartphone. If you’re getting emails about bills, projects at your house, things happening at work, etc., you’re not in the same mental place as a Christian pilgrim was in the pre-smartphone era. One group that I met seemed to have combined some of the best of the old and new worlds. They signed up for a tour with Active Adventures and eight of them were guided and shuttled over a monthlong pilgrimage route in a little more than a week, starting in Bilbao. When the (French) Camino was an interesting and peaceful footpath they walked (8-10 miles per day). When the Camino coincided with a boring/busy road, they hopped a shuttle bus.

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Hanna Reitsch flying helicopters and jets

July 24, 2024July 5, 2024 by philg

A second post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg. This supplies some detail about Hanna Reitsch’s pioneer flights in the world’s first practical helicopter.

One day [in September 1937], however, Karl Franke asked Hanna to fly him over to the Focke-Wulf factory at Bremen where he was due to take up one of the world’s first helicopters, the precarious-looking Focke-Wulf Fw 61, for a test flight. Professor Henrich Focke’s pioneering machine had overcome the two fundamental problems facing autogyro and helicopter designers: the asymmetric lift caused by the imbalance of power between the advancing and retreating ‘air-listing screws’, or rotor blades, and the tendency for the helicopter’s body to rotate in the opposite direction to its rotors. The solution was to use two three-bladed rotors, turning in opposite directions, which were fixed up on outriggers, like small scaffolding towers, in place of wings. An open cockpit sat below. It was not an elegant design; some papers described it as looking ‘like a cross between a windmill and a bicycle’, but it worked. According to Hanna, when she landed at Bremen with Karl Franke, Focke wrongly assumed that she was there to give him a second opinion. Seeing that she was ‘brimming with joy’ at the thought of taking the helicopter up, Franke was generous enough not to disabuse the great designer. Franke flew the machine first, as a precaution keeping it tethered to the ground by a few yards of rope. Unfortunately this also trapped him in reflected turbulence, buffeting the helicopter about. Such an anchor did not appeal to Hanna. Before she took her turn she had the rope disconnected and a simple white circle painted on the ground around the machine to guide her. As Hanna later recounted the story, with typical lack of false modesty, ‘within three minutes, I had it’. From now on Franke would argue that, in Germany, Hanna and Udet were the ‘only two people who were divinely gifted flyers’. The Fw 61’s vertical ascent to 300 feet, ‘like an express elevator’, with its noisy mechanical rotors literally pulling the machine up through the air, was completely different from the long tows needed by gliders, or even the shorter runs required to generate lift by engine-powered planes. To Hanna it was like flying in a new dimension. Despite the heavy vibrations that shook the whole airframe as she slowly opened the throttle, the revolutionary control of her position in the airspace at once fascinated and thrilled her, while the machine’s sensitivity and manoeuvrability was ‘intoxicating!’ ‘I thought of the lark,’ she wrote, ‘so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields.’ Hanna had become the first woman in the world to fly a helicopter.

(the above section is extensively referenced)

That February [1938], Germany was showcasing a range of Mercedes-Benz sports cars as well as revealing plans for the forthcoming ‘Volkswagen’ to an international audience at the prestigious Berlin Motor Show. ‘The story of the Berlin exhibition since National Socialism came to power,’ the national press fawned, ‘has been an uninterrupted triumph.’ Hitler wanted to use the 1938 show as more than a trade fair. It was to be a demonstration of German engineering excellence for unprecedented numbers of visitors. For this he needed a star attraction. Hanna was booked to head the programme: she was to be the first person in the world to fly a helicopter inside a building. The theme of the motor show was Germany’s lost colonies: ‘at that time a much ventilated grievance’, Hanna noted. In preparation, the great Deutschlandhalle sports stadium, then the world’s largest arena, had been furnished with palm trees, flamingos, a carpet of sand and, in Hanna’s words, ‘a Negro village and other exotic paraphernalia’. This was the scene she was to rise above in the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 helicopter: a symbol of German power and control. At first Hanna was scheduled to make only the inaugural flight, after which the chief Focke-Wulf pilot, Karl Bode, was to take over. During a demonstration for Luftwaffe generals, however, knowing that the helicopter’s sensitivity meant any slight miscalculation could take him sweeping into the audience, Bode refused to risk rising more than a few feet above the ground. It was safe, but hardly impressive enough for the crowds who would be looking down from the galleries of steeply tiered seating. Then, through no fault of Bode’s, one of the propellers broke. ‘It was dreadful,’ Hanna told Elly. ‘There were splinters from the rotor blade flying around and the flamingos were all creating.’9 Once the blades had been replaced, Hanna took her turn. With typical insouciance, she lifted the helicopter well above the recommended height and hovered in the gods. Göring quickly ordered that she was to make all the motor show flights. Bode never forgave her.

It turns out that the public back then didn’t love watching helicopters any more than they do now:

But when Hanna revved up the rotors [inside the stadium] she was horrified to discover that the machine refused to lift. The reputation of the Reich, her own career and, Hanna must have realized, possibly even her liberty, hung stuttering in the spotlights just a few inches above the floor. Surrounding her, watching every manoeuvre of both machine and pilot through a growing cloud of dirt and sand, were some 8,000 spectators, including many representatives of the international press. Hanna was certain that the problem was caused by the helicopter’s normally aspirated engine being starved of air by the breathing of the vast audience. Painful minutes passed while the technicians debated, but then the great hall’s doors were opened. Hanna and the Deutschland immediately ‘shot up to about twenty feet’ and slowly rotated on the spot. At first ‘the audience followed the flight intently’, but such a controlled display held little drama and the applause grew desultory. At the end of the demonstration Hanna neatly lowered the machine with her head held high, executed a perfectly timed, stiff-armed Nazi salute, and landed safely on her mark. She had practised this countless times for Udet while he sat comfortably ensconced in an armchair, puffing at a cigar.

(Maybe opening the doors reduced the temperature and, therefore, the density altitude?)

I had always thought that Hanna was the world’s first female jet pilot, but the book says that she likely never flew the Me 163 under power. (It’s actually a rocket-powered plane, but that’s close enough.) Her job was to test fly it in glider mode, which was how every flight in the plane ended. Nazi leadership did not want their star female pilot to be killed by the Me 163:

… the famous Me 163b Komet, was powered by extremely combustible twin fuels kept in tanks behind, and on either side of, the pilot’s seat. The fuels were a mixture of methanol alcohol, known as C-Stoff, and a hydrogen peroxide mixture, or T-Stoff. Just a few drops together could cause a violent reaction, so they were automatically injected into the plane’s combustion chamber through nozzles, where they ignited spontaneously producing a temperature of 1,800°C. Several test planes with unspent fuel blew up on touchdown. ‘If it had as much as half a cup of fuel left in its tank,’ one pilot reported, ‘it would blow itself into confetti, and the pilot with it.’ Several simply exploded in the air. Hydrogen peroxide alone was capable of spontaneous combustion when it came into contact with any organic material such as clothing, or a pilot. To protect themselves, test pilots wore specially developed white suits made from acid-resistant material, along with fur-lined boots, gauntlets and a helmet. Nevertheless, at least one pilot would be dissolved alive, after the T-Stoff feed-line became dislodged and the murderous fuels leaked into the cockpit where they seeped through the seams of his protective overalls. ‘His entire right arm had been dissolved by T-Agent. It just simply wasn’t there. There was nothing more left in the sleeve,’ the chief flight engineer reported. ‘The other arm, as well as the head, was nothing more than a mass of soft jelly.’

Hanna wasn’t scared by these deaths and injuries and tried to get into the powered test program. She was seriously injured even without the deadly fuel/engine:

Her Me 163b V5, carrying water ballast in place of fuel, was towed into the air behind a heavy twin-engined Me 110 fighter. But when Hanna came to release the undercarriage, the whole plane started to shudder violently. To make matters worse, her radio connection was also ‘kaput’.83 Red Very lights curving up towards her from below warned her something was seriously wrong. Unable to contact her tow-plane, she saw the observer signalling urgently with a white cloth, and noticed the pilot repeatedly dropping and raising his machine’s undercarriage. Clearly her own undercarriage had failed to jettison.

Hanna could have bailed out, but chose to try to preserve the airplane. She paid for this decision:

Hanna had fractured her skull in four places, broken both cheekbones, split her upper jaw, severely bruised her brain and, as one pilot put it, ‘completely wiped her nose off her face’.87 She had also broken several vertebrae. She was rushed to surgery but, knowing her arrival would cause a sensation, she insisted on travelling by car rather than ambulance, and on walking into the hospital through the quieter back entrance and up a flight of stairs before any members of staff were alerted.

In case you were tempted to complain about your own health woes:

Hanna spent five long months in hospital. After her condition stabilized, a series of pioneering operations included surgery to give her a new nose. Although she would always have a faint scar, and people who met her noted it was ‘evident something had happened there’, the reconstruction work was excellent.

Still suffering from headaches and severe giddiness, her first priority was to recover her sense of balance, without which she knew she could not fly. The summerhouse had a flight of narrow steps running from the ground up to the steep, gabled roof. Hanna climbed them cautiously until she could sit astride the ridge of the roof with her arms firmly clinging to the chimneystack, and look around without losing her balance. After a few weeks her vertigo began to ebb and she risked letting go of the chimney. Within a month, through pure determination, she could ease herself along the entire length of the ridge without feeling giddy. She built up her strength by walking, then hiking, through the forest. Despite setbacks and some despondency, in time she began to climb the pines, branch by branch, ruefully recalling the days of her childhood when ‘no tree had been too high’.

She was cleared to return to flying.

More: Read The Women Who Flew for Hitler.

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Portugal Diary 6 (Guimarães and Campo do Gerês)

July 23, 2024July 5, 2024 by philg

We went to the UNESCO World Heritage town of Guimarães on our way back into the mountains.

This place gets hit with bus tours that trek through the duke’s palace, for example. This might be where Hrothgar’s mead hall (Heorot) was!

It’s still very pleasant, though maybe an afternoon here is enough.

We drove up into Portugal’s only national park, Peneda-Gerês, via São Bento da Porta Aberta, an important Christian pilgrimage destination.

We arrived in what barely seemed like a village, Campo do Gerês, and stayed a few nights to walk in the surrounding mountains. The highlight of my trip, of course, was a visit to the town of Covide:

The weirdly narrow “house” is for storing grain safe from animals. Here’s the local cemetery:

It was in Covide that we found walking paths down which Google Maps tried to send us in the Mercedes E class. It was also there that we found a car with a great design for Europe’s ridiculously narrow and nonstandard roads:

The Citroen Cactus has Airbumps that can be sacrificed in the event of a scrape. Both Covide and Campo do Gerês are on the Caminho da Geira e dos Arrieiros, a 239 km route from Braga, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela.

Even if this path coincides with roads for cars, it’s likely hilly everywhere. The 28 km stretch above is particularly worrisome!

Campo do Gerês has a good museum on the Roman history of the area.

We did see some old Roman road sections and also columns in various places nearby.

There is a lot of good hiking and, for those who don’t mind cold water, swimming, around and in the reservoir impounded by the Vilarinho das Furnas Dam.

There is one hotel in Campo do Gerês, which has a good restaurant, and there are quite a few campgrounds and AirBnBs. The unpaved road alongside the reservoir has an excellent surface and is a good way to get to the border with Spain (a derelict unstaffed crossing).

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Celebrating Women in Aviation on the First Day of Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture)

July 22, 2024July 22, 2024 by philg

It’s the first day of EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the world’s largest fly-in and general celebration of aviation. In particular, there tends to be a lot of official celebration of women in aviation. Thus, today’s blog post is about the greatest female pilots in history, chronicled in the book The Women Who Flew for Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, who taught herself to fly a helicopter, is already well-known, but the book also covers Melitta von Stauffenberg whose career was actually far more impressive. While Hannah was a great stick-and-rudder pilot, Melitta was one of Germany’s most important aeronautical engineers and a far more disciplined test pilot (the author refers to both women by their first names). As Melitta isn’t as well-known, a few excerpts

In October [shortly after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering Melitta] was interviewed by the head of the aerodynamics department at the prestigious German Research Institute for Aeronautics, better known as DVL,* at Berlin-Adlershof airbase. Having temporarily closed its doors during the war, the institute was now aiming to restore Germany’s international reputation in technology, and was keen to employ the brightest graduates. Invited to watch a test flight, Melitta was deep in conversation when the plane she was there to observe plummeted from the sky to crash only a hundred metres away from her. The entire crew was killed on impact. Although she was shaken, Melitta’s resolve did not falter. The following year, aged twenty-five, she received her diploma and started work at DVL as a flight mechanic and mathematician in experimental aerodynamics research. Her initial brief was the operation of propellers, then known as ‘airscrews’, with particular focus on the sound and drag caused by high altitudes.

Adolf Hitler was an early adopter of aviation and a big proponent of the industry as well as women within it.

‘Hitler wanted the Germans to become a nation of aviators,’ the wife of Hanna’s friend Karl Baur, a Messerschmitt test pilot, later wrote. ‘If there was some kind of celebration in a city, an air show was a must.’

‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’ While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.

Hitler ended up supporting and decorating both of the women whose careers are chronicled in the book and, famously, admitted Hanna Reitsch to his inner circle.

[It is interesting to compare the book’s description of Hitler’s platform to what today’s politicians promise: “[Hitler] promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism.” Is it fair to say that Democrats promise to take cars away, move people into apartments in 15-minute cities, give women money if they don’t get married, and, instead of defending against Bolshevism, to deliver the best aspects of Bolshevism adapted for domestic use.]

Some recent books describe aviators, including German fighter pilots, as anti-Nazi. A Higher Call is one prominent example. Pilots find themselves accidentally wearing swastikas and doing whatever Hitler tells them to do. The Women Who Flew for Hitler points out that German aviators were early enthusiasts for Hitler:

Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’

By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.

If you think that motion sickness will prevent you from achieving greatness in the air:

Hanna quickly proved her capabilities and was accepted by her peers. Most of the flying suits were too large, and she needed cushions to boost her height in the cockpit, but she learned to fly loops, turns and rolls in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44, a two-seat open biplane known as the Stieglitz, or Goldfinch, and carefully concealed her initial sickness by throwing up neatly into one of her gloves.

Americans loved Hanna Reitsch before and after World War II and she loved Americans. Here’s an interesting quote from 1938:

Nevertheless, although she favourably compared the USA to a Europe ‘intellectually overburdened with centuries-old cultural legacy’, she still had some reservations. ‘The American’s uncomplicated acceptance of life-as-it-comes,’ she decided, ‘exposes him to the dangers of absorbing uncritically the opinions served up to him by press and radio.’

While Hanna was celebrated for winning gliding competitions, Melitta was doing a combination of aeronautical engineering and test piloting her own creations:

Melitta’s new assignment was to perfect the aircraft technically, to eliminate as much risk as possible. The main task was to evaluate and improve the targeting devices, and in particular the dive-sights for the two-man Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, with its distinctive gull-wing shape, and the popular four-man Ju 88 dive-bomber developed for larger-scale strategic air war. This involved registering the continuously changing angle of the dive, speed and dropping altitude, all without modern instruments. She also worked on developing dive-visors, ensuring that the autopilot levelled off the aircraft automatically when a bomb had left its cradle so as not to put too much strain on the machine’s airframe, and that the automatic pullout sequence functioned at 6G – the point at which most pilots suffered G-force-induced loss of consciousness.

Every morning Melitta cycled across the airfield from her dorm on her heavy-framed pushbike, before swapping her beret for her leather flying cap, donning her overalls and clambering into a Junkers’ cockpit. She would take her machine up to 4,000 metres before rolling sideways and tearing down again at speeds of up to 350 mph, the engines howling and the surfaces of the plane whistling as the dive angle steepened until it was at least seventy-five to eighty degrees – not far from vertical. As Melitta plunged towards earth, her gloved hands tightly gripping the steering column, the whole frame of her plane would be shaking with the mounting pressure. The vibrations made it difficult to read her instruments accurately, so many of her dives were filmed to provide the detailed information required to enable incremental improvements to the targeting devices. Sometimes she would also release between four and ten cylindrical cement bombs to test her work. At between 150 and 200 metres, just as correction seemed impossible, Melitta would lift her plane’s nose and skim low across the fields before circling back to land. After several such tests over the course of a morning, her colleagues would heave her from her cockpit, unclip her parachute harness and help her out of her flying suit, so that she could return to her engineering role. Over desk and drawing board she would now conduct a precise evaluation of the dives, often working late into the night ‘without making any fuss about it’, her colleagues noted, to calculate the alterations required before testing could begin again.6 Undertaking a few such dives without any of the engineering work had been enough to exhaust Udet some years earlier. Even with automatic dive-brakes, trainee Stuka pilots were often sick, and sometimes plunged into the sea. Yet Melitta might complete fifteen such test dives in one day: a performance unmatched by any pilot in history.

… As an engineer–pilot, Melitta already had all the qualifications needed for a technical general staff officer so she now started work on a PhD. Her new work was focused on the development of a special night-landing device for single-engined night fighters. She was ‘testing landings with fighter planes for unlit, improvised emergency airfields’, and ‘blind-flying’ without any electrical landing systems, Jutta explained.

Melitta ended up doing more than 2,000 test-dives and had a full staff of men working for her. By contrast…

Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off.

The other huge contrast was that Melitta was actually part-Jewish and, though immensely useful to the Nazi war effort, was at best ambivalent about National Socialism. Hanna Reitsch, of course, was an ardent admirer of Hitler before, during, and decades after World War II.

More about this book and these women in a follow-up post…

Melitta:

Hanna:

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