Frederick the Great discussion post 11

[cahn]

In our last installment, our heroes found that Henri de Catt's memoirs, a major source for current biographers of Frederick the Great, are not to be trusted!!

rheinsberg

Comments

Re: Operation Bodysnatch

[selenak]

Fascinating story, may be entirely accurate or not as far as I know, I have zero idea and would have to look it up, but nothing in this write up sounds unlikely.

Salt mine: nothing weird about that. Most of the art and artifacts and documents had ended up in mines by 1944, and as far as I know more because of US/British bombardments than because of approaching Russians. (Though the later were certainly feared to behave just like the Germans had done in Russia.) I mean, did you see photographs of Berlin in the spring of 1945? Dresden? Any German city above mid-size? Nothing, including marble coffins, would have survived that. Mines and tunnels deep in the earth were just about the only place where works of art could survive without being reduced to rubble as the majority of houses on the surface were.

Re: Operation Bodysnatch

[mildred_of_midgard]

I know what German cities looked like in 1945, I didn't know how much had been *saved*! And I didn't know how much had been put in salt mines as opposed to other possibilities I could think of, like "remote area where no one lives and unlikely candidate for bombardment" or "bunker" or "shipped out of the country."

I also freely admit to having very little knowledge of history after 1815. I mean, much more than your average American, but much less than, say, your average German on WWII.