Monthly Archives: September 2012

History, Poetry, Security

This Day in History 1942: Gestapo Arrest the Harnacks

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The only American woman sentenced to death by direct order of Adolf Hitler was arrested on this day in 1942.

Mildred Fish was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She met Arvid Harnack, a German Rockefeller Fellow, while he was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. They were married in 1928 and moved to Germany in 1929.

During the 1930s Mildred and Arvid traveled outside Germany but they continued residing there past the point when they knew their freedom would be severely restricted by the Nazis. This 1939 postcard from Mildred ends with the sentence “Better not write but don’t forget me…”

Mildred Harnack Postcard

Eventually the couple helped establish an underground resistance group with hundreds of members. They alerted other countries of the Nazi Army’s brutal mistreatment of occupied civilans/POWs and of Hitler’s aggressive and expansive intentions. Mildred gave advance warning to the Soviet Union, for example, of Germany’s intention to break the 1940 trade / 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop pacts and invade in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).

Precautions were taken by the Harnaks and underground members to protect communication but they were up against more than 20 years (since 1918) of decryption and surveillance expertise in the German government. In July 1942 the Nazi Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) Abteilung Fremde Heere West (FHW) or “High Command of the Army, Foreign Armies West” intelligence department intercepted and cracked the groups’ radio messages. In August the Gestapo began capturing members of the group, torturing them and putting them in jail. The Harnaks were arrested on September 7th, 1942.

Arvid Harnack was sentenced to death and executed just a couple months later. Mildred initially received a six year jail sentence but Hitler reversed the decision and ordered her put to death. She was beheaded by guillotine in 1943 in Ploetzensee Prison.

Wisconsin Public Television (WPT) has produced a video called “Wisconsin’s Nazi Resistance: The Mildred Fish Harnack Story”

WPT also has produced an interview with Andreas Sander, a Gestapo Prison expert on the Harnacks’ incarceration and interrogation.

Watch Andreas Sander on PBS. See more from WPT Documentaries.

“To and From the Guillotine” is a memorial poem by Mildred’s friend, Clara Leiser

Food, History, Security

What Smokers Really Smoke

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A humorous and well-written investigation of cigarettes has been posted by the Wall Street Journal.

Under “c” alone we find cardamom oil, carob bean extract, cinnamon oil, coffee extract, coriander oil, corn syrup and an oil made from camomile flowers. Gone, apparently, are some that appear in earlier lists: “civet absolute,” for example, which turns out to be a secretion from the anal gland of the civet cat, and castoreum, a comparable secretion from the Siberian beaver.

The real story here actually is that the massive amount of data generated by litigation over risk has allowed researchers to mine for historic ingredient information. Another way to look at it is that transparency forced by compliance upon product manufacturers and providers has led to some surprises.

Note: “secretion from the anal gland of the civet cat” might sound unusual but it also has been used by the sugar industry as an “ingredient in the food additives used to add butter, caramel, and rum flavorings to sweets”.

Food, Security

Drink Rate Control Through Visual Feedback

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A long time ago, although I don’t remember where, I read that the martini glass was invented during the American prohibition to get people to drink more quickly. Supposedly it opened up the rate of consumption so people could gulp and therefore reduce the risk of being caught with a drink in their hand.

The idea sounded strange (ever try to gulp out of a large martini glass?) and was stuck in my head until I read a recent study in ScienceMag that explained how it might actually work. The study describes an observed difference in drinking speeds with curved and straight glasses.

After watching video of both sessions and recording how much time it took for the drinkers to finish their beer or sodas, Attwood’s team found that one group consistently drank much faster than the others: The group drinking a full glass of lager out of curved flute glasses. In a paper published this month in PLoS ONE, the team reports that whereas the group with straight glasses nursed their 354 milliliters of lager for about 13 minutes, the group with the same amount of beer served in curved glasses finished in less than 8 minutes, drinking alcohol almost as quickly as the soda-drinkers guzzled their pop. However, the researchers observed no differences between people drinking 177 milliliters of beer out of straight versus fluted glasses.

Attwood believes that the reason for the increase in speed is that the halfway point in a curved glass is ambiguous. Social beer drinkers, she says, naturally tend to pace themselves when drinking alcohol, judging their speed by how fast they reach half-full. Another experiment in which participants were asked to judge different levels of fluid in photographs of straight and curved glasses showed that people consistently misjudge the volume in fluted glasses, Attwood says. A simple solution to this problem would be to mark beer glasses with the accurate halfway point, she says. “We can’t tell people not to drink, but we can give them a little more control.”

Straight glasses do not seem to include an angled glass like the martini shape. A better distinction might be between a vertically symmetrical glass where consumption has a constant rate versus shapes that make estimation difficult.