If I Had a Million Dollars... Camp X Artifacts Up For Sale

The Camp X Exhibit at the Oshawa Airport is full of neat stuff: a dagger hidden in a lipstick case, a fountain pen that shoots poisonous gas and a revolver concealed in a hollowed out book, to list but a few items. As Toronto Star reporter, Carola Vyhnak, points out in her March 4th article, this is the stuff of fiction. In fact, it's exactly these type of gadgets that you might expect to read about in a James Bond novel.

This comparison between fact and fiction is hardly surprising when you consider that Bond author, Ian Fleming, spent part of WWII in Camp X, a spy training facility on the Oshawa-Whitby border near the shore of Lake Ontario.

The collection, which was compiled and largely owned by history buff Robert Stuart, has spent the past 33 years exhibited to the public, most recently in the Ontario Regiment building at the Oshawa Airport as part of the Robert Stuart Aeronautical Collection. Poorly advertised and rarely open, I only discovered the existence of this collection 3 or 4 years ago. Since then school, work, and a year spent in Korea has kept me from visiting the exhibit. And now, the opportunity may be lost to me forever - a pretty harsh lesson in "(s)he who hesitates" for an historian to learn.

On February 24th, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson (mentioned in my February post on the Battle of Bowmanville at Camp 30) contacted local papers after discovering that the entire collection of Camp X artifacts were poised for an internet auction block. Since then, a flurry of controversy has surrounded this usually obscure collection.

Since Stuart's death nearly seven years ago, the collection has been privately owned by his wife, Lois, and his daughter, Deidre, two women who are about to become responsible for selling off a significant piece of Durham Region's (and Canada's) rich wartime history "for personal reasons."

Like many private collections, the Camp X artifacts came together relatively organically over a period of several decades, with many of the pieces attained through private sales and auctions. Other items were accessioned into the collection through donations or long-term loans from veterans or the families of those that had worked at the Camp. Many of these donations and long-term loans were made in good faith in the form of a "gentleman's agreement" and a handshake between Mr. Stuart and the donor. Little, if any, paperwork was ever completed to outline the terms of these transactions.

Now, with the impending sale of the collection, a number of donors and family members have come forward to demand their family heirlooms back. As far as they were concerned, the items were on loan only so long as they were being displayed locally and in a respectful manner; they never intended for the Stuart family to profit off of their history and memories.

Deirdre Stuart has little sympathy for the people who donated to her father's collection. In an interview with the Toronto Star she was quoted as saying, “[i]f you didn’t put it in writing, you pretty much gave it to us... Like, hello? How stupid are people. We’ve had this museum for 33 years. It’s ours.”

Clearly, Ms. Stuart is no gentleman.

Although the loss of local history that would accompany the sale of this collection is immensely disturbing to me and it saddens me to say this, it is my understanding that the Stuart family is well within their legal rights to sell the artifacts however they see fit (provided that they adhere to all applicable laws concerning the sale of cultural artifacts). Public museums are legally restricted from selling artifacts unless they can provide extensive paper records proving their ownership of the item(s) (e.g. a receipt of purchase or a deed of gift). In instances where items are found in a collection but lack proper paperwork, these museums are legally required to keep and care for the artifacts for several decades before they may deaccession them. Unfortunately, private collections are not bound by the same standards. And, since theirs is a private museum, the Stuarts, in the absence of paperwork, have implicit legal right to items in their possession.

Thankfully, it at least seems as if the Canadian government isn't going to let this collection leave the country without a fight. As of March 20th, the Canadian Department of Heritage has "opened a dossier" on the artifacts and is looking into whether some of these items may be able to be protected from international sale under restrictions outlined in the Cultural Property Export and Import Act. For Canada's sake, let's hope this is so. Better yet, let's hope that a Canadian cultural institution (*cough* Canadian War Museum *cough*) steps up and buys the entire collection so that Ms. Stuart is not allowed to break it up and sell the unprotected items piece by piece.

On a local level, Hodgson and other concerned members of the community (including a number of local veterans from the aptly named Sir William Stephenson Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion) have stepped forward to coordinate fundraising efforts in order to save the collection. The Legion is currently accepting donations that will be used to purchase and house the collection permanently in Durham Region (an outcome that I selfishly find most favourable). If the campaign is successful, not only will the collection remain in Canada, but it will remain in Durham Region and on display to the public.

If you'd like to donate and ensure that the collection stays together and in Canada, you can do so by sending the Legion a cheque with "Save the Collection" in the memo section (see their website for more details). You may also want to follow this issue as it develops via the Save the Collection group on Facebook.


Sources by order of publication:

Whitby This Week - "Camp X artifacts up for sale"
The Toronto Star - "Historian fights to keep WWII spy-school collection in Canada"
--- "Veterans families angry over bid to sell wartime artifacts"
Canwest New Service - "Sale of historic espionage gear draws Ottawa's attention"
National Post - "Selling Secret History"

Controversy Over Heritage Designation Grows

2020 Lambs Road in Bowmanville is the site of the only battle of the Second World War to be fought on Canadian soil.

What would come to be known as the “Battle of Bowmanville” began on Thanksgiving weekend 1942, when hundreds of German prisoners of war at Camp 30 rioted in response to a federal government order that 100 of their highest-ranking officers be shackled. Using a variety of makeshift weapons including jam jars, baseball bats and hockey sticks, the German PoWs seized control of the camp, taking one guard hostage and barricading themselves in the main hall. The three-day standoff ended only after guards stormed the building, using fire hoses and tear gas to subdue the inmates.

While the Battle of Bowmanville isn’t likely to make it into many history books, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson believes Camp 30 to be a critical piece of Canada’s wartime history. Now in a state of disrepair, this collection of 18 buildings in rural Bowmanville is thought to be the world’s last remaining German prisoner of war camp. A small camp, it housed 880 of the Third Reich’s high-ranking officers during the Second World War. Hodgson believes that by containing these officers and denying Hitler some of his most strategic minds, Canada did its part to ensure Allied victory.

This belief has been at the centre of Hodgson’s ten-year campaign to preserve the site and to turn one of the buildings into a small museum.

Sadly, it has been an uphill battle. Over the years Hodgson has faced uncooperative property owners (Kaitlin Group, a housing development company), demolition plans, vandalism, property damage and, most recently, arson that gutted the camp’s administration building and damaged two others.

Fortunately, a new year has brought new progress. Sort of. In January, in the wake of intense backlash, Kaitlin Group offered the Municipality of Clarington a third of the property to develop as a park.

Victory was short-lived, however. A splinter group, led by Clarington councillor Charlie Trim, has emerged among preservationists. Trim believes that highlighting the war history of the site honours the German officers and could offend veterans living in the area. Instead, Trim wants the site to preserve the history of the training school for delinquent boys that occupied the site for the majority of the time from 1925-1979.

But this proposal is not without its own controversy. In fact, members of the community have stepped forward to remind Trim that the school has its own dark past of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that some may not wish to commemorate either.

It appears there is no easy solution for the preservationists in Durham Region. The Municipality of Clarington has the land. Now the question becomes, what are they going to do with it? Whose history should be privileged? Whose buried? Perhaps the answer lies in finding a compromise that would use the site to interpret all aspects of the area’s history.


Notes:

* This post was originally written as an assignment for my Public History class. The focus of the assignment was to learn how to write a 500 word article about history that would engage and inform a public audience. As it stands, this post represents a significantly altered second draft of my original article and includes corrections I made in response to the constructive feedback of Dr. Jonathan Vance and my peers in UWO’s Public History program.

* Although few people remember it, more than 37,000 German prisoners of war once forcibly called Canada ‘home.’ CBC Digital Archives has done a wonderful job of compiling both contemporary and subsequent news footage about German and Italian POWs here.

* To see what Time Magazine had to say about the Battle of Bowmanville at the time, see this article.

* Click here to see Hodgson's proposal for the site.

Searching for Sophie Scholl Online is Like Trying to Find the Smallest Kid in a Game of Hide-and-Go-Seek

For the purpose of our latest Digital History assignment, our class has been asked to write a brief introductory guide to some of the sources and tools that are available online about any subject of our choosing. The only stipulations are that the topic must be something we are personally passionate about, has a historical dimension and can be boiled down to just a handful of essential websites or methods of information trapping.

In honour of this year’s Holocaust Education Week theme of defiance and resistance, I decided to focus my Digital History assignment along the same lines. I understand, however, that there’s no possible way to concisely treat the topic of defiance and resistance without doing an injustice to the millions of people affected by the Holocaust and their tens of millions of acts of resistance, both large and small. Instead, I decided to narrow my focus to Sophie Scholl’s participation in the White Rose, a non-violent organization made up of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor, Kurt Huber. In brief, Sophie and her brother, Hans, were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets on university property. They, along with their friend, Christoph, were then arrested, tried for treason, found guilty and executed within a week. Soon after, most other members of the student group were arrested, tried and executed. Few survived the war.

Now that we have the basics, it’s time for the research:

Like any good student, I know that I’m not supposed to admit to using Wikipedia as my “go-to” source for quick introductory searches. But I do. Sue me. As long as the person using Wikipedia is aware of its downfalls and refrains from sourcing it (just as you would any other encyclopaedia), I think that it is a pretty good starting point, if for nothing else than for mining the footnotes and helping to develop stronger research questions. With that in mind, you may want to check out the Wikipedia pages for Sophie Scholl and/or The White Rose.

If this were any other research topic I would likely head from Wikipedia to Google to continue my search. However, since this particular search concerns personalities and organizations concerned with the Holocaust, I prefer to make the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website my next visit. Although I was disappointed in the lack of biographical information that the USHMM provided, I was pleased to see that they had included a list of print resources to consult at a later time, links to FAQs about the group, a short memoir by one of the surviving members (which I will get to in just a moment) and educational resources about resistance during the Holocaust. The general affect of the USHMM site is to give a reader an inclination as to how Sophie and the other members of the White Rose fit into the narrative of the Second World War as a whole.

The aforementioned memoir by one of the few surviving members of the group, Dr. George J. Wittenstein, is reached via The History Place website (specifically its Points of View section). This source offers the reader a unique opportunity to see the effect that time has had on the recollections of someone who was in the thick of things and somehow managed to escape with their life. In his memoir Wittenstein introduces many of the key members of the White Rose, discusses the leaflets written by Hans Scholl, Alex Schmorell and Kurt Huber, the trials and the aftermath. He also includes selections from the leaflets, as well as partial trial transcripts from their sentencings.

The Shoah Education Project is also a helpful site when looking for unique information on the White Rose that I haven’t found anywhere else on the web. That is, Dr. Elizabeth Kirkley Best provides a list of the members of the White Rose and what became of them. It is interesting to see from the chart the different ways that men and women were charged for their involvement in the same organization.

The last website that I would like to suggest anyone interested in Sophie Scholl or the White Rose organization look up is the one run by The Holocaust Research Project. This website has a number of pages devoted to Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, but its biggest triumph is that it has translations for all six leaflets in their archives. That one’s a gem.

In addition to my usual search techniques, I thought I would try a few different avenues this time around and see if any of them were effective for the purposes of this assignment. Turns out, they’re largely not.

The first thing I tried was imputing my search terms into Google Search and then attempting to use the Google Wonder Wheel to see what, if any, different search results it would lead me to. I use the word “attempt” because as soon as I would click on the Wonder Wheel option, Google would bounce me out of the specialty search and back onto their main page. Strike one.

Next I tried image searching via Flickr (instead of using my old, reliable Google Image Search). and found that this worked with mediocre results – I found some images, but it was inefficient, largely disorganized and the results were underwhelming in terms of numbers. In short, my results using Google Image Search were both faster and better. Strike two.

Out of sheer curiosity, I then tried Google Timelines for Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and the White Rose to see if I could unearth any new information. All of the timelines were sparse and largely unhelpful. Strike Two... and a half.

I also thought it might be neat to search for “Sophie Scholl” in different blog search engines, so I put the term into Google Blogs and into IceRocket’s blog section. I got very different hits on both search engines, but neither one was very satisfactory. With IceRocket I was bombarded with foreign language web pages. After I waded through the majority of those and through the Google Blogs results, I discover that the majority of people that are blogging about Sophie Scholl are doing so in response to the movie that was released in 2007 entitled Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Strike three.

I suppose I can admit now that this movie was actually my introduction to Sophie Scholl. After watching the movie I wanted to know more about this girl who had acted so courageously in the face of such strong opposition and such dire consequences. But then, just as now, it was extremely difficult to find a substantial amount of information on this small group of German students and their most famous female member.

Additional sources you may be interested in:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/rose.html

http://roses-at-noon.blogspot.com/

http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/holocaust/articles/sophie-scholl-white-rose.2786.htm

[Note: The picture seen above is of one of the White Rose monuments in Munich, Germany. This one is located in front of the Bavarian Government building and includes the text one one of the group's anti-war leaflets. The photo was taken in May 2007].

Tags: Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, WWII, Holocaust

And Doesn't That Just Say It All...?

In the summer of 2007, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a few weeks touring some of Central Europe’s most famous cities (Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Munich). And, because my travel partner was also a like-minded history major, the two of us were able to indulge in the local history and culture to our hearts content. Although I enjoyed them all for different reasons, it was the city of Munich that made the most lasting impression on me in terms of how its recent history was being conveyed to the public, both its own citizens and those visiting the Bavarian capital.

On our first afternoon in the city, my friend and I opted for a WWII-themed walking tour (I’m not positive, but I think it may have been billed on the brochure as a tour of “Hitler’s Munich” – insert *eye roll* here). Over the course of the next hour and a half, our guide pointed out dozens of things that peaked my interest as someone concerned with how history is communicated to and understood by the public. Perhaps a future blog will touch on more of these examples, but for now, I want to focus solely on the war monument in front of the Bavarian Parliament Building.

At first glance we barely noticed the monument. Its sandy colour and position (lowered into a hole in the ground and further hidden behind a small hedge) do a pretty good job of camouflaging it from visitors without tour guides as savvy as ours. The shape of the monument also helped to conceal its purpose for being - giant blocks of stone piled on top of each without easily understandable visual clues (like gigantic arcs, bronze soldiers, eternal flames, flags, etc) don’t exactly scream ‘honoring our war dead’ to me. Turns out, you have to go even further down a set of stairs to get inside the monument (hmmm… not-so-metaphorically burying your wartime history, Munich?!?).

Once you are inside the monument, there are two inscriptions carved into the walls in German, the first of which is for those that perished during WWI. Loosely translated it says, “Built for the city of Munich, Bavaria’s brave soldiers – 13 000 heroic fallen sons of the city of Munich.” I find this phrasing pretty typical of the WWI war monuments I’ve seen in the past. Use of the words ‘brave’ and ‘heroic’ show that despite Germany’s position on the losing side of the conflict, there was still a sense of pride in the individual soldiers who had acted honourably while giving their lives for their country. Further, the inscription’s use of the phrase “fallen sons” seems to show the sense of ownership the city of Munich felt towards these soldiers and their actions, just as a parent would have towards a child; they were truly a beloved part of the community and therefore deserving of a monument in their honour.

So, although the physical location of the monument doesn’t automatically convey a sense of nationalism or pride in the part that Munich’s soldiers played in the war, I could clearly see the impact that carefully chosen phrasing can give a monument in terms of the messages about the past that are being recorded for future generations to read and interpret.

Underneath the inscription in honor of those who died during the First World War is the dedication to the soldiers and citizens of Munich who were lost during WWII. Although both inscriptions were written under similar circumstances (that is, the German loss of a world war), the second inscription is markedly different than the one for WWI. Roughly translated, it reads:

“Built in memory of the
99 000 fallen
11 000 missing
6 600 victims of the air war
of the city of Munich
1939-1945.”

The differences between the two inscriptions are striking. Compared with the word choice of the WWI inscription, this one is cold, clinical even. Gone are phrases such as “heroic sons” and “brave soldiers.” In their place are emotionless numbers and one word descriptors. Essentially, the inscription boils down years of hardship and loss, tragedy and horror to a pile of emotionless statistics. Reading the inscription more than 60 years after it was first inscribed, the shame that this phrasing captured was still palpable to me.

What caused this change in the tone of the two inscriptions should be no mystery to anyone reading this blog, but it did bring to my mind the larger question of commemoration. Specifically, how do nations commemorate wars and how does the approach of a nation towards commemoration change depending on the outcome of the conflict? More to the point, perhaps, how does the approach to commemoration change when a portion of the soldiers and citizens of the nation in question participated in or benefited from such a horrific genocide?

I think the inscription that was added to the Munich war memorial following WWII is an interesting example. It strikes me as an obvious attempt by the city’s leadership to distance themselves from the ugly role Munich played during the 1930s and 1940s in regards to the Holocaust. Soldiers are now referred to only as “fallen” or “missing”; no longer are they the beloved “sons of Munich.” They are mentioned, not glorified. At the same time, however, it is clear that the city still tried to honour the sacrifices that their citizens and soldiers had made on their behalf (the fact that Germany had participated in and lost a second world war couldn’t exactly go unmentioned on German soil).

That said, I find the statistics dehumanizing. Presumably there were many people in Munich at the time who disagreed with or even acted against their government’s policies during WWII. I’m sure that they went missing or died in air raids with equal measure to those that supported Hitler and his regime. Perhaps they deserve to be remembered more fondly than they have been?!

I guess the question that I am posing is this: how does one, as an historian, find the balance between acknowledging the loss of the nation during wartime without glorifying the reprehensible actions that the country’s leadership put into motion?

Any thoughts?

[Note: For the purpose of this blog, I attempted to translate the inscriptions as closely as possible. Please be aware, however, that I don’t speak German. :) The translations above are a combination of my tour guide’s efforts two years ago in his second or (possibly) third language and an online translation program that I accessed as I was writing this post earlier this morning.]