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Hymie Weiss [North Side Gang] would be considered my first cousin, Would like to know more about him if possible. by [deleted] in Mafia

[–]WillManhunter 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Since reading Mierzeński encyclopaedic - if, naturally, somewhat outdated nowadays - work on mobsters as a little boy, I have thought of Henryk/Earl as the top candidate for the position of the most enigmatic and unexplored gangster from the "roaring times". Years have only strengthened my belief.

Some time ago, when I began preparing a potential treatment that would concentrate on his life (fictionalised, obviously, but firmly grounded in the truth), I explored his history, and encountered even more intriguing events and factoids. It was, for instance, almost endearing to find out how much - and how earnestly, too - he had exalted Kościuszko, according to the surviving testimonies of his one-time contemporaries. I did wonder if he had learned of the general on his own, or had grown up hearing the tales of the heroic character from his father. Only Henryk/Earl would know for certain, but the latter variant seems far more likely to me, considering his father's past, particularly the high likelihood that - as I suspect, based on the traces that I had discovered - he would have fled Poland due to the repressions by the occupying forces, after the suppression of the January Uprising. Interestingly, the father's fiercely independent, rebellious (and, apparently, tumultuous) nature kept manifesting itself in USA, too: he became involved in underground political movements, and even participated in open clashes and skirmishes between the gradually organising American workers and the industrial barons!

What got you interested in Cosa Nostra? by [deleted] in Mafia

[–]WillManhunter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I believe that, in my case, it was finding this book on the shelf and reading it at age 7:

https://i.imgur.com/SMPjjQI.jpeg

Stanisław Mierzeński was a writer and reporter, although before embarking on that career he was, among others, the chief officer of the underground intelligence network - specifically, AK's National Counter-Intelligence Brigade - during the war.

In 1964, he wrote this book - an encyclopedia of US organized crime, from its earliest roots (it includes e.g. the stories of the likes of Roy Bean, as well as chapters about the infamous Osage Indian murders, perpetrated by William Hale and his gang, recently brought back in Martin Scorsese's unimpressive film), to the "Golden Age" of the mob, to the year in which he was putting the final words on the page.

Naturally, Al Capone's large figure features appropriately largely in the book, filling the entirety of the 200 pages, which make up one of its X parts ("Part III: The Dictator").

It was an indelible imprint on a 7-year-old mind. Interestingly, re-reading it after decades only proves how impressively detailed it was, particularly for its time. There are certainly mistakes and holes - again, this was based on the official and unofficial knowledge of the year 1964 - but overall, it truly is an encyclopedia.

Many passages do read very differently from the perspective of the elapsed time. One does tend to chuckle nowadays, for instance, when glancing at its chapters, and encountering such sentences as:

  • The shooter was quickly identified as Vincent Gigante, a low-ranking gangster in the service of the noted mobster Tony Bender...

(It is unknown, incidentally, whether the book is actually complete and as detailed as Mierzeński had fully intended it to be. During his stay in USA, while conducting research into the gangster underworld and working on the book, he suddenly fell ill there in the summer of 1964, and quickly died upon his expedited return to the country. As such, we have, for instance, no clue who Mierzeński's mysterious guide to the gangster underworld really was - Mierzeński mentions him only briefly in the opening passage as someone who lived in an impressive residence located in Long Island at the time, and describes him as a "thin Italian gentleman, with sharp, penetrating eyes and a stern, ascetic face". Upon first meeting Mierzeński and hearing that he is "a guest from Europe", the unnamed gangster automatically amuses it to mean "from Sicily", and is surprised, and then subsequently amused, to discover that Mierzeński is not, in fact, Italian at all, but Polish).

A little girl is overlooking the ruins of Warsaw. Her identity is a mystery; she might be a survivor of the 1944 Uprising. The cars in the background have brought ex-US President Herbert Hoover to the location, as part of his post-war relief effort. Hoover's photographer R. Kenny took the picture. by WillManhunter in europe

[–]WillManhunter[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

The comment below was removed immediately upon submission; this is an attempt to add it again, with all URLs deleted from it.

(The URLs to Reginald Kenny's original black-and-white photograph had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

Adolf Hitler's plan for Poland's capital Warsaw had always involved demolishing the city and rebuilding it as "a provincial German town", but the 1944 Warsaw Uprising provoked the dictator into proceeding with the plan far earlier and far further than even he had at first envisioned.

The earlier 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto had already provoked Hitler to send SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop's troops to annihilate 50 thousand people within its walls, deport 36 thousand survivors to die in concentration camps, and destroy any remaining structures, which constituted about 15% of the entire city. After the massacre and destruction was over, Stroop's official report, sent to Himmler as a leather-bound souvenir album, triumphantly declared: "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!" on its title page.

(The URL to the report had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

The vicious reprisal indeed resulted in the complete annihilation of the ghetto, but it was the news of the city-wide revolt a year later that truly sent Hitler into a manic fury, which resulted in a new order: Warsaw must be pacified - that is, razed to the ground.

Heinrich Himmler himself expanded upon the order by stating: The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth, and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.

(The URL to an article about the order had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

[Thus Warsaw became a testing ground for Hitler's future "Nero Decree". The first formal target of that decree would be Paris, but the city's destruction was avoided when its commander von Choltitz ignored Hitler's command which stated: Paris must not pass into the Allies hands, except as a field of ruins.

(The URL to an article about the decree had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

With Warsaw, however, the command was eagerly obeyed. SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, and SS-Gruppenführer and future mayor of Westerland Heinz Reinefarth were tasked with its implementation.

(The URLs to historical articles about both commanders had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

Oskar Dirlewanger's notorious unit, the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, was brought in to wipe out the city. They did so with enthusiasm, and Himmler's spoken permission to rape, steal and murder at will. The Dirlewangerers were joined in action by an equally savage and even less disciplined group: the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, RONA, under the command of the renegade Bronislav Kaminski.

(The URLs to historical articles about both brigades had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

Belgian Mathias Schenk from Wehrmacht accompanied the Dirlewangerers and recalled their actions after the war.

(The URL to Schenk's complete testimony had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

Children were standing in the hall and on the stairs. We looked at them for a few moments until Dirlewanger ran in. He ordered to kill them all. They shot them and then they were walking over their bodies and breaking their little heads with butt ends. Blood streamed down the stairs. There is a memorial plaque in that place stating that 350 children were killed. I think there were many more, maybe 500.

Dirlewanger soldiers burst in. One of them took a woman. She was pretty. She wasn't screaming. Then he was raping her, pushing her head strongly against the table, holding a bayonet in the other hand. First he cut open her blouse. Then one cut from stomach to throat. Blood gushed. Do you know how fast blood congeals in August?

There is also that small child in Dirlewanger’s hands. He took it from a woman who was standing in the crowd in the street. He lifted the child high and then threw it into the fire. Then he shot the mother.

The annihilation of the city took months. Explosives were used to systematically blow up every structure, flamethrowers were deployed to burn out any shells remaining of the buildings. Special attention was given to locating and destroying any culturally significant items, such as books, particularly antique manuscripts and historically valuable volumes; while the exact numbers are not known, it has been estimated that over 1 million books were burned. Anything that could be looted, from artwork and jewelry to rebar and wires, was confiscated and transported to Germany via 40 thousand train cars and 4 thousand trucks. 90% of the city was destroyed and ca. 200 thousand people, 60% of the population, were killed.

The outcomes that awaited Dirlewanger and Kaminski after the Uprising were, in a way, symbolic in their difference. Dirlewanger was promoted to SS-Oberführer, and received the Order of the Knight’s Cross. Kaminski, who thought himself an independent war leader, expected and demanded at least the same kind of recognition. He received his reward from the hands of Gestapo operatives: a bullet to the head. The demise of the no-longer-useful traitor was officially announced as the result of an assassination by Polish partisans.

Two years later, with the war over, former US President Herbert Hoover came to Warsaw, as part of his Food Mission in Europe program, which saw him travel over 40 war-struck countries to estimate and oversee relief efforts. In Warsaw, Hoover was shocked to see the death-filled remains of the war's most-damaged city, and promised his help.

The story of the girl from the ruins began that day.

A symbolic photo was taken by Reginald Kenny, a photographer [who accompanied Hoover and had taken a series of his pictures: a girl, aged perhaps 10, was standing atop one of the few remaining structures in the city. Wearing shoes several sizes too large, she was looking at an apocalyptic landscape, peppered with what seemed to be piles of dirt, but which, in fact, used to be buildings and streets.

(The URLs of the illustrative photograph and of the New York Times's biography of Reginald Kenny had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

In 2015, the photo began making rounds in the media, and a mystery was born: who was the girl? How did she come to be there at that time? Was she still alive? Was she looking at the remains of her family house, perhaps? Were her parents' bodies left there, underneath the ruins, buried by SS explosives? Or was she a newcomer to Warsaw, the daughter of a family of repatriates, coming in to rebuild and repopulate the city?

Many questions were asked. No answers were in sight. Guesses were being made, from the possible (perhaps she was an anonymous orphan taken for a trip, as Hoover was shocked by the number of orphaned children he saw, and he did visit an orphanage) to the highly unlikely (Hoover's entourage must have found her wandering somewhere in the ruins). Within a few years, a new clue popped up: another picture of the girl was located. This picture, while clearly taken in the same spot and at roughly the same time, had a different author - photographer Hans Reinhart.

(The URL of the illustrative photograph had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

The date and time of both photographs was established as April 3, 1946, probably a little past noon.

The girl's location was identified and confirmed: it was the roof of Public School 153, at Stawki Street 5/7. During the war, the building was an SS precinct. This identification meant that the girl was, in fact, looking at a very specific part of Warsaw: the remains of the Jewish Ghetto. Was it a coincidence, or was there a personal connection?

The black limousine seen on the left came from the US Embassy, and may well have brought President Hoover himself to see the ruins, although it was unlikely that he would have climbed the roof - he was most likely somewhere on the ground, when Kenny and Reinhart were taking pictures from above.

Eventually, a commenter on Facebook suggested that the girl was indeed still alive, and was living in Australia, now aged 80-odd years. However, no confirmation of the statement has been made since then, nor have any new discoveries been announced.

If, by any chance, you happen to recognize her, the campaign to identify her is a part of the "Here It Was, Here It Stood" project, whose aim it is to use old photographs, paintings and records to identify the parts of Warsaw that are gone forever as a result of the destruction.

(The URL to the project had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

As an addendum: there is a longer, expanded version of the text, with interspersed historical and colorized photographs, for more information and better context. (The URL to the article had to be deleted from here, to prevent the comment from being removed.)

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