GRGR: important "facts" ?

[jporter]

Jill,

This is wonderful. Speaking only for myself, keep it coming.

Thanks- jody

> From: jill <grladams at teleport.com>
> Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 09:12:33 -0700
> To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: GRGR: important "facts" ?
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I'd been looking for this line from back when there was that discussion of
> the color black, in the first quote, and the term "liberate," which is
> mentioned in the second quote below, and also, later, have I discovered
> some coincidences of personality of characters in the book?
> 
> Again, all it seems I know how to do is quote this book, but here it is
> again, >Peenemunde to Canaveral< / Dieter K Hutze. Hutze was an Engineer at
> Peenemunde. BTW, there is a forward by Werner von Braun. The context of
> this quote is that successful firings of the first V-2's had let the cat
> out of the bag, and Peenemunde was experiencing unwanted attention from
> allied air raids. Hutzel reports in this chapter called Peenemunde at War:
> 
> "A little farther away, noticeably isolated, a group of thirty or forty
> concentration camp prisoners were sitting on the ground, watched by a
> couple of bored guards. I couldn't help noticing the difference beetween
> these poor souls and the only other group I had run across, during my days
> at Siemens in 1938. Concentration camp prisoners carried colored markers on
> their arms to indicate the type of offense. Six years earlier most of these
> I had seen were murderers, thieves, sex offenders, and the like, with only
> a small proportion of political prisoners. Now I noticed a shocking
> predominance of black political arm marks. What had started out as a means
> of getting able-bodied prisoners to do useful work had apparently turned
> into a device for political persecution. A feeling of uneasieness came over
> me..."   
> 
> By the way, I do not know if we did discover what the Schwartzgerat was.
> Did we?
> Now, next chapter, called Personality of Peenemunde, who is this? I am not
> suggesting it is Weissman, but it is irresistable to compare:
> 
> "Part of the personality that was Peenemunde, Nimwegen was a puzzle to
> almost eveybody. He had appeared as if from nowhere one day: a big, heavy,
> corpulent man who had operated a hotel in the area atone time and had
> somehow gotten a position in the car pool. His talent for organizing (in
> the sense of the GI slang term, "liberate") had become legndary around the
> plant--but always for the benefit of the plant, never for personal gain. He
> was a "big time operator," par excellence, blessed with irrepressible
> savoir-faire. It was no trick, for example, for him to call the Admiral of
> the Navy installation at Swinemunde and identify himself as speaking for
> the Reichsfuhrer SS (Himmler), and then follow through with requests for
> materials, food, fuel--almost invariably with success.
> He was, nevertheless, a loudmouth and course in his manner, and often
> his methods skirted close to the edge of the law. All of these things
> tended to isolate him from the rest of us. In way, this was a shame, for on
> numerous occasions he was a big help to the plant, and later on he
> deemonstrated great, unselfish courage by making sorties via truck into the
> eastern combat areas, collecting pigs and other domestic animals abandoned
> by the fleeing population--all right under the noses of the advancing
> Russians. And though we could not know it then, he was later to play an
> important role in the  relocation of the entire Peenemunde effort to
> Bleicherode, in the Harz mountains."
> 
> A-and later using strange acronyms: "We utilized as much as possible the
> advantges accruing from the attachemnt of our weapon system to SS Chief
> Heinrich Himmler. Pompous passes and letterheads sprang into being
> conveying to all and sundry that we were a part of the SS organization.
> These naturally included reference to our association with Dormberger's
> agency, BZBV Heer. By a strange quirk of misunderstanding, some of this
> BZBV stationery emerged as VZBV, an utterly meaningless expression. Here
> again Nimwegen's preposterous talent turned the error to advantage. He made
> VZBV a top secret agency, not to be interfered with by anyone save Himmler
> himself. Soon VZBV signs began to appear in letters several feet high on
> boxes, trucks, and cars."
> 
> there is so much more. do people want more?
>