When the prestigious Huntington Library unveiled a copy of the infamous Nuremburg Racial Laws graced with Adolph Hitler’s John Hancock, it didn’t generate the response library officials were hoping for.
The most prominent query: What the hell have you been doing with this document for the past 54 years?
Berkeley author Tony Platt now has an answer: Hiding an artifact it suspected had been looted — because it was.
Platt, a professor emeritus at Sacramento State University and a British-born Jew, was a visiting scholar at the Huntington, back in 1999 when it unveiled the Nuremburg Laws document. The Southern California library’s official story on how the typewritten sheaf of paper found its way into the Huntington’s archives never did sit right with Platt. According to the official line, none other than General George Patton entered Nuremburg, guns blazing and hurling grenades this way and that before a safe was conveniently located and the papers extracted from within.
In Platt’s new book, “Bloodlines,” he explodes the Patton myth, locating the man who actually found the Nuremburg Laws, and further exposing the racism and anti-Semitism of Patton and many of California’s elites of yesteryear.
Platt will be speaking 7 p.m. Monday, April 24 at Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford Street, Berkeley. The Yom HaShoah-related evening event is free to the public.
The actual guy who unearthed the closest official document there is to a signed Hitlerian mandate of the Final Solution did not, incidentally, have George C. Scott portray him in a movie.
He’s a short, affable Jewish man named Martin Dannenberg, who is still going strong in Baltimore at age 90.
In contrast to Patton’s swashbuckling yarn, Dannenberg calmly reported that his three-man Counter-Intelligence Corps team unearthed the documents in Eichstatt — not Nuremburg — led by an informant and without any need for shots and explosions in the town. Dannenberg’s team included Alabaman Maxwell Pickens and Frank Perls, a German Jewish military interpreter who had personally been forced to flee his home country in the 1930s.
The two Jews knew exactly how important their find was, and they informed the media — news of the discovery even made the Times of London. They passed the Nuremberg Laws to Patton’s intelligence chief with the understanding the invaluable document would be forwarded, posthaste, to Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.
Instead, it ended up in Patton’s trophy case and, soon after, in a Huntington vault for 54 years.
As other historians have done, Platt documents Patton’s anti-Semitic ravings — he referred to the survivors as “lower than animals,” objected to the Nuremberg trials — which he saw as a Jewish-led pogrom — and, in general, treated the Jews as if they were culpable for their own misfortune. Unlike many other writers, however, Platt doesn’t chalk up Patton’s deeply offensive behavior to war weariness but a lifetime of racist, aristocratic and anti-Jewish behavior.
However, it was not anti-Semitism but a thirst for glory and loot that Platt believes led the general to snatch the documents.
Following the outcry over the Huntington’s sitting on Patton’s pilfered Nuremburg Laws, the document was passed to the nearby Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where it remains to this day.
And, if nothing else, Platt’s work has had a small but immeasurable effect on the Skirball’s exhibition: Replacing the tiny photograph of Patton presenting the laws to Huntington administrators is an equally small photograph of a youthful Dannenberg next to his Jeep.
“It’s still a very powerful impact to go and stand before a document that is symbolically tied to millions of people losing their lives,” said Platt.
“That’s why it should be seen by many people.”
“Bloodlines” by Anthony M. Platt with Cecilia E. O’Leary (Paradigm Publishers, 268 pages, $18.95).