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Time Capsule Tales

@timecaptales

Nov 8

Wojtek wasn’t your average bear - he was a beer-guzzling, cigarette-eating soldier who fought Nazis during WWII.

Wojtek would wrestle with the soldiers, salute his commanders & when it came time to fight, he was ready

This is the true story of Corporal Wojtek

(thread 🧵)

1. Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear born in Iran. After his mother was shot by hunters when he was young, Wojtek was found as a cub by a young Iranian boy who sold him to Polish soldiers. They fed him condensed milk out of an empty vodka bottle (what else?) & quickly adopted him into their ranks.

2. The 22nd Artillery Supply Company decided to name him Wojtek, a diminutive of the Polish name Wojciech, meaning “happy warrior" (pronounced in English as “Voy-tek”).

As Wojtek grew, so did his bond with the troops. They didn’t just see him as a pet or an adopted orphan, but rather a companion.

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Time Capsule Tales

@timecaptales

Nov 7

Thread of bizarre beauty pageant queens from American history

1. Miss Sausage Queen Geene Courtney of 1955. Sponsored by the Zion Meat Company during National Hot Dog Week.

2. Connie Blake from Bassett, Nebraska was "Miss Stock Grower" of 1969.

3. Gail Hooper, 18, from Memphis, Tennessee, selected as Miss National Catfish Queen, holds a 56-pound catfish at the Hotel New Yorker. 1954.

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Time Capsule Tales

@timecaptales

Oct 29

A thread on how to recognize & combat Holocaust denial

1/ It's important to define what is talked about here. Within the relevant scholarly literature & for the purpose of this post, the Holocaust is defined as the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews and millions more Roma, Sinti, & other groups by the Nazi regime & its collaborators.

Holocaust Denial is the attempt & effort to negate, distort, and/or trivialize the established facts about the Nazi genocides against Jews, Roma, & others with the goal to rehabilitate Nazism as an ideology.

2/ The fact that the Nazi regime applied the tools at the disposal of the modern state to genocidal ends, their sheer brutality, and a variety of other factors, the ideology of Nazism & the broader historical phenomenon of Fascism in which Nazism is often placed, have become – rightfully so – politically tainted.

As an ideology that is at its core racist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal, Nazism and Fascism have become politically discredited throughout most of the world.

Holocaust Deniers seek to remove this taint from the ideology of Nazism by distorting, ignoring, & misrepresenting historical fact & thereby make Nazism and Fascism socially acceptable again. In other words, Holocaust Denial is a form of political agitation in the service of bigotry, racism, & anti-Semitism.

3/ In his book 'Lying about Hitler,' Richard Evans summarizes the following points as the most frequently held beliefs of Holocaust Deniers:

(a) The number of Jews killed by the Nazis was far less than 6 million; it amounted to only a few hundred thousand, and was thus similar to, or less than, the number of German civilians killed in Allied bombing raids.
(b) Gas chambers were not used to kill large numbers of Jews at any time.
(c) Neither Hitler nor the Nazi leaderhsip in general had a program of exterminating Europe's Jews; all they wished to do was to deport them to Eastern Europe.
(d) "The Holocaust" was a myth invented by Allied propaganda during the war and sustained since then by Jews who wished to use it for political and financial support for the state of Israel or for themselves. The supposed evidence for the Nazis' wartime mass murder of millions of Jews by gassing and other means was fabricated after the war.

[Richard Evans: Lying about Hitler. History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York 2001, p. 110]

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Time Capsule Tales

@timecaptales

Oct 26

Thread of historical images if they had been taken today

1. A Bird's Eye View of New York City, 1851 & 2020

2. Quincy Market, Boston, 1900 & 2018

3. Mercury Train Leaving Chicago, 1936 & 2020

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Time Capsule Tales

@timecaptales

Oct 25

Thread of what everyday life used to look like

1. Teenagers at a party in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1947.

2. A happy, thankful family, 1959.

3. Housewife poses with a weeks’ worth of groceries in 1947. She spent a total of $12.50 (not including milk) to buy her groceries. On this budget, she is able to feed herself, her husband, her four-year-old twins & their cat.

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Time Capsule Tales

@timecaptales

Oct 24

If you ask what the evilest event in history is, many would say the Holocaust

Ask who the most monstrous figure was, and Josef Mengele - nicknamed the “Angel of Death” - often tops the list

The more you learn about Mengele, the more horrifying & sadistic he gets

Thread 🧵

1. Josef earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935. He followed this by working in genetics with some of the leading medical minds of Germany & and he earned a second, medical doctorate

Mengele was a dedicated Nazi & joined the SS around the same time he earned his medical degree. When World War II broke out, he was sent to the eastern front as an officer to fight the Soviets. He earned an Iron Cross Second Class in 1941.

2. In early 1943, Mengele was assigned as one of several SS doctors to Auschwitz. He was given freedom to conduct his experiments first on Romani people & then Jewish inmates.

Mengele injected dye into the eyeballs of inmates to see if he could change its color. He deliberately infected inmates with horrible diseases to document their progress. He injected substances such as gasoline into the inmates, condemning them to a painful death, just to watch the process.

He liked to experiment on sets of twins and always separated them from the incoming train cars, saving them from immediate death in the gas chambers but keeping them for a fate which was, in some cases, far worse. It is estimated that during his year and a half at Auschwitz, he experimented on 3,000 twins - only 200 of whom survived.

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