nuclear bombs and Monju
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities which suffered under a US nuclear attack are in the vicinity of Fukuoka (where the writers of this blog are currently located), so there are quite some people around here for whom these attacks are not just a scary story but bitter reality.
The bombs were a production of the Manhattan Project which was initiated by the fear that Nazi Germany could develop bombs of its own (which turned out wasn’t the case) and there were plans to throw nuclear bombs on Ludwigshafen, Mannheim and Berlin. Luckily Berlin capitulated early enough! If this wouldnt have been the case you probably wouldnt read this blog, as both of my parents were in Berlin in wartimes (with a few exceptions: my father and his mother (a single mom) were evacuated to Bavaria for a short time and my mother and her mother went on a trip to get the mother of my grandmother (whose husband died already in the first world war) out of Poland)
Among the targets of the US bombs were the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and it is a strange coincidence that right this company is currently developing Japans new fast breeder at Monju (partially in collaboration with russia). At this point one should repeat that fast breeders bear a high proliferation risk.
The old fast breeder in Monju was closed in 1995 following a serious sodium leak (which was luckily not radioactive like this leak) and fire. It is expected to reopen in 2008.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:59 am
with “strange coincidence” you do not want to suggest that there may be people in Japan who want to take revenge for the nuclear attack!
August 8th, 2008 at 2:53 am
@Arthur Miller
i do not want to suggest anything. a coincidence is a coincidence.
I wrote “strange” since i find it strange that a company which suffered from radioactive material is now furthering the production of radioactive material.
August 11th, 2008 at 6:38 am
What happened to the men in the family?
I dont know too much about them.
One grandfather -Gerhard- was a tall handsome simple police officer, who came from the countryside. His wife – my grandmother Gerda was a very young Berlin city girl. They got divorced, when my father was one year old. As a consequence my father was partially brought up by my greatgrandmother Grete Kniehase, a socialdemocratic inclined pubowner, who actually also took care of me, when my father studied and my mother had to work. The husband of Grete, Gustav Schellhase- a cellist at the first Berlin radio philharmony- committed suicide after returning from world war one (he was a soldier in Africa).
My other grandfather -his name was Rheinhold- was a convinced Nazi. In world war one he got a bullet into his head. The bullet entered his left cheek and passed through the neck, right next to the spine. After that incident his black hair (from a raethoroman background) went grey, so he was totally grey already in his early twenties.
He was among the first thousand people to become a member of the NSDAP. He was a bookkeeper and worked at some Nazi institution in Berlin during the war. He was in charge for money logistics in relation with social issues (nobody knows the details, I tried but I didnt find out more). So he was a Nazi functionary and after WWII he went I think for about one year to a british jail because of this. After that he worked as a grave digger and died of a bad liver when I was one year old.
The relation between him and my grandmother was difficult. Before she got pregnant she worked as a secretary for one of the directors of Siemens. She told me that she (and her boss, where at the moment I forgot the name) knew not exactly, what happened with the deported people, but more or less everybody in the higher ranks at Siemens suspected that terrible things happened with them. Last not least e.g. another director of Siemens was involved in the Stauffenberg attack against Hitler.
So she was rather openly opposing the Nazis. In fact Rheinhold bailed her out from the SS, which arrested her, because she secretely supported her former jewish landladies with money (she was seen by neighbours, when she regularily slipped an enveloppe).
My mother was born in a nonmaritial status. My grandfather and my grandmother were sort of half split up, but married when my aunt was conceived towards the end of the war. After the war my grandmother worked again at Siemens. To a great extent her mother took care of her children. Besides an interception in 1987/88 I lived together with my grandmother (partially with my sister) from 1983 until her death in 1988.
November 26th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Interesting these family reports. What happened to Gerda – the city girl?