9 shipwrecks from World War I discovered off Morocco's coast
Nine ships sunk by German torpedoes during World War I have been found off the coast of Morocco, experts announced Monday, marking the latest in a string of shipwrecks from the war to be found in recent months.
The nine wrecks — which include Japanese, Norwegian, French, British, Portuguese and Italian vessels — are all located along the coast of southern Morocco, according to the Assalam Association for the Protection of Maritime Heritage, a nonprofit focused on preserving underwater archaeological sites in the region.
The association did not say whether it was able to identify the ships but it posted a video on social media of a news broadcast showing historic photos of various ships and divers exploring artifacts on the ocean floor.
"German submarines targeted commercial and military ships of allied countries, resulting in the loss of many ships off the southern provinces," the association said.
Information about the exact location of the shipwrecks as well as a report detailing the characteristics of each vessel have been forwarded to relevant authorities, the association said.
The wrecks were found more than a decade after researchers discovered the wreck of the Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse, a famous German ship that was sunk during World War I, off the coast of Dakhla, Morocco.
Other shipwrecks from World War I have been discovered around the globe in recent months. In November, military officials in England announced that a shipwreck discovered off the coast of Scotland was confirmed to be the HMS Hawke, a British cruiser sunk by a torpedo during World War I, killing more than 500 crew members on board.
About a month before that, the German World War I supply ship Titania was discovered by an expedition ship off the coast of Chile.
Last September, an offshore wind farm company discovered a shipwreck believed to be the World War I vessel the SS Tobol.
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Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Rosebushes at the gates of hell
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up My grandfather had a camera, and he took photographs at Dachau. They ended up in his wartime scrapbook along with photos of Camp Old Gold, the Rhine, dusty German roads, bomber planes in the sky, and the Austrian Alps. I saw the scrapbook for the first time in 2015, when my grandmother brought it out at my grandfather's funeral. I knew my grandfather had been at Dachau. He had even shown me some of his war 'souvenirs,' as he called them, from Berchtesgaden. I had heard about the scrapbook over the years from my aunts and uncles, who mentioned it in low tones when the subject of my grandfather's wartime experience came up. But it had mostly remained stowed away in the dark, out of sight and out of mind. The author's grandfather's wartime scrapbook. Clark Family Collection As I turned its brittle pages, I understood why. There were black-and-white photographs of cattle cars on a railroad track with their doors half-open — death trains from Buchenwald, full of corpses. Hills of bodies outside the gas chamber and crematorium. Bodies on long flat carts, pulled by horses. Dead German soldiers on the ground. An enormous pile of clothes and striped uniforms. American GIs standing around, stunned. I knew what I was looking at, but my grandfather didn't. Not then. Like many American soldiers who witnessed horrors in Nazi Germany, my grandfather wanted to forget. He had helped liberate the Nazis' victims and should have been proud of the small role he played fighting fascism. But he never mentioned Dachau to me, even though he loved talking about history and politics. Somehow, I knew not to bring it up. He finally allowed my aunt to interview him about the war in 2011, when he was in his late 80s. He spoke dispassionately about what he had seen at Dachau and didn't give many details. 'We went around the back of it. And that's when it was bad, you know,' he said. My aunt attempted to draw him out, but his answers were vague. 'You change a little bit,' was all he said about his emotions then, and after. But I'd heard the story about how he once approached a couple of truck drivers who were talking about how the Holocaust had never happened. My grandfather told them to read their history, because he was there. He had seen it with his own eyes. The author's great-aunt Ann Clark, who made the scrapbook, with the author's grandfather Herbert J. Clark in front of their home on Columbus Ave. in Somerville during his second furlough from the war in 1944. Clark Family Collection In the summer of 2023, I traveled to Germany to research my novel, partially based on my grandfather's experience in Bavaria during the spring of 1945. I tried to retrace his wartime route. I went to Berchtesgaden and took Hitler's gaudy gilded elevator up to the Kehlsteinhaus — the 'Eagle's Nest,' an old Nazi chalet perched on the edge of a small mountain, with stunning views of the Alps. Now, improbably, the Eagle's Nest was a busy restaurant full of tourists and hikers who sat in the June sun with steins of golden beer. Apart from the historical photos that hung on some walls, it was hard to imagine Hitler relaxing there with the Nazi top brass. My grandfather had been here at the end of the war, he said, and had taken a swastika flag. American GIs had carved their names into the marble fireplace. I looked for his name but couldn't find it. The next day I walked through Dachau's museum, reconstructed barracks, gas chamber, and crematorium. I stood where I thought my grandfather had stood 78 years before, when he had taken his photographs. I still didn't know how to think about those photos. I worried, in my worst moments, that they were some kind of macabre war souvenir, like the flag he'd taken from Berchtesgaden. But in the crematorium at Dachau, I saw a photograph of local Germans forced by American soldiers to view the murdered victims' corpses. I thought I understood, then, why my grandfather had taken the photos. They were documentary evidence that this had really happened. Later, I learned that my grandfather had developed those photographs in Germany and sent them back home to Somerville, to get the word out about the horror he had witnessed at Dachau. 'You can't tell me the Germans didn't know,' he said in his interview with my aunt, referring to the townspeople of Dachau. He never forgot the sight of a German woman pruning her rosebushes not far from Dachau's 'gates of hell' — a comment that struck me anew when I watched Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest,' with its scenes of Hedwig Höss, wife of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lovingly tending her garden as smoke from the camp's chimneys rises upward in the distance. When I finished my research in Germany, I returned to New York and worked on my novel. I decided to incorporate a transcription of my grandfather's words from his interview about Dachau. I was writing fiction, but I couldn't bring myself to make up those details. I did not want his testimony to vanish. Still, I struggled to understand what he had been through at Dachau, and I worried about appropriating Jewish suffering. He was a liberator, not a survivor. I was wary about claiming any kind of trauma on his behalf — this was a man who would not even watch 'Saving Private Ryan' because he was uncomfortable with its themes of heroism. And yet, as I researched the stories of other GIs in the Blackhawk Division, I came to feel that what these young men went through at Dachau was its own kind of hell, one that many of them never forgot. The author's grandfather before his deployment during training at Camp Cook in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Clark Family Collection My family is not Jewish, but the Holocaust shadowed my grandfather's life. Dachau poisoned and twisted everything it touched, including the lives of those German townspeople looking away in the Dachau museum's photos — a larger metaphor for Germany in the immediate postwar years. As popular support for Germany's far right-wing AfD party and other fascist threats around the world grow, so does the need to revisit the lessons of Dachau. Soon, the last of World War II's survivors and veterans will be gone. But the photographs, diaries, letters, and scrapbooks will remain. As memories of the war fade, and as we face a growing and pernicious skepticism about the ravages of the Holocaust, I am grateful my grandfather took those photos. I think I now understand why he took them, and what they truly cost. He exposed a horror too much for words.
Boston Globe
6 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Marthe Cohn, a wartime Jewish nurse who spied for the French, dies at 105
She then slipped past two German sentries, identifying herself to them with an audacious 'Heil Hitler' salute. Then she headed deeper into Germany, pretending to be the only child of parents killed in an Allied raid and saying she was searching for her missing fiance, 'Hans.' The ruse worked. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up She soon encountered a wounded Nazi storm trooper, who bragged that 'he could smell a Jew a mile away.' When the soldier collapsed in mid-conversation, Ms. Cohn ministered to him. He invited her to visit the front lines to continue the quest for her missing boyfriend. Advertisement As a result, she was able to glean two strategic military secrets about Wehrmacht maneuvers, a feat that would win her medals from France and also from postwar Germany -- for saving lives by helping to hasten the end of World War II even by a few weeks. The war in Europe ended May 8. Advertisement Marthe Cohn died May 20 at her home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., in Los Angeles County, where she had settled with her American husband, a doctor, long after her wartime exploits, her family said. She was 105. Her odyssey from German-speaking Alsace Lorraine as the granddaughter of a rabbi to her recruitment as a French spy and then to her life in America -- moving from New York to the Midwest and finally to California -- became grist for a 2002 book, 'Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany' (written with Wendy Holden). It was also the subject of a documentary film, 'Chichinette: The Accidental Spy' (2019). Asked in the film for a life lesson she could impart to viewers, Ms. Cohn replied, 'Be engaged, and don't accept any order that your conscience could not approve.' Marthe Hoffnung, the fifth of eight children, was born April 13, 1920, in Metz shortly after the Lorraine region reverted from German to French rule after World War I. Her parents, Fischel and Regine (Bleitrach) Hoffnung, were Orthodox Jews who owned a framing and photofinishing business. While the family had Roman Catholic friends, they were also subject to antisemitism. Ms. Cohn wrote that she had been emboldened to become a spy by an indelible childhood experience: When teenagers stoned the Hoffnungs as they left services at a synagogue, her father bravely chased them, wielding only his belt. As classmates disparaged Leon Blum, the French prime minister in the 1930s, for being Jewish, she recalled, she and a sister 'had fistfights with the girls in school about that because then they showed openly their antisemitism and we did not accept it.' Advertisement She left school at 17 to work at an older sister's hat store. After war broke out in 1939, the family transplanted themselves to Poitiers, in western France, where they operated a wholesale clothing business. Marthe studied nursing there. Her parents had sheltered German Jews fleeing Nazi pogroms, and Ms. Cohn soon joined the cause. She and another sister, Stephanie, a medical student, helped Jewish refugees escape south to unoccupied France, which was administered by the collaborationist Vichy government. Several members of her family escaped south with false papers provided by a non-Jewish colleague with whom Ms. Cohn had worked as a translator at the Poitiers City Hall. 'When I asked him how much it would cost, he started crying, and he said, 'I do not want to be paid, I do this to save you,'' she told The Southern New England Jewish Ledger in 2015. As she led her mother and maternal grandmother to safety, she said, she feared that local peasants would renounce them to authorities for a reward. One old man in work clothes stared at the three women. 'Without saying a word, he suddenly dropped onto one knee and, hand on his chest, lowered his head in prayer,' she wrote. 'Next to him, his wife knelt on both knees in the dirt and made the sign of the cross.' 'I could hardly believe my eyes,' she added. 'It was so beautiful, the humanity of it. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I nodded my head in silent thanks.' Stephanie Hoffnung was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 for helping an escapee; she was later murdered at Auschwitz. Marthe's actual fiance, Jacques Delaunay, a medical student and non-Jew who was active in the resistance, was executed in 1943. Advertisement Ms. Cohn studied nursing in Marseille, and then joined another sister in Paris for a year until the city was liberated in August 1944. She tried to join the Free French army but was rebuffed by an officer, who told her that she should have been killing German soldiers instead of saving refugees. 'As much as I hated the Germans at that time, I was unable to do that,' she told The Southern New England Jewish Ledger in 2015. 'I told him, 'I'm a nurse, I take care of patients, I don't kill people.'' She was recruited by a French intelligence officer after he learned she was bilingual; German-speaking women were in demand as espionage agents. She interrogated German prisoners of war in France before being smuggled into Germany, where she befriended the wounded storm trooper. 'He was talking about, you know, all the things the SS do -- how much they do and how they hate the Jews and how they hate the Poles and how they hate the Russians and what they do to these people,' she said in a videotaped interview with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1995. 'Then suddenly he fainted.' 'So I was a good German nurse,' she added. 'I took care of him.' By the end of the war, she estimated that she had lost more than two dozen relatives in the Holocaust. In 1953, after serving as a nurse in Indochina, she was in Geneva and met a medical student, Major L. Cohn, from Brooklyn. They moved to the United States in 1956, married, and conducted research in anesthesiology. Her husband practiced medicine in New York City; Newark; Pittsburgh; Minneapolis; and St. Louis before settling in Southern California. Advertisement Marthe Cohn was named a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2004 and awarded the Order of Merit of Germany in 2014. She leaves her husband; their sons, Stephan and Remi Cohn; and a granddaughter. Until she wrote her book, Cohn didn't advertise her wartime adventures. Her husband learned about her secret assignments only after they married; her children were unaware for years. 'I just thought nobody would believe me,' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. 'Spies are usually tall and good-looking. I am a very unlikely spy.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
How The Sole Survivor Of India's 787 Plane Crash Walked Away With Little More Than A Limp
Last week's Air India Flight 171 crash claimed the lives of nearly 280 people in the plane and on the ground, yet somehow, one of the passengers lived to tell the tale. I'm not much of a believer in miracles, but this is about as close as we're going to get. There were 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner when it crashed into a building shortly after taking off from an airport in Ahmedabad, India. 241 were killed by the impact, intense heat and smoke, but not Viswash Kumar Ramesh. In the hours following the crash, footage began popping up online with wounds on his face and blood on his shirt, according to the New York Times. He was seen walking himself to an ambulance with a small limp and a crowd around him saying he had come "from inside" the plane. It's truly astonishing. Read more: These Supercars Lose Value So Quickly, They're Almost A Steal At first, it seemed like this was a mistake or a hoax because of how badly harmed many of the bodies found at the crash site were, but by the end of the day, Air India confirmed that there was one survivor who was being treated at the hospital. Here's what the 38-year-old said in an interview. From the New York Times: "I still can't believe how I got out alive," Mr. Ramesh said. [...] "I thought I was also about to die." Mr. Ramesh, who was seated in an exit row, said the plane had felt "stuck five or 10 seconds after takeoff," and it seemed to be trying to accelerate when it crashed. [...] The front of the plane, after hitting buildings, crashed into an open area, he said, while the tail was stuck in a building, which was later identified as the dining facility of a medical college. Ramesh told The Times that he unbuckled his seat right after the crash when he saw a way to get out. He didn't make it clear if he had to open the emergency exit he was sitting next to or if it opened during impact. Either way, he was able to get out without being seriously injured. "When my door broke, I saw there was some space — that I could try to get out," he said in the interview. "The other side, people couldn't get out, as it was crushed against a wall." The incredibly lucky man — a British citizen — was on his way back to England after a vacation to India with his brother Ajay. He was seated in 11J on the right side of the plane, and was killed in the crash, Just after the crash, Ramesh made a video call to his family near the wreckage to confirm he was safe, according to NYT. This incident wasn't the first time a single person survived a horrific crash. Back in 1987, a four-year-old was the sole survivor of a crash in Detroit that killed 156 people. There is a place you can sit on a plane that will give you the best chance of survival, but oddly, Ramesh wasn't sitting in one of these seats on his flight. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
