The Postcard
A postcard that was published by F. Frith & Co. Ltd. of Reigate. The card was posted in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset using a ½d. stamp on Monday the 23rd. August 1915. It was sent to:
Miss E. Jenkins,
c/o Message Room,
G.P.O.,
Westgate Street,
Cardiff.
The pencilled message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Dear Eugenie,
Thanks for note.
I am glad I have a friend
in you, at least "until
Germany falls."
I hope I may retain your
friendship longer.
Love,
May."
Cheddar Gorge
Cheddar Gorge, including the caves and other attractions, is a tourist destination. The gorge attracts about 500,000 visitors per year.
In a 2005 poll of Radio Times readers, following its appearance on the 2005 television programme Seven Natural Wonders, Cheddar Gorge was named as the second greatest natural wonder in Great Britain, surpassed only by Dan yr Ogof caves.
The maximum depth of the gorge is 137 m (449 ft), with a near-vertical cliff-face to the south, and steep grassy slopes to the north.
The gorge was formed by meltwater floods during the cold periglacial periods which have occurred over the last 1.2 million years. During the ice ages, permafrost blocked the caves with ice and frozen mud, and made the limestone impermeable. When the ice melted during the summers, water was forced to flow on the surface, and carved out the gorge.
During warmer periods, the water flowed underground through the permeable limestone, creating the caves and leaving the gorge dry, so that today much of the gorge has no river until the underground Cheddar Yeo river emerges in the lower part from Gough's Cave.
The river is used by Bristol Water, who maintain a series of dams and ponds which supply the nearby Cheddar Reservoir, via a 137-centimetre (54 in) diameter pipe that takes water just upstream of the Rotary Club Sensory Garden, a public park in the gorge opposite Jacob's Ladder.
The gorge is susceptible to flooding. In the Chew Stoke flood of 1968, the flow of water washed large boulders down the gorge, damaging the cafe and entrance to Gough's Cave and washing away cars. In the cave itself the flooding lasted for three days.
In 2012 the road through the gorge was closed for several weeks following damage to the surface during extensive flooding.
Longleat and the National Trust
The south side of the gorge is owned and administered by the Marquess of Bath's Longleat Estate. The cliffs on the north side of the gorge are owned by The National Trust. Every year both of the gorge's owners contribute funds towards the clearance of scrub bush and trees from the area.
Most of the commercial visitor activity in the gorge is on the Longleat-owned south side, including access to the two main commercial show caves and the visitor centre.
Tourist numbers through the show caves have dropped from 400,000 a year in the 1980's to 150,000. Because of this fall in numbers, in 2013 Ceawlin Thynn, AKA Viscount Weymouth who runs the Longleat estate on behalf of the family trust, proposed the installation of a 600 metre (2,000 ft) 18-gondola cable car estimated to cost £10M, taking visitors from the entrance area to the caves directly to the top of the southside cliffs.
The National Trust have opposed the proposed development, stating that it will spoil the view and cheapen the experience, creating a "fairground ride" that will make the area feel more like an amusement park. In 2015 the financial feasibility was still being investigated.
Werner Grothmann
So what else happened on the day that May posted the card to Eugenie?
Well, the 23rd. August 1915 marked the birth in Frankfurt am Main, German Empire, of Werner Grothmann.
Werner Grothmann was a mid-ranking commander in the Waffen-SS of Nazi Germany, and aide-de-camp to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, from 1940 until Himmler's death in 1945.
Werner Grothmann - The Early Years
In his youth Grothmann studied economics and became an accountant at a bank. In 1933 he joined the SS, and was trained the Junkerschule SS.
At the beginning of the Second World War, he was given command of SS-Sturmbann Nº 13, a unit of the SS Standarte Deutschland. He took part in the Battle of France and was wounded in combat in June 1940.
At the suggestion of Joachim Peiper, Grothmann was appointed second assistant to Heinrich Himmler until July 1942, when he was promoted to aide-de-camp to Himmler. As Himmler's aide, Grothmann accompanied him on all field visits.
Werner Grothmann at the End of WWII
During the last few days of the war in Europe, Himmler, Grothmann and Heinz Macher traveled from Lübeck to Flensburg, where Himmler offered his services as second-in-command to the Flensburg government led by Karl Dönitz, successor to Adolf Hitler.
Dönitz repeatedly rejected Himmler's overtures and initiated peace negotiations with the Allies. Himmler was formally dismissed from all his posts.
Unwanted by his former colleagues and hunted by the Allies, Himmler attempted to go into hiding. Himmler had not made extensive preparations for this, but he had equipped himself with a forged paybook under the name of Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger of the Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police).
This false identity was a mistake, because members of the Field Police were being sought after by the occupation forces. Grothmann and Macher were both dressed as army privates.
Grothmann, Himmler, and Macher were stopped and detained on the 21st. May 1945 at a checkpoint which had been set up by former Soviet POWs. The three men were taken to an Allied barracks in Lüneburg on the 23rd. May.
During a routine interrogation, Himmler admitted who he was, and he was taken to the headquarters of the Second British Army. During an attempted medical examination, Himmler bit into a hidden cyanide pill and died. After Himmler's suicide, Grothmann and Macher were arrested.
Grothmann was taken to a barracks at Lübeck, where he was extensively questioned. He denied any knowledge of Operation Reinhard. He was then taken to an SS prison camp.
Grothmann served as a prosecution witness against several SS officials between 1946 and 1948, but during the trial of Karl Wolff he denied having any knowledge of the Final Solution.
After release from Allied internment, Grothmann was de-nazified, and considered part of Category III (Lesser Offenders), by a court in Freising in March 1949.
Grothmann remade his life as a businessman, and granted a few interviews in the 1970's in which he disparaged Himmler's character. Grothmann died at the age of 86 on the 26th. February 2002.
Operation Reinhard
Operation Reinhard was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps.
The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; more than 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from July to October 1942.
During the operation, as many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to be murdered in purpose-built gas chambers.
In addition, facilities for mass-murder using Zyklon B were developed at about the same time at the Majdanek concentration camp and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the earlier-established Auschwitz I camp.
Oberleutnant Ludwig Franz Stigler
Two days earlier, on Saturday the 21st. August 1915, German fighter pilot Oberleutnant Ludwig Franz Stigler was born.
He is remembered not for the number of Allied aircraft that he shot down in the Second World War, but for the one – an American B-17 bomber – that he didn’t.
In December 1943, 2nd. Lieutenant Charles “Charlie” Brown was on his first mission to attack the Focke-Wulf aircraft factory in the German city of Bremen.
Brown’s B-17F bomber, flying under the unlikely name of Ye Olde Pub, was twice hit by flak as it approached the target. He had to shut down one of the engines. The badly damaged aircraft then lagged behind the 20 other bombers in the American formation, and Ye Olde Pub was repeatedly attacked by German fighters.
In no time it had lost its nose cone, the tail section was almost destroyed and there were gaping holes in the fuselage. Only one of its eleven guns was still working.
If 21-year-old Brown’s aircraft was in a sorry state, so were those on board. Brown himself had been shot in the shoulder, and at one point lost consciousness because of pain and loss of blood. The tail gunner was dead, and other members of the 10-strong crew were badly wounded.
When Brown looked outside his cockpit he was horrified to see a German Messerschmitt hovering about a metre off his wingtip and obviously about to close in for the kill. “He’s going to destroy us,” Brown said to his co-pilot.
Jagdgeschwader 27 was a fighter wing of the Luftwaffe. One of its crack pilots was 28-year-old Franz Stigler, who by this day had 27 “kills” to his name flying his deadly Messerschmitt. With one more kill, he would receive the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest honour for bravery. And he was in the thick of the fighting against the American B-17s.
Just after Stigler landed to refuel, the crippled Ye Olde Pub limped through the air close by, and the German immediately decided to quickly take off and shoot it down. But when he flew close to the enemy aircraft, he could see the dead and wounded members of the American crew through holes in the fuselage. Stigler could not understand how such a severely damaged plane could still be flying.
Gustav Rödel, one of his commanding officers, had told his pilots:
"If I ever see or hear of you shooting
at a man in a parachute, I will shoot
you myself.”
Stigler decided that, like a parachutist, the crew of this B-17 were in no condition to offer resistance, let alone launch an attack:
"To me, it was just like they were in a
parachute. I couldn't shoot them down.”
Stigler nodded at the American pilot, then began flying in formation with the B-17 so that German anti-aircraft gunners below would not shoot down the slow-moving bomber. He escorted Brown away from danger out to the North Sea.
Then he took one last look at the American, saluted, peeled his fighter away and returned to Germany.
Brown somehow managed to nurse his crippled aircraft the 250 miles back to his base in England.
Had Stigler’s superiors known of his actions he would almost certainly have been court-martialled and probably shot. But the story did not emerge for nearly 50 years.
By that time Brown was living in Miami, Florida, and had made repeated attempts to identify and locate the unknown German. His efforts included placing an ad in a newsletter for former Luftwaffe pilots, telling the story and asking if anyone knew the identity of his saviour.
Then in January 1990 he received a letter. It was from Stigler. The German pilot had moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 1953 and had become a successful businessman.
The two met and became firm friends for the rest of their lives. The two men died within months of each other in 2008. Stigler was 93, and Brown was 86.
