Transcript

4.9.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated April May
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twenty twenty six. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a
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reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the first article, which is
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part two of an article from the March edition. One
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of the Ally's secret weapons against the Nazis was a
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twenty one year old woman armed with the microphone and
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a script of lies by April White. In the first part,
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we learned the story of Agnes Bernauer, a twenty one
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year old German Jewish refugee who became an unexpected Allied
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weapon during World War II by broadcasting propaganda under the
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persona Vicky with three Kisses. Using a seductive, affectionate radio
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voice and popular big band music translated into German, Bernauer
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helped draw in German soldiers listening to clandestine Allied stations
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that were designed to sound like official Nazi broadcasts. Her
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on air character evoked romance, nostalgia, and longing, subtly encouraging
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listeners to question the sacrifices demanded by the Nazi cause
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while disguising subversive messages beneath entertainment. Our story's first part
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places Bernauer's work within the Rise of Black Propaganda, a
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secret Allied strategy that mixed truthful details with deliberate deception
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to confuse, demoralize, and emotionally manipulate enemy audiences. Operating from
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a hidden English estate, the Political Warfare Executive and OSS
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assembled refugees, defectors, and artists to weaponize radio and disinformation.
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Though many listeners suspected the broadcast's true origins, their popularity
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unsettled Nazi leadership and demonstrated how modern media, emotion and
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repetition could blur truth and fiction, foreshaft gioing the power
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of disinformation in the modern world. Here now is Part two. Meanwhile,
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inside Buchenwald, the concentration camp, prisoner Ougen Kogan tuned in
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on a Pilford radio. He transcribed the questionable reports of
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approaching Allied troops on scraps of paper to be passed
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among his fellow prisoners. It was all important for us
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to remain well informed about the situation at the fighting
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fronts so that we could take appropriate measures in time,
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Cogan wrote after being liberated as the fighting dragged into
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the spring of nineteen forty five. Each night brought stories
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crafted to exploit cracks and German morale and complicate the
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logistics of the war machine in the Allies, telling Nazi
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officials were abandoning the cause in droves, and those who
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remained lived extravagantly. Some were said to have fled via
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submarine to Argentina, a fiction that caused an international man hunt.
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Another reports sugested that Nazi leader Hermann Geering had moved
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his family in a trove of stolen art to a
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castle in the Alps, while civilians in Berlin died from
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lack of shelter. For Bernauer, the best lies were the silliest,
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like the time she told listeners that the government requested
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they each send a urine sample to the Ministry of
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Health in Berlin. She liked to think she clogged up
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the German postal service for days. By March nineteen forty five,
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the Allied broadcasts had a grateful audience and were beginning
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to have a noticeable effect on the German people. Giebels
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reported in his diary the Nazi propagandists worried that the
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enemy now proposes to bring into action his big psychological
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warfare guns. He was right. As Allied troops prepared to
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enter Germany, the broadcasters at Milton Bryan prepare to unveil
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their biggest lie, Operation Intruder. The Allies had long known
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that German radio stations signed off as air force approached
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to prevent being used as beacons. With the power of
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the medium wave transmitter that aired soldatanzen Deer West, broadcasters
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could hijack the Nazi frequencies and segue seamlessly from authentic
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content into fraudulent news. The capability had been held in reserve.
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Now it would be unleashed to cause a stampede of
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the population by suggesting to them that the Party has
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given an evacuation order for a chosen few and is
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leaving the rest to be destroyed where they are according
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to a top secret memo. Bernauer balked at the idea,
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she would later tell her family. Everyone at m B
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knew that their broadcasts targeted not only German soldiers but
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also unsuspecting civilians. Only now the propagandists would be putting
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them in harm's way. Despite her hesitations, Bernauer participated in
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this unprecedented effort to tangle supply lines and stymy the
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movement of German troops. On March twenty fourth, nineteen forty five,
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the fraudulent German evacuation orders for those on whose preservation
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the continued life of the nation depends were given. As
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for everyone else, the evacuation of a great number of
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our compatriots will for the time being be impossible. Their
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duty therefore is to stick it out, and, if need be,
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faced death bravely. According to a memo written in late
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March by a Nazi officer in Westphalia, Germany, considerable misunderstandings
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and great unrest were caused among the population by the
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intrusion of enemy wireless announcements on the German wireless Bernauer
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would always regret her part in that. After the war,
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even Britain's top propagandist Sefton Delmer, seemed abashed. On a
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visit to Germany just months before the war ended, he
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saw the roads crowded with refugees. I did not stop
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to ask any of them whether it was a message
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on Radio Cologne or Radio Frankfurt. German's days targeted an
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operation Intruder that had first started them on their trek.
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He wrote, I did not want to know, but the
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confusion caused one delay for which Bernauer would later be
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very grateful. As Operation Intruder continued into April, a train
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left the bergen Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. It
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was loaded with twenty five hundred prisoners bound for Teratzine,
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a camp in German occupied Czechoslovakia, about seventy five miles
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west of Berlin. The train stopped abruptly, its progress halted
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by reports of approaching forces and nearby Allied bombings. No
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one knew what was true or false, the ultimate goal
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of black propaganda. What is clear is that the German
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troops believed what they heard, abandoning the train and those
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crammed on it, who were later discovered by American soldiers.
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Ilma Bernauer's dear cousin, was among those liberated that afternoon.
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Ilma's mother, Gazella, did not survive. She died in Auschwitz
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in nineteen forty two. The fight was finally over. According
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to the propagandists. It is expected that the end of
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the war will be announced in the very near future,
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simultaneously with the death of the Furer. The stations reported
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on April twenty ninth, nineteen forty five. The assumption that
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the Furor has already been quietly liquidated in the last
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days by Heinrich Himmler is now confirmed. As usual, the
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news was almost accurate. Hitler died by suicide the following day,
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and Germany surrendered a week later. The voices of Atlantic,
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Zender and zoldatn Sender West fell silent at dawn on
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May first. There was no more reason to lie. There
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was no grand on air send off, just a note
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at the end of that night's script zogbeim abshid Liza
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servus say good bye silently. But where is the most
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listened to station in Europe since May first? Wondered a
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Swiss newspaper. As the war in Europe drew to a
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close less than a week after the German surrender, the
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answers started to emerge. Radio Atlantic disclosed as Allied propaganda
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roofs and associated press headline blared. Some of Germany's best
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pre war actors entertained the enemy and shipped at his morale.
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Allied officials did not confirm the scoop because one said,
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there's a war on the other side of the world.
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Even then, it was clear that the disinformation model built
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at Milton Bryan would be expanded upon and used again next.
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The Librea tar Pits have been sucking in visitors for millennia.
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Paleontologists are still finding out what lies within the ouze
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by Richard Conneff. Unusually for a major tourist attraction, the
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phrase death trap features prominently in the signage and the
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lore at the Librea tar Pits, the celebrated fossil site
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in the heart of Los Angeles. Death trap for meat eaters,
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says the sign at one site, though in truth it's
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a death trap for plant eaters too. Over the past
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sixty thousand years or so, animals by the millions, including
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giant ground sloths, saber toothed cats, dire wolves, and ten
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ton Columbian mammoths, were stuck in the goo and died here,
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and were quickly preserved in exquisite detail by the same
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stuff that killed them. For scientists, the Librea death trap
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matters because the animals entombed here, now mostly extinct, are
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remnants of a lost North America. Not so long ago,
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big scary animals, both predator and prey dominated the landscape,
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much as they still do. In parts of Africa to day.
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Their abrupt disappearance roughly thirteen thousand years ago makes Librea
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a tantalizing window into the American past what the International
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Union of Geological Sciences calls one of the most important
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fossil localities in the world. Emily Lindsay, a Librea paleoecologist
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with a passion for the strangeness of giant ground slots,
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goes further, there is almost nothing on Earth of any
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time period that can match the number of fossils and
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the diversity of fossils. This range includes megafauna and microfossils, plants, insects, snails,
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even fungi, all preserved together. Lindsay and Reagan Dunn, a
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former river guide and ski instructor turned paleobotanist, are the
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scientific leads at Librea. The big question researchers hope these
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fossils can answer is why such a world suddenly disappeared
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when it did, and what, if anything, those findings can
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tell us about our own world. For non scientists, though,
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Librea's death trap image has a different appeal. Lots of
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screenwriters live in the area, says Done. Her eyes widen
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but do not quite roll. You sometimes see them around
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with their laptops. Act one. Seen one often takes place
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at the sizeable lake pit by Librea's front gate, just
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off Wiltshire Boulevard. The location is production friendly, just fifteen
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minutes from major Hollywood studios, and suitably apocalyptic, with methane
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bubbling ominously from the surface and a statue of a
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desperate mammoth mired hip deep in tari liquid. In the
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recent Nimbi ce television series Librea, a sinkhole opens here
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and drops attractive people into a primeval underworld. And in
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the nineteen eighty eight movie Miracle Mile a boy meets Girl,
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Boy loses girl, boy finds Girl's story. The happy couple
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are racing away from a nuclear apocalypse when their helicopter
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suddenly spins down into the tar. As the goo rises
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around them, they console themselves with the thought that their
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fossilized remains might some day be displayed in a museum.
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Such depictions may be Hollywood kitsch, but they live in
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the hearts of fans. This is right where the movie
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Volcano Happened. Right, exclaims a middle aged man and a
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cowboy hat to two pals one morning as they stride
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past the tar pit bound for the George See Page
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museum on the Librea grounds. In that nineteen ninety seven movie,
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Librea gives rise to a volcano which flings flaming lava
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bombs and sends a river of molten rock flowing through
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the city. Perhaps as a nod to the site's morbid reputation,
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the man in the cowboy hat has dressed for his
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Librea visit and a black T shirt printed with lyrics
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from the heavy metal group Venom. We suck the blood
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of the Beast and hold the key to Death's door
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for visitors. The first clue that there is something different
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about the land around the museum is the bare patches
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among the trees, where the exposed earth is a little
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too dark and dead leaves are stuck in place. On
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one such patch, a stray soccer ball waits like an
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invitation to come closer. Don't. In fact, there are fences
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to keep you away. These dark patches have always been
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the real hazard, not the lake out front. Lindsay, who
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is the excavation site director, dismisses the lake as a
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giant hole in the ground left behind by commercial mining
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in the late nineteenth century. The almost ordinary patches of
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ground are more deadly for being less obvious. What they
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hide beneath the leaves is not a lake or even
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a pit, but a shallow seep. The dirt is saturated
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with asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil. Long before
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commercial mining, Native Americans harvested the asphalt here to waterproof
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baskets and boats. Early Spanish colonists likewise used the asphalt
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to seal their roofs. They were the ones who named
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the place librea, which means the tar. The oil pushes
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up through narrow cracks in the rock from oil deposits
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between what five hundred and one thousand feet underground. The
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asphalt didn't pull its victims down into the earth, as
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Hollywood likes to suggest. Even a shallow puddle was enough
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to lock creatures in its adhesive grip, where they died
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of exposure or starvation, or were finished off by predators
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that often then got trapped themselves, as did many scavengers
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following behind. Inside the museum, school children and parents flock
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to an exhibit that invites them to pull up on
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the handle of a shaft stuck in tar and see
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what being trapped might have been like. These encounters suggest
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that most of these people would have gone the way
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of the parished mammoths. There are, however, other quieter ways
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to approach Librea. The museum as part of Hancock Park,
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a twenty three acre refuge from the traffic and chaos
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of central Los Angeles. Parents wander with the child or
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two down winding paths shaded by live oak trees. School
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groups picnic under the date palms. An exercise class works
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through its routine at the foot of a slope. Visitors
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can amble in through the museum's back gates and visit
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Project twenty three, a fenced in area where a palaeontological
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excavation is in progress. Now a wooden crate stands open,
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revealing what looks like a crude sculpture roughly five feet tall.
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It's a tableau of death, a cataclysmic mix of blackened ankles, teeth, femurs,
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and skulls jammed together. This mass grave was carefully excavated
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and set aside during construction at the site. The bones
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in the crates are still embedded in asphalt, just as
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they were underground before removing them from the crates. Sean
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campbell a palaeontological preparator at the museum uses a laser
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to measure each one and carefully documents its position relative
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to the others. Next, Campbell goes to work excavating a
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large rib, spraying on solvent to soften the asphalt that
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holds it in place. The asphalt yields to gentle scraping
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with dental tools and accumulates in glistening little heaps, like
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couscous cooked in motor oil. So far, Campbell says as
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he works, I have a baby ground sloth, a baby bison,
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a baby horse. Visitors often pay special attention to the
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babies in the collection. People are just like, oh God,
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that's so terrible, And I'm like, yes, but they would
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have died forty thousand years ago by now anyway. But
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at least they're now present for the scientific record for
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us to study and analyze them and learn more about
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their lives. He continues with his roster of the dead
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in the crate. One deer, a few dwarf prong horns,
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tons of coyotes, at least three adult dire wolves, and
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at least one sub adult sabertoothed cat, a partially articulated
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rodent time and geological upheaval below ground have left many
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of the bones battered, including the rib. Campbell wraps it
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in aluminum foil to keep it intact as he gently
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rocks it back and forth out of the dirt. Then
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he brings it to a bench and wraps it again,
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this time an orthopedic casting tape. A half hour in
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the sun will harden it, leaving it ready to be
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cleaned up and repaired more durably at a lab inside
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the museum. What comes out of the ground here is
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true buried treasure. A nearly intact sabertoothed cats skull unearthed
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near by in the nineteen sixties sold at auction in
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two thousand nine for three hundred thirty four thousand, six
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hundred dollars, but the museum doesn't sell its discoveries. A
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volunteer named Lynne Schneider, retired from a career as a
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government contractor, has been working for months on a dire
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wolf skull that's very broken up. Now. She says she's
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almost getting to the point where I can start consolidating
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a bone and gluing it together. Barbara Hill, another volunteer
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and a former aerospace worker, stands on the opposite side
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of the same blackened mass of bones. Both women volunteer
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two days a week. Hill divides her time between Project
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twenty three and the prep lab inside the museum, though
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that schedule can change depending on where she is needed most.
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It feels like a custody battle. Hill jokes of her
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split schedule. At the lab, preparators stand at a long
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horseshoe shaped bench facing out into the public visitors watched
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through plate glass windows. Jars of Q tips, toothpicks, and
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foam tip make up applicators stand at the ready for
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the cleaning and sorting process. Manicure sticks the kind peutitions
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used for pushing back cuticles, are very nice for removing
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stubborn matrix, says Connie Clark, a staff preparator, referring to
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the sediment that hardens around fossils. An electric toothbrush is
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good for removing a clay layer alongside the bone. Consolidates
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and glues are degreasers for cleaning the bones. In the
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old days, they used boiling kerosene, Clark says, but boiling
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of flammable liquid, she says, is not ideal. Like Schneider
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and Hill, the other preparators are mostly long time volunteers,
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an anthropologist, a veterinarian, a software developer, a fun mix.
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Clark says, today they're working from a gallon paint can.
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It's the oily couscous that originally surround the bones out
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at Project twenty three, now dried and thoroughly cleaned. When
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the preparators view them through a microscope, items in the
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mix sharpened in to bits of sticks, shells, bones, plants,
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and insects. They use the bristles of a fine artist's
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paintbrush to nudge pieces to one side or another, sorting
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them by type. Next the gallon can, the results of
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recent sortings occupy clear plastic boxes. Clark carefully opens a
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box full of the glossy, blackened heads of insects, some smooth,
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some pitted, Their rounded skull like shapes resembling the singed
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aftermath of a mass catastrophe. Sometimes a sneeze or a
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deep sigh will send things rocketing away, she warns. Dung
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beetle fossils have lately become Hill's specialty. A palaeontologist helpfully
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told the volunteers that the underside of a dung beetle's
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head looks like a toilet seat, and so far, in
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a few days of microfossil sorting, Hill has found two
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dung beetle heads that may represent previously unknown species. She
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hopes to find another today. It's a treasure, Hill says, playfully,
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giving herself a pep talk. You're going to find it.
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Open a whole new page of history. The big animals
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that thrill the popular imagination may have died at Librea
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only once or twice in a decade, but across millennia
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those numbers added up. In the museum's collection rooms, sabertoothed
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cat skulls fill a line of cabinets eight and a
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half feet high and fifty feet long, while drawers full
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of sabertoothed cat astragali or ankle parts and other bones
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are lined up like spoons. A public display Wow's museum
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goers with four hundred dire wolf skulls in almost military formation.
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Another four hundred thirty are stored in back for scientific research.
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Is it real? A visitor demands, in front of a
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massive skeleton of a Harlan's ground sloth. It's a standard
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questionablebrea and becka Prater, an educator on staff confirms that, yes,
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it's real. We have found over nine thousand of their fossils,
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so we do have a fully articulated skeleton of a
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Harlan's ground sloth here. Then scrupulously she adds those nine
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thousand bones probably came from about sixty individuals. Like nearly
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all skeletons at natural history museums, this one is a composite.
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The bones of individual animals rarely turn up intact or
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even in the same place. So whoever had that skull
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never knew the guy with those ribs, and probably never
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was friends with the sloth that now holds his legs up.
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So we frankenstein them altogether and build these big composite
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skeletons with the pieces we find. The viewer goes away satisfied,
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but the is it real question will inevitably recur. The
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challenge for Librea, says Lindsay, is that it's a spectacle,
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and it's also in the middle of the worst city
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to be a spectacle. People come to el expecting to
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see made up experiences like Universal Studios or Disney's Hollywood Land,
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which builds itself as a place where moving moments come
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to life. When they come to Librea, Lindsay says, they're like, oh,
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it's the Librea tar pit's experience. It doesn't always fully
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register that these fossils are real and they're still coming
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out of the ground. In the third largest city in
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North America, several seeps on the property are active enough
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to require fencing. Other smaller seeps turn up from time
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to time, and green traffic cones labeled sticky and gooey
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worn pedestrians away. Workers scoop asphalt out of inconvenient areas
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and empty it into the lake pit, which is periodically
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pumped out by a hasmat service. There are seeps outside
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the museum grounds too, Nearby homeowners who do not realize
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they live above an oil field sometimes called to complain,
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your tar is coming up in my garage. Old seeps,
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now cut off from their source, also libraried and pockets
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around the neighborhood As preparatoris continue to sort through the
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original batch of twenty three crates. Construction for a new
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wing of the Los Angeles County Art Museum recently brought
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thirty seven more crates to the museum. Faced with so
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many specimens, some seemingly insignificant. When does a palaeontologist decide
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to stop excavating. Librea is planning a major redesign with
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a new center for ice age research that will emphasize
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lessons from microfossil research. The aim is to get it
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done in time for the twenty twenty eight Olympics in
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Los Angeles. Microfossils are really cool, really important done, the
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botanist tells an evening audience of museum donors. They're superabundant
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if you look hard enough, and if you know how
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to look for them. And these small critters are really
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important for ecosystem function. While the monsters for which Librea
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is now celebrated roamed widely across the region, size kept
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their smaller counterparts mostly local. We study them to interpret
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what the environment was like right here at the tar
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pits and the surrounding area. And these small fossils tell
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really big stories. A twenty twenty three paper published in
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the leading journal Science shed new light on the abrupt
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disappearance of species including the western horse, the American lion,
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a bison species, saber toothed cats, and dire wolves. Lindsay
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and Dunn's collaborators at Marshall University and the University of California,
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Irvine used updated techniques to remove all traces of asphalt
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from the fossils, which is crucial for accurate carbon dating,
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and then says done. They said, oh my god, we
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know the timing of the extinction event, but what was
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the extinction event? Botanists like Dunn thought that phytoliths might
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hold the answer. These infinitesimal stones form when plant species
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take up silica from groundwater and channel it into shapes
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that are visible only under a high powered microscope, and
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then only after grinding up stony matrix and running it
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through a series of acid baths and heavy liquid flotation treatments.
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Different types of plants left behind differently shaped phytoliths. On
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her computer screen, Done points out examples. You see kind
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of like a spiky golf ball at the top center.
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Those are palms. The one on the left with these
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parallel lines. That's a fern. The one that's like a
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worm with spirals on it. It comes from the veins
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and leaves. Phytoliths are everywhere in the plant world. When
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you run your hand up a blade of grass and
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feel a spiky edge, she says, you're touching phytoliths, and
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they provide clues about the habitat. Certain phytoliths from the
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upper surface of a leaf can reveal, for instance, whether
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the plant lived under forest cover or in open grassland.
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By studying fossil phytoliths, seeds, pollen, and other plant remains
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from Librea, the botanists constructed a time line of what
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the habitat there was like in different time periods. The
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post glacial pine forests of fifty four thousand years ago
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gave way to juniper and oak woodlands thirty thousand years ago,
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and then about thirteen thousand, two hundred years ago to
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open habitat populated by drought and fire adapted plants. But again,
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the question is why the megafauna extinction event didn't happen
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only at Librea. Ice age fossils found scattered across the
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continents suggest that it was a global event. Librea is different,
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mainly because of the abundance and the extraordinary preservation of
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the evidence there. Scientists worldwide have debated possible explanations for
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the sudden extinction. One is that at the end of
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the glacial period, the climate rapidly became warmer and drier,
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changing habitats in ways that put pressure on cold adapted
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plants and wildlife. Another commonly sighted explanation, the overkill theory,
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is based on the fact that human populations expanded around
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this time, including in southern California, where evidence suggests that
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people were present in the Channel Islands by about thirteen thousand,
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two hundred years ago. These growing human populations led to
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heavier hunting, which intensified the pressure on large animals. A
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third model, put forward by Lindsay Dunn and their colleagues
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in the twenty twenty three paper emphasizes fire. As humans
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traveled through this already drying landscape, they made fires wherever
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they went, causing conflagrations and adding to the stresses on
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vulnerable species. The same asphalt that preserved bones and insect
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parts so well was terrible at preserving ash and charred materials.
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And we'll have to leave it there for now. We'll
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have part two next week. This concludes readings from the
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Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore.
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Thank you for listening, and have a great day.