Elayne Grossbard: I am Elayne Grossbard I am the curator today at the Magnes Museum and I am honored to introduce tonight's speaker Anthony Platt. Professor Platt is professor emeritus at California State University at Sacramento, where he has taught since 1977. Previously he taught at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. His books include The Child Savers: The Inventory of Delinquency, The Politics of Riot Commisions, 1917-1970: and E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered. The essays have appeared in monthly review, Z magazine, Los Angeles Times, Souls, and Social Justice. Tonight we will hear about Platt's most recent book Bloodlines. He covered Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. Bloodlines is the story of how original copy of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler and turned over to General Joseph, General George S. Patton, ended up in Huntington Library vaults remained there for 55 years. Platt discusses war time looting, the holocaust, eugenics, Jewish identity and the responsibility of museums and cultural centers. Copies of Bloodlines are available in our museum shop and the author will be available to sign books in our lobby immediately following the program. Please join me in welcoming Professor Platt.
Anthony Platt: Thank you very much. Very glad to be here at the Magnes. The Magnes has played a very important and will continue to play a very important role and they are in northern California and I am glad to be in a place that combines preservation, exhibitions and educational debates and tonight I am going to talk about some of the topics in this long complex book called Bloodlines which has many issues in it but tonight I want to focus on issues having to do with museums and I am going to give you a tale of two very different kinds of museums, in two very different kinds of cities. The two museums of the Huntington Library in Pasadena although now it's in San Marino, originally it used to be called Pasadena until San Marino incorporated the south and made it's own special place to house a museum and I have seen many of you have been to the museum yes. This is that, or this is the gardens of these. And the second museum that I want to talk about is the Skirball Cultural Center which is the new type of museum in Los Angeles just out from the 450 Freeway at the San Diego freeway. Many of you have been to that museum as well and many of you have been there as well. So you know what I mean, when I say it's the tale of two very different kinds of museums. Interestingly both museums when they were created thought themselves as oasis. When the Huntington museum was created in the 1900s and 1910s and then opened up in the 1920s made possible by the big money of Henry Huntington, Huntington family fortune, they considered the Huntington to be what they hoped would be an oasis of civilization in California and what they had in mind was that the Huntington library would represent the importation of ideas about civilization from another part of the world. And Henry Huntington and the other people have helped create that library thought that was surface civilization was to be found in England. And so Huntington was a great lover of everything English and he sent his agents over to England and other parts of Europe and they collected and order of huge collections of first editions of Shakespeare, poetry and extraordinary documents long before countries like England began to put a embargos on being able to take these national heritages out of the country and brought ___ and imagined himself to have setting down a civilization because the reformers of the 1900s and the 1910s in California people like Henry Huntington and the circle around him, especially the Patton family, the his - his confederate in setting up the Huntington was a man named George Patton who is his business agent, business partner, I mean, a visionary like Huntington. He was the father of George Patton who became the General and figures prominently in the story I am about to tell you. But they had, they imagined that there was no civilization around them. That the Spanish had left nothing, that Mexican culture had nothing to speak off. That addition of people, working people worth talking or speaking or collecting what they left behind and so they imagined California to be this arid cultural desert into which they had to bring these extraordinary guardians that many of have walked through and also listening extraordinary library they set up there and if you visited the library and visited the gardens you know, it brings to mind Europe. It brings to mind the guardians of the French palaces, it brings to mind the () style of the buildings that were constructed in Europe and other places to establish a solidity, a foundation of knowledge and they were - and really in the literal sense of the word in terms of representing solidity and a sense of collecting the passion to one place. Larry Levine a important historian of Berkeley who recently I am told he just unfortunately just died once described a place like Huntington as taking the view that culture is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy. And that was very much the view of the Huntington. The Huntington saw itself as a place that was there for the few. On the other hand, this in short, the Skirball made use of the 1990s and the Skirball is a Jewish cultural center that's sees itself as representing all the different populations and trying to aspire to certain democratic vision of what cultural center of museum should be like. We will return to that museum in a short while. In the summer of 1999 my research partner, he is sitting on the back row there, the co-researcher for this book Bloodlines and I - we were on leave from Berkeley. We got prestigious fellowships to study at the Huntington Library, we are doing research on the 19th century California documents and living the good life of Pasadena in the house with a swimming pool and taking it easy. And while we were there doing this research in our leisurely way the Huntington Library made an announcement that I first of all recommend Los Angeles Times over breakfast before going to work and later on did a lot more about at a special briefing with the Huntington Library providing and this announcement was covered by News media television, print media and all over the world. It's a major event, they had a few things that were surprising, first of all, they announced that they had an original copy of the Nuremberg Laws signed by Hitler in the 1935. The documents themselves are reproduced in the book that I passed on the lines, so you can get a sense of what they look like. They are - they are nothing much to look at in terms of the original documents. There are four top script pages, they are bureaucratic in their language, they are technical, they look legislated while they are a piece of propaganda the Nuremberg Laws by many historians are considered to be the beginning of the end for Jews of Europe because they mark the first time that the new Nazi regime setup legislation that is going to segregate Jews from several Aryans. And that the announcement of the document was extraordinary because it's as though somebody had announced all of a sudden, you have just found another provisional copy of the constitution. It's not that these documents were secret, it's not that these documents had anything new to say. But the original documents themselves are very, very important icon of western racism, of anti-Semitism and they fit there prominently in the histories of the Nazi regime. It was the first place that on looking back now you can say that things began to go wrong for the Jews of Germany and then later the Jews of Europe. And so that was the first significant thing. That they had this document. The second significant thing that they said is that we have this document since 1945 when General Patton gave it to us before he went back to Germany, he was then sadly killed in a car accident in December 1945. But he was visiting United States in the summer of '45 at the end of the war on a victory tour of United States he came back to the Huntington, out of respect for the place where he grew, to be around the place where he spent his childhood. In commemoration of Henry Huntington who himself had helped George Patton to get begin his military career and he left his documents to the Huntington in 1945. So the Huntington and we have had them since 1945 and we've done nothing with him for the last 54 years said the Huntington Library. We are not even acknowledged we have had them. We have not formally recepted them in our collections. We have not published them in anyway; we are not going to research this nor do we have them, only the internal staff of the Huntington would know that they would hear, that this is the first time that we are going public with them. And when they make an announcement they they will announce by the media, well why we have them for 54 years and done that with them because they are pretty significant historical icons. And they said a couple of things. First of all he said well, you know they don't exactly fit into our our collections. They don't fit into the focus of the of the research, and the work that the Huntington Library does. The Huntington has extraordinary collections of English literature and English history in California, in American history but the Patton materials and particularly the materials from Nuremberg and the Nazis don't fit our collections. And then when other people followed up with other questions one of the officials from the Huntington said, well probably the other reason why no one did anything with them in 1945 is that they didn't really realize what they have. That they considered that to be just another document and Patton was always sending his documents from Germany. He was a great lender of historical documents and maybe back then people didn't know that historical significance. So that was the story that the Huntington Library put out and I went to a briefing that they did for research fellows and for the staff of the Huntington and sat there in this huge room, all the staff working with over 100 people in this room and the Huntington officials then gave us a briefing on this whole situation because there has been so much of media about it and they put up on the screen, huge blow-ups of these documents, instead of passing around the room map, and it was a very moving experience for me, to sit there and to look at these documents, because even though they are just ordinary type scripts and technical documents that because of their historical significance you are going to link them with the with the holocaust. There are very, very few documents that Hitler signed and in any links him with what happened to the fate of Jews in Europe. This document is part of the most important one that we have that we have now got other documents and things that he signed but historically this is becoming one that exists which is what makes it such a rare historical document. And as I sat there I looked at these documents blown up on the screen, I was very moved and troubled by them in the same way that African Americans going to see the exhibitions of the slave shackles or documents of people being sold as slaves, feel very choked up and upset. And had the same impact on myself, it reminded me a lot of my past growing up in England. If at that moment the Huntington officials with those documents behind them had said the following, if they said, look we have had these documents in 54 years, that was wrong, we should have done something about them before. Whether people knew or didn't know them in 1945 they are clearly historically significant, we should have done something in the 50s or 60s, certainly in 70s and 80s when people began to talk a lot about Nazi documents and Nazi materials and the story behind that and you know now we are going to make up for that and look to get these documents, home around to the Skirball that people can go and see them where, you see them now and we would like to apologize for hanging on to it for so long. And then suddenly if I said you know Patton when he came here, he dictated this document in in June 11th of 1945 when he came to the Huntington, he dictated this document, then and no doubt Huntington officials at the time has conferred his statement because I am sure people will write that, you know, do you have the right to keep these documents. Do you have the right to own them? So we asked the General Patton who people didn't go out asking him to do things but the president of the Huntington library did ask that how did you get these, how do you know that they are yours and so he dictated this statement that I will pass it around, so you could take a look at it. And in this statement he tells a story of how they were found, and it's a great story. It says, when the 3rd army entered the city at Nuremberg there was quite a fight going on and the city was burning. Some troops of the 90th infantry divisions fighting through town, came to stairway, went back with grenades and face there any Germans. There were no Germans, they found the vault, not only persuaded the German to open it up for them. It is this they found, that was all that was in the vault, the Nuremberg laws there. And so then the soldiers of 90th division were very fond of me. They thought that they would like to do something formal, so they sent me, we had a great public presentation. The former commanding general of the 90th division, he actually made the presentation to me, so it is my property. So for those who have been familiar with museums them as an important collection, that's the problem statement and that's the popular statement on in the summer of 1999 that Huntington Library gave up to all the media as proof that a) The General Patton found these materials, that b) General Patton owned these materials, and c) General Patton gave them to the Huntington Library in 1945. This was proof of the problems. If at that point if they said instead of just handing out General Patton's statement, if they said well, you know, as this statement in 1945, but we are not we are unsure, just as he made a statement - mean to say it's true and we have actually we have asked the national archives to do an investigation of proponents and to go through the history, to see if they can verify General Patton statement that this was his property, he had the right to give it to us and if that's true, then we have a right to these materials and we own them and if its not true then we will open it up to the museum community, to the national archives, make it to the library of Congress where all the General Patton statements are held, as to what should be done with this important significant Nazi document. If they said any such things I wouldn't have had a book, but they said none of those things. They just talked about how the media was kept talking about and asking questions about what happened to this material for 54 years and the media was insensitive to this incredible kind of generosity on the part by giving this document on loan to the Skirball Culture Center at Los Angeles and the focus should be on Huntington's philanthropy and generosity and not questioning him about providence. But for me that triggered a whole set of questions myself because I had a set of questions about how did Patton get this? Did he have a right to keep it? Why had it been kept in the vault for 54 years and also at that point as I began to ask these questions, that people have had, I know people have worked for Huntington, I also got much more closely in touch with my own sense of at ease being at the Huntington Library. Huntington Library is a is a gorgeous place. I mean, the guardians are spectacular, the library is fantastic, the documentation is amazing. We wish for another sort of documents from California and American, European history through the such but there is something about the place that made me feel a lot easy there and I am sure some of you have experienced that, when you go into a place and you don't feel like this is your home, you don't feel comfortable, you don't feel welcome there. And I realized that particularly through the relationships of Nuremberg Laws that I was reminding me what it was like for me when I was a young man trying to pass the university as a undergraduate student in 1960. When I also felt this incredible sense of discomfort. I was the first person not just to go not just the first person in my family to go to college, but to go to Oxford university and I grew up in Manchester and I was the third generation of Jews growing up in England in my family. My grandparents came from Romania and Poland escaped the poverty in the 1890s and 1900s, and ended up in Northern England where a lot of Jews ended up and Manchester which was a big textile community, where there is a lot of work for people coming in. And then they got in just before the door closed on Jewish immigrants to England. And my grandparents very much had this sense of themselves to quote Sartre's description of what the repression can do to Jews, they had themselves - sensed themselves as being perpetually Jewish. That was the world that they knew, that was the way they relate to the world and they have a strong sense of anxiety about where they came from. So much so that they would never talk to me about any of the repression they experienced growing up in Poland or Romania. My parents on the other hand were secular, political, activists Jews like a lot of the generation of the 20s and 30s. They grew up you know, edgy because they understood Nazism and anti Semitism from a political viewpoint and they I believe figuratively and literally it should also have a bad pack and some idea about how you are going to get out. But nevertheless they brought up the 3 children, myself and my brother and sister from looking forward and for staying in England and they gave this names for assimilation, Anthony, Steven, Suzan. These are not names for looking back, these were names looking forward. And that proceeded to tell us particularly the boys that we could go on and be whatever we wanted to be and my brother and I went on to college and I I was taken at 13 years old Oxford University and University and said this is where we wanted to go. Little bit of pressure 13-year-old. Now, so I fulfilled that pressure, I respond to that pressure when I left Northern England and went to Oxford I very much felt like an outsider. I came from a place where I spoke differently, my English accent was northern, I was a Jew in a very Protestant community. I came from a politically progressive and activist family, you know, in a town in in the early 1960's it was conservative, Tory and politically very, very conservative. I spoke English with regional I spoke regional English in a town where lot of the others spoke of a plumb English. And so I felt, even though I I have been brought up with a sense of like belonging there and having a right to go there, I also had a sense that I had to stay on my toes and that I was an outsider. And when I thought about this that at the Huntington library, these recollections were were triggered by the experience of being at the Huntington Library and thinking about rather down that history that and also at sort of one stage but it's sort of a journey that I went around, that while I am built into the book was my own journey back to these past as well and how story got relayed into the Nuremberg law incident got me to rethink some issues, about my history and my past. So, well, so the Huntington made this announcement and after I hear the announcement started to have some questions about this that also to what I start to do my own research, Cecilia and I began to to talk about this and to - to think about writing about this experience, because this was a historic moment. And first of all I want to learn all about Patton. And I would go all the way about Patton was that he was sort of a politely politely anti Semitic which is not unexpected, a person of his generation and his past and everything else I know a lot of them - sort of came from the George C. Scott version of the movie that came out in 1970 and got the Oscars in 1971. Any of you remember that film, seen that film. This leaves quite an impression and in fact most people when they think about Patton, they think about George C. Scott incarnated Patton, and he did in many ways, you know, Scott is very effective and getting at that sort of rough diamond quality that Patton had ____ people, ordinary guy, you know, foul mouth, shooting from the hip, strong, resourceful, resilient, takes chances, you know, of course his troops - the kind of gentleman you need, if you're trying to win a war, the last stages of the war, and a very difficult war at that. But when I went down into the Huntington's regular library I needed to know more about General Patton's since he is such a prominent figure in the story than just what I learnt from the George C. Scott version. So I went down and opened up the Martin Blumenson diaries and the Martin Blumenson diaries are the definitive collection of the diaries and letters of General Patton. They came out, started coming out of the 1970s, interviewed Blumenson about that whole experience and he died maybe a year or two ago. But this was the definitive work, reading through the diaries and I looked up Patton and Jews, because I wanted to have some understanding of what Patton thought about Jews since what this relationship might be to this - in this incredible document. And I found that - that he wasn't just the polite anti-semite but he was a vitriolic hater of Jews. That he was a - extraordinary white right-wing____ that he had used that equal opportunity of hater of human beings, so this anybody that he didn't hate, but particularly around racial groups he had a lifetime of racial attitudes, that at the end his life in 1944, 1945 when he was supposedly the liberator of the concentration camps thus getting one of his name names being the liberator. This is the kind of thing that he was writing in his diaries, and writing to his family and talking to friends that came to visit him. He said, Jews in the concentration camp practically all of them had that black, brownish, grey eye common amongst the Hawaiians which to my mind indicates a very low intelligence. He said that he would of course, carry out General Eisenhower's order to make sure that Jews were properly housed in the camps at the end of the war. But he said that - his sympathy were for the German survivors, the only decent people left in Europe or to give you another sense of what he said. This is what he wrote in his book to his wife, 1945, "My personal opinion is that no people could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached in the short space of four years." He practically called that the result of Truman's policy will be that should the German people ever rise in the state, of utter degradation to which they have now being reduced. That will be the greatest problem of the Jews in the history of the world." And after visiting all the concentration camps, he described that the Jewish residents of the camps, the post concentration camps as the greatest stinking bunch of humanity that I have ever seen." He said "these Jewish dps or displaced persons have no sense of human relationships. I'm marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of god can look the way they do or act the way they do." And after visit to the concentration camp he went home and took a bath and went hunting. In his diary he said "I am familiar with the tribe of Judah from which the current sons of bitches have descended. However, it's my personal opinion that this too is a lost tribe, lost to all decency." So this, I have decided, I felt the same as you did. This is not the genteel anti Semitism, this is the deep seeded profound hatred of Jews. And so this information about Patton which then began to, you know, make me curious about why he - why he brought Nuremberg Laws back to California? Why he thought that was so important? So Cecil and I then went on library and went into the special place and the permanent - exhibition where the Nuremberg Laws are now on display. And for those that are not being to Skirball Cultural Center it's a model of a building. Its Moshe Safdie is the architect, very brilliant architect and this was his conception along with Uri Herscher the Director of the Skirball Cultural Center and unlike and quite opposite to the Huntington this is all white and glass, you know, you drive into the Skirball Cultural Center and literally you can see through the whole place, that kind of transparency, there is no solid walls. Every every angle when you look at you can see in through these extraordinary glass windows and the architect and the designer said that he wanted the place to to be experienced as a sort of a silky experience, that is the word he used silky experience that you you feel that you could be eased in place, that you also use the word oasis. Since he wanted to be an oasis in the city. And he worked very closely Uri Herscher, to create this and Herscher's design also emphasized unlike many historically Jewish museums around the world, but this would not be specifically aimed only telling the story of Jews. That many museums like, for example, the Maltz Museum in Cleveland, focus on the history of Jews as a specific definite history. The story there is you know, from Egypt to the present and the journey the Jews go through and what's unique and different about Jewish culture. The Skirball conception of Jewish culture and Jewish museum is very different. They imagined Jewish culture as being exemplary American culture, that the best of American culture was to be found in the history of Jews and the best - the history of Jews is to be found in American culture, and that, in that sense the Jews were also not uniquely different from other Americans as Jews were quintessentially American, in the same as many, many other different kinds of human immigrant groups that come to the United States. And also unlike the Huntington library, the Skirball wanted, Herscher wanted Skirball to be a place that would be meeting place. A place where cultures would connect and so programming for the Skirball is not extensively Jewish degree, they often speak, novelists, and used by orchestras, you can see movie stars who were Jewish or not Jewish, it talks about the experience and you can the first time you see them walk in into the Skirball Cultural Center, for those of you who have been there is the restaurant and all the food is available there, because that they are really inviting them into - feel to tell them, to go and eat, to feel using the place and Herscher himself, when he talked about it there he said you know, you don't have to come here to look at the precious objects or something very extraordinary. You can say it is like you might do with Huntington or say Getty or something like that. You can come here to make yourselves at home. So this is the the place that we went to see the exhibition and when we went to see the exhibition I I felt uneasy there as well. I feel uneasy a lot, its sort of my persona. I thought that easy in part, because it has been a long time since I had been in a Jewish Cultural Center even though its not exclusively Jewish that the main exhibition tells the story and I and what to me is a very linear way, you know, from the the wilderness of Egypt to the civilization of the golden land of California and its one of those heroic stories that of goes from there to here with no detours and things going in the same direction. I would like my history more contradictory, I like it more porous, I like it more complicated, I like it more messy and so this kind of stories where telling a history a Jewish history often makes me feel uneasy. So that was one reason I felt uneasy but the other the reason that I felt uneasy is that when we stopped before the the case and the exhibition to see the Nuremberg laws, as prominent as the Nuremberg Laws were in the case also very prominent was General Patton because when the Huntington Library had said to the Skirball, they would like to donate these documents and materials to you, and your cultural center they basically said they have a packaged stuff for you for a case. We have all the stuff that goes together and I am not certain the Skirball were interested in a bunch of stuff other than just the documents themselves because just a look at the documents themselves is a powerful emotional experience that the Skirball likes to tell a story. Its its not unlike being in this room here, if you are looking at some extra ordinary oblique here and we are up - on the one hand being ready to face the fact that this is our work out of a genocide and mock of human history, on the other hand there were stories being told in the country, in the fabric designs and there is a certain volume to the designs and so on and it tells a story, not so that we are - where we are looking at it, we are looking at it artistically but we are looking at it historically. And the Skirball doesn't like just to show off objects, they like to teach stories and when they got all this material from Huntington, they said this is the story, this is the narrative and the story is put together in the in the glass when you went to look at it showed you, has showed you Patton and the picture of Patton, well, this picture of Patton which I will pass around it's an historical picture actually. Patton - at the Huntington Library in 1945 when he is turning over the Nuremberg laws in this envelope and sealed with the swastikas. He is handing it over to a very prominent physicist called Robert Millikan who at that time was the president of both the Huntington Library and the Caltech after Einstein the most widely reported, sought after physicist in the United States and so he and it was also very tied into science and the war effort. So here you have the scientist, here you have General Patton, behind him up here is the extraordinary photograph of George Washington and Patton can say himself to be related by blood to Washington. So you have the father of the country, you have the liberator of European concentration camps and you have the great scientist and you have and the story and narrative is embedded in this photograph, you have General Patton liberating Nuremberg Laws from the Nazis and turning them over to the representatives of democracy and science in the west. So this is in the case this photograph, and also in the case is this very extra-ordinary huge kichy volume of Mein Kampf. This is the cover they have. Which Patton had also brought back from Germany and donated to the Huntington Library and though it maybe different volumes that Mein Kampf were produced but this was particularly monstrous and unusually kichy and unusual and Patton - and Patton did this to the only book that the Huntington Library has in its possession on the cover of the book, which is a letter, he wrote to the Huntington Library from GS Patton Junior, dated December 14th 1945. Scrolling his name, over Mein Kampf. You want to be of psychological value you would say, you know its it's the act of a victor triumphing over, over Hitler or you could say there is a certain affinity that maybe Patton shares. So this is quite a shock to see Patton so promptly display in this display and nothing about Patton's racism, nothing about his anti-Semitism, and so this is a very disturbing experience and so these two experiences in these two museums where what set us off on the project for this book and the book then into the into the journey we have, how these questions have been raised in this early stage of the process, led in all these different directions which I am going to very, very briefly summarize for you. Because you actually have to read the book to get a full story. First of all we are into track down two of the people who actually recovered the Nuremberg Laws in Germany, 1945. One man named Martin Dannenberg is still alive and lives in Baltimore, who turned out to be a military intelligence officer during the war and when Cecilia went back to Baltimore to interview him and to see what he the whole experience, you know, I don't remember remember in crystal clear way what happened in 1945 when he found these documents that he had photographs, he had documents to back up his memory and his memory was nothing like General Patton's. He is his recall had nothing at all to do with the troops fighting through Nuremberg and you know trying to get past German troops in recovering this swashbuckling story. It was more mundane than interesting story but it wasn't that story, and secondly Dannenberg told us that when they found these documents that they realized how significant they were because the person because Dannenberg is Jewish and his family came from Germany in the 19th century but his translator and his aide was a man named Frank Perls' who died in in the mid-1970s and Frank Perls' family also came from Germany, and was also Jewish and as they were looking at the documents Frank Perls' said to Martin Dannenberg, this is my god these are the documents that forced us to leave Germany. So this and then Dannenberg told this is, well Patton had no right to those documents. These are going to be turned over, they were going to be used as part of the displays and background for the Nuremberg trials that is going to take place after the war and that Patton basically eluded them. So in the course of the document that's is version of what happened, he gave us other people to verify this information and then show to give you some of the endless story, we are able to show that Patton actually looted the documents and violated his own orders about doing so. Also later on we discovered that the Huntington Library itself over the years had their own very strong suspicions of the documents had been looted and therefore kept them without doing about for many, many years. The second person Frank Perls' that we obviously we couldn't track him down because he died in the late 70s but he came he came from a very significant art family that was first in Germany and then Paris and then the United States. They had very close relationships with all kinds of artists including Picasso and whilst Cecilia was back in Baltimore interviewing Martin Dannenberg I decided going for the phone book looking down relatives of Frank Perls' and on my third phone call I got a woman called Marion Perls' who lives in Beverly Hills. You have to be a bit lucky doing this kind of historical research. This was the one, and so I later visited her and got to know her and it turned out she had access to her uncle's papers and she provided us with the papers that he had left which also told stories about finding the Nuremberg Laws, but also very significantly in his papers were three press clippings from and French news paper and a New York newspaper and French and from the Times of England and then these newspaper had announced that Martin Dannenberg and Frank Perls' and this special unit had recovered the Nuremberg Laws. It was that significant a story in 1945. By the end of the war when all kinds of things being covered in the media it was that significant story that they actually found these documents that the world press covered that story, which sort of then, created problems for the Huntington story of the Huntington story that nobody really knew what these things were in 1945. So that was so then we began the whole activist projects, because the research then was not always about trying to learn what happened but we wanted Huntington to take responsibility for its failure to look at the problems of the documents, that some on going struggle hopefully it will happen one day, so far its not happened. And secondly decided to working with the Skirball Cultural Center, in fact in the early that we had on Patton and later on Bob Millikan the head of the Huntington about the anti-Semitism and about the racism. And raising with the Skirball Cultural Center, what does it mean to have somebody who hated Jews and hated communities of color being presented in this case. So giving the impression in this case that he was the liberator of democracy. And once the Skirball Cultural Center looked at the evidence and they also then helped bring up on Dannenberg who gave a talk at the Skirball Cultural Center and we presented all among Dannenberg's evidence to them, gradually over the next few months Patton got sanitized from the display. And it was a difficult situation for the Skirball because they'd been given these extraordinary documents but you know, Holocaust Museum in Washington DC would have loved to had - any other museum would have loved to had them. And it was an embarrassment for Huntington but they just naturally started returning things, they returned statement, they returned photograph. They replaced the photograph of General Patton in the case of the photograph of Master Sergeant Mark Dannenberg among the dead. And so over a period of a several months they changed the whole way in which they displayed what was - now if you go and you will find, you can really see that General Patton brought these to the United States, it doesn't say that he owned them or had the right to them. We are left to make up your own mind about that. And the book that documents him, a book that documents him looting these materials and other aspects of this history is sold at Skirball book store. The other thing that the book adds in too was the journey into Nazi racial science and trying to understand why the Nuremberg laws were so important because the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 and they say really three very simple things. They say that the Nazi flag is now going to fly rather than the previous German flag. That we have now have people who are German citizens and everybody else who isn't and the third law which is the key law, which is the blood law, the blood law says that Jews and Aryans are not allowed to marry, or have sex and Jews are not allowed to fly the Nazi flag, that must have been a big disappointment and thirdly that Jews are not allowed to hire anybody who is not Jewish in their household under the age of 45. And in many ways the Nuremberg Laws represented the ideas about eugenics and racial science that were flourishing in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. And so all those who did research and to try to understand why the Nazis wanted Jews to be segregated, why they ended up with these racial categories, we started to study how racial science operated in Germany. And very correctly that law goes back to the United States and the Southern California because we found and other researchers have found this as well, correspondence and communications that went on between American eugenicists and Nazi racial scientists and this was correspondence that was collaborative and supportive, mutually appreciative and so on. And in the course of doing this research we found that some of the key people who are around, one of you named the institute in Southern California called Human Betterment Foundation and that the Human Betterment Foundation hadn't explored a lot of the key figures from the Huntington Library and so a lot of the people have started to study the Huntington Library, we founded them very involved in the eugenics movement in California and the United States and so lot of how the book is that and they are trying to explore these different ideas and how they flourished in California and why they flourish. So, in conclusion, the book ends up discussing the obligations about public history, because it's difficult to know what to do with an icon like the Nuremberg Laws. You can do what the Huntington Library did, which was basically not deal with it, not handle it, and when they did admit to having it then turning it over to another institution so that there would be no reflection about what he meant in that particular institution. That's one way of dealing with the problem. You can display it, hasn't been displayed at the Skirball Cultural Center but when we are asked what we would like to see displayed of the Skirball Cultural Center we said, I think - we think it would be much more effective from an educational view point if you left the materials from Patton in the case but with Patton's own words about Jews and Millikan's own words about Jews, and other communities of color. So people perceive the connections between the so-called liberators and the so-called fascists and begin to understand a way in which ideas of fascism are not something that's just over there but it deeply rooted in the so-called democracies as well. And so maybe we could have a discussion about this and people are interested in this, about the responsibilities of a museum, for does it mean to have museums in this country that I don't think do a very good job of getting us to look closely at the bloody tragic past of the United States. California does a very poor job there, we have very few memorials, we go to where we can ponder the blood and history of the state. We have very few educational materials whether in text books for children, or in museums and cultural centers where people can go and learn up the history of the indigenous people of those people 75 - 80 percent of who were lost in disease or warfare. The history of the programs against the Chinese in the 19th century, the racial segregation blacks and Jews and Japanese Americans. The internment of the Japanese Americans during the World War II, a long, long bloody so often, history of California has and very few opportunities were with naturally to being public places and talk about these issues and it's of concern to me that we can go to many museums and culture centers and not be opened out to those profound issues. So that's really the end, the end of these questions about public history and we begin with really asking a very similar - a simple question a lot of time - why did we keep this stuff for 54 years and do nothing about it. But at the end, I think, we are revealing the larger problems that museum and cultural centers face in California. Thank you.
