My Review of Matti Friedman's "Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe"

 Parachuting into Statehood

While reading Matti Friedman’s wonderful new book, I was reminded of my trip to Prague where I visited the memorial for the dead Czech paratroopers who were gunned down in a Prague Church. (See: https://destinationwwii.com/operation-anthropoid-memorial/ee:) Their mission organized in 1942 by the British under the name Operation Anthropoid succeeded in assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Prague and an architect of the Holocaust. To me, this is Friedman’s best book and I reviewed several of his works before. (See for example: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2022/05/my-amazon-review-of-matti-friedmans-who.html )

 

Here we are told the story of another British mission to send newly trained paratroopers into occupied Europe in 1944. The British in cooperation with the Hagenah recruit 32 Jewish citizens of their Palestine Mandate, whose mission was to help downed pilots evade and escape from the Nazi’s. They were chosen because of their language skills and their knowledge of the countries they were to be dropped into. All of them recently escaped from Nazi Europe and now they are choosing to go back into the hell they left.

 

However, the Hagenah has a different mission. That mission is help organize Jewish resistance to the Nazi occupation and to also, if possible, to get them out of Europe. Indeed, the paratroopers are fighting for a state that does not yet exist. The mission has the high-level involvement of the leading figures in the Jewish state in waiting, including its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion.

 

Of the 32 recruits most die or are captured. Friedman tells the stories of four of them. Haim Hermesh 24, known as the scythe, airdrops into Yugoslavia enroute to Hungary. He like all of them he flies from Cairo to Beri, Italy where he is then parachutes in. He survives. Enzo Sereni, the group leader and a father of three drops into northern Italy. Marta Reick 30, known as Haviva drops into Slovakia where she becomes and important figure in the resistance. Indeed, Freidman takes you into the forests and clearings where the paratroopers landed and their interaction with the local partisans. One thing I did not know, was that for a time the resistance actually controlled a small amount of territory before being overrun by the German army.

 

The most famous of the four was Hannah Senesh 22, the author of the lyrics to “Eli, Eli.” She is the daughter of a famous Hungarian playwright and leaves an extraordinary paper trail. She was captured in Budapest and was killed in prison a few months before the arrival of the Red Army. Her mother was in the same prison with her for awhile and is ultimately freed and ends up in Israel.

 

We also learn from Friedman that the Nazi’s had a good understanding of the operation. Both the Hagenah and the U.S. OSS availed themselves of the services of a double agent in Istanbul. A monumental intelligence failure that put the entire operation at risk.

 

Although from a strict tactical sense the mission of the paratroopers ended up as a failure, in a broader sense the mission succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its promoters. Their lives become the legends that gave inspiration to the new State of Israel.

 

In order to write the book Friedman researched the Hagenah archives loaded with musty boxes, found unpublished letters from relatives of the paratroopers, and discovered long out of print books. He also visited all of the drop zones of his four protagonists and followed the trail from there. It was a three-year effort, and it paid off in a hell of a good story.   

My Amazon Review of Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann"

 

Genius

 

Something was in the water in fin de siècle Budapest. Out of that community came Nobel Laureates in physics Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, the rocket pioneer Theodore von Karman, and the subject of Ananyo Bhattacharya biography John von Neumann. I would note that the book is more a biography of von Neumann’s ideas rather than a full biography of his life.

 

Von Neumann was born into a very upper-middle class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1903. He was a child prodigy from the beginning and received his math Ph.D. before he was twenty. The then studied engineering and before he was thirty, he authored "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” which integrated Heisenberg’s matrices with Schrodinger’s waves, a monumental accomplishment.

 

But that was only the beginning. He developed Minimax theory and at the Army’s Ballistic Research Lab he became an expert at the trajectory of artillery shells. That led him to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where developed the implosion lens necessary for the creation of the Atomic Bomb. He also conceived of stored program computer which had yet to be invented. Indeed, his second wife Klara was among the very first computer programmers.

 

Along the way he coauthored with Oskar Morgenstern “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” which revolutionized economics and was found to be very useful in business and war strategies, especially concerning the use of nuclear weapons. After World War II he divided his time among Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Los Alamos’ Weapons Lab, and the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

 

While at Rand he instrumental in the development of ICBM’s and he came up with the idea of self-replicating computers. In essence he was the progenitor of artificial intelligence.

 

Bhattacharya tells the story of a true genus who also loved to party hard. My one criticism is that several of the science and math parts of the book can be a real slog for the lay reader.

 

The full Amazon URL is at: Genius (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Janek Wasserman's "The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas"

Something was in the Coffee

I first learned of Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk from the late and great UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer’s capital theory class nearly 50 years ago. Who knew he was an Austrian and I had never heard of the Austrian School of economics. I have since learned of the people and ideas associated with the school. Here University of Alabama history professor Janek Wasserman presents a way too detailed look at the people and ideas of the Austrian School.

There must have been something in the coffee of late 19^th and early 20^th Century Austria-Hungary. In Vienna there lived the founders of the Austrian school including the above mentioned Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Carl Menger, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried Haberler, Oscar Morgenstern, and Ludvig von Mises. Not to be overshadowed in the dual monarchy, Budapest produced such physicists as Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, and Dennis Gabor around the same time. In fact the two strands would merge when Morgenstern teamed up with von Neumann to write the “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” in 1944.

The Austrian school was a major promoter of the now accepted marginal utility theory of value. Menger along with Jevons and Walras developed the theory in the 1870s and it was codified by Marshall in the 1890s. Marginal utility stood in direct contrast to the classical labor theory of value developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo that was later expanded by Karl Marx.

The Austrians viewed themselves as classical liberals and as such they stood foursquare in opposition to the growing appeal of socialism that developed in the 1880s. Their theory was developed in the coffee houses of Vienna and many of their seminars were open to all. Indeed Bohm-Bawerk was open enough to invite socialists Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding and the soon to be Bolshevik   revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin. But make no mistake, the Austrians were suspicious of popular democracy.

Their world first crashed with the onset of World War I and its aftermath and then the leading lights were forced into exile with the arrival of Hitler. Two emigres to the West became famous in the 1940s with Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and Schumpeter’s “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.” 

With collectivism on the rise in the 1940s, they formed the Mont Pelerin Society where unlike the looser seminars of pre-World War I Vienna, dissent was not welcomed. It was through Mont Pelerin that the Austrians linked up with such Chicago School luminaries as Milton Friedman and George Stigler. It was at one of their conferences that von Mises called them out as socialists. Splits were inevitable.

Nevertheless after the Austrians linked up with Chicago and they received increasing funding from sympathetic foundations their influence soared as their views of limited government, free trade, floating exchange rates and the information economy percolated up to policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic. In a sense they were the godfathers of the neoliberal world.

Wasserman tells the story in way too much detail which is great for the academic reader, but not so much for the educated lay reader.

The Full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZQEF4OUM2GWU/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv