Among our speakers: Organising committee member Charles Provan, an expert on unknown aspects of World War II, speaks on a well-known SS "whistleblower," and what he found.

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Labor Day weekend, Aug 30 - Sept 2, 2002

 

  

Photo: Marriott Hotel Corporation

Charles Provan is a native of Pennsylvania, a regular and popular speaker at Cincinnati since the first Real History weekend, and an expert on the closing stages of World War II. Among topics of his intensive research: the events surrounding the U.S. army's liberation of the Nazi camp at Dachau, and the architecture of the notorious site at Auschwitz.

His stumbled on the current topic of this year's lecture by chance, when researching a German co-defendant of the SS judge Konrad Morgen. Morgen, who became a well-known lawyer in Frankfurt, Germany, after the war, was one of the most fascinating figures for historians: an SS whistleblower appointed by Himmler himself to investigate atrocities and crimes being committed by top ranking SS officers including the concentration camp commanders, Morgen secured wartime death sentences against, among others, Koch, commandant of Buchenwald, for corruption.

Morgen had the commandant of Auschwitz, the notorious Rudolf Höss (right, hanged in 1947 by the Poles), in his sights for a long time. Bit by bit, Provan came cross one of the oddest side-episodes in war history: Höss had enslaved one of the more attractive female prisoners, Eleanora Hodys; when she became pregnant, Höss called on his uglier associates to terminate her with her pregnancy -- until Morgen stepped in and saved her, taking her testimony in the formidable case that he was building against Höss.

Provan has found the file. A uniquely human story, and like much we get to hear at Cincinnati, unknown to the world of conformist history.