The Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, was Hitler’s bunker outside of Rastenburg, Germany. Photo: Steve

Margot Woelk, now 95, is the last surviving member of a team tasked with keeping Hitler alive as he hunkered down in the Wolf’s Lair in the final chapters of World War II. For nearly all her life, says the Associated Press, Woelk kept quiet about her wartime activities. But now, in her old age, she wants to talk, and her stories are filled with details of life in Hitler’s fortress and about living a life of “constant fear.”

Woelk was the sole survivor of the Nazi leader’s poison paranoia. In her mid-20s, she was swept away from her home in Ratensburg (now Ketrzyn, Poland), “drafted into civilian service” to join 14 other women in the dictator’s wartime bunker where she and the others were charged with taste-testing the leader’s meals.

As the war dragged on, food supplies in much of German-occupied territory suffered. Within the Wolf’s Lair, however, “the food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta,” said Woelk.

“He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,” Woelk said of the Nazi leader. “And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him — that’s why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself.”

But each meal brought fear, says Woelk. “We knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal.”

Nearing the end of the war, after tensions mounted following an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life from within the bunker, Woelk fled. When Soviet troops took the Wolf’s Lair a year later, the other taste testers were all shot. But the end of the war was not the end of Woelk’s ordeal, according to the AP. She suffered abuse at the hands of Russian troops long after the war ended, she says:

“For decades, I tried to shake off those memories,” she said. “But they always came back to haunt me at night.”

…Only now in the sunset of her life has she been willing to relate her experiences, which she had buried because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member.

More from Smithsonian.com:

One Man Against Tyranny
Hitler Plotted to Kill Churchill With Exploding Chocolate
The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer

Margaret Thatcher in 1984 with Ronald Reagan at Camp David. Image: White House Photographic Office

Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, died today at the age of 87. Thatcher, the first woman to lead a Western power, pushed back against socialism in Britain and ushered in a new era of partnerships with Russia.

Thatcher wasn’t exactly an uncontroversial figure. She was fiercely conservative, tough and unwavering in her commitment to her own ideas, earning her the nickname the Iron Lady. “I am not a consensus politician,” she would say. “I am a conviction politician.” Later, she said to her internally warring party “Turn if you like, the lady’s not for turning.”

Some think that this hard-working, hard-headed ethic came from her working class background. Thatcher was born above a shop in Grantham, to a grocer. Early in her career, Thatcher underwent an image overhaul that included changing her voice to be lower. She worked with a speech therapist to lower her register. In Vanity Fair, her biographer chronicles the episode saying, “soon the hectoring tones of the housewife gave way to softer notes and a smoothness that seldom cracked except under extreme provocation on the floor of the House of Commons.”

This sort of commitment and work wasn’t uncommon for Thatcher: if she set out to do something, she did it. And it is that resolve that made Thatcher successful, according to the New York Times:

At home, Lady Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market.

Abroad, she won new esteem for a country that had been in decline since its costly victory in World War II. After leaving office, she was honored as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.

Thatcher was one of first Western leaders to work with Mikhail Gorbachev, spurring a slow turn towards working with the former Soviet Union. Thatcher pushed British Petroleum to explore oil deals in Kazakhstan to help Gorbachev, eventually creating a giant oil production facility in Azerbaijan that has pumped thousands of barrels of oil a day for the last seven years.

Of course, these policies weren’t universally praised. During her time, inequality in the U.K. rose, and her own former university, Oxford, refused to grant her an honorary degree, making her the first prime minister educated at Oxford to be denied the honor. Here’s the BBC on the internal Oxford debate:

The principal of Mrs Thatcher’s old college, also supported her nomination. Daphne Park said: “You don’t stop someone becoming a fellow of an academic body because you dislike them.”

But Professor Peter Pulzer, of All Souls, who led the opposition, said: “This is not a radical university, it is not an ideologically motivated university.

“I think we have sent a message to show our very great concern, our very great worry about the way in which educational policy and educational funding are going in this country.

Thatcher didn’t comment on the snub, but her spokesperson said, “If they do not wish to confer the honour, the prime minister is the last person to wish to receive it.”

Eventually, however, Thatcher’s political enemies caught up with her. She fought over poll taxes and over water privatization. She called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. And then, in 1990, she left office.

Here is her last speech to Parliament, made on November 22, 1990.

Of course, no one with such sway stays quiet once officially out of politics. Thatcher is thought to have greatly influenced George H.W. Bush in his decisions about the first Gulf War, telling him it was “no time to go wobbly.” She retired from public life in 2002, after a stroke, and it was another stroke that ultimately claimed her life on Monday.

Thatcher was divisive; she was tough; and she was intense. The New York Times closes its obituary of the Iron Lady with this quote:

“Margaret Thatcher evoked extreme feelings,” wrote Ronald Millar, a playwright and speechwriter for the prime minister. “To some she could do no right, to others no wrong. Indifference was not an option. She could stir almost physical hostility in normally rational people, while she inspired deathless devotion in others.”

And while many disagreed with her policies, most agree that her resolve was admirable and her precedent as a woman in charge opened doors for generations after her.

More from Smithsonian.com:

We Prefer Our Leaders to Have Deep Voices, Even If They Are Women

Image: Taryn

Earlier this week, a jury in New York City decided that the cop who dreamed of killing and eating his wife wasn’t simply fantasizing. The case sets an unusual precedent—people can be convicted of a crime they thought about but never committed. The implication here is that cannibalism is so terrifying and awful to us that anyone who could reasonably consider it must be dangerous. But cannibalism didn’t always have such a horrific association. Other cultures practiced cannibalism as part of religious rituals, and even in America’s past, many have turned to cannibalism out of desperation, when stranded by weather or lost in the wilderness.

Mental Floss has summed up some of the most famous people-eaters of the Old West, like Liver-Eating Johnson, whose wife was killed by members of the Crow tribe. Johnson spent the next twenty years killing something like 300 Crows and eating their livers. Then there’s Alferd Packer, also known as The Colorado Cannibal. Packer was serving as a guide for six men hiking in Colorado. When the men went missing in a snowstorm and Packer showed up alone and seemingly unfazed, people were suspicious. But Packer had a story. Here’s Mental Floss:

Packer was arrested and taken in for questioning. The tale he told then was quite different: Packer said that while they were stranded, Israel Swan (the oldest of the group) died and the others ate his body. Humphrey died next, of natural causes. Then Miller died of an undisclosed accident. Each of the bodies were eaten by the survivors. Then, according to Packer, Shannon Bell shot Noon in order to eat him. Then Bell tried to kill Packer as well, so Packer killed Bell in self-defense. Not long after telling his story, Packer escaped from jail and wasn’t seen again until 1883. Meanwhile, the remains of the other prospectors were found, showing evidence of violence. However, they were all lying near each other, and their feet were bound with strips of blanket.

Later Packer confessed to eating some human flesh, but it’s still pretty unclear what happened. And then there’s Boone Helm, the man who ate at least two companions during two separate storms. At Legends of America they have an account of one of those two instances:

He stayed on at this spot, and, like a hyena, preyed upon the dead body of his companion. He ate one leg of the body, and then, wrapping up the other in a piece of old shirt, threw it across his shoulder and started on further east. He had, before this on the march, declared to the party that he had practiced cannibalism at an earlier time, and proposed to do so again if it became necessary on this trip across the mountains.

The thing is, people used to find themselves in life or death situations far more than they do now. Survival cannibalism—eating another human because there is literally nothing else to eat and you will die otherwise—is easier for us to stomach. Mental Floss writes:

In 18th and 19th century seagoing communities, it was pretty much accepted as something that happened from time to time as a hazard of the occupation and lifestyle. By the 19th century, sailors and fishermen had even worked out some general guidelines should the “custom of the sea” need to be performed. Straws were drawn to decide who would be killed and eaten and who would have to do the killing (usually the second shortest straw made you the killer, and the shortest made you dinner).

Non-survival cannibalism is a whole other thing. And it didn’t used to be that uncommon either. Cultures all over the world have incorporated human flesh into rituals and events. Some of these rituals, like eating the flesh of a recently deceased person at the funeral, have positive associations. Some, meant to intimidate enemies, involved eating the flesh of their warriors. It’s not necessary to go that far back in the past to find that sort of intimidation, either. In World War II, a few Japanese soldiers were tried with war crimes for cannibalism. Except the U.S. realized it hadn’t really ever technically outlawed cannibalism in international law so it had to technically try them for something else. The Project to Enforce the Geneva Convetion writes:

Lieutenant General Joshio Tachibana, Imperial Japanese Army, and 11 other Japanese military personnel were tried for the beheadings of two American airmen in August, 1944, on Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands. They were beheaded on Tachibana’s orders. One of the executed airmen, a U. S. Navy radioman third class, was dissected and his “flesh and viscera” eaten by Japanese military personnel. The U. S. also tried Vice Admiral Mori and a Major Matoba for A Global Forum for Naval murder in the deaths of five U. S. airmen, in February, 1945. Major Matoba confessed to cannibalism. However, military and international law had no provisions for punishment for cannibalism per se. They were accused of murder and “prevention of honorable burial.”

In fact, even today, most countries don’t have laws against cannibalism. Here’s Business Insider:

In the United States and most European countries there are no outright laws against the consumption of human flesh. Most criminals who commit acts of cannibalism are charged with murder, desecration of corpses, or necrophilia.

Because the victims often consent to the act it can be difficult to find a charge, which was what happened with the famous Miewes case in Germany. His victim responded to an internet ad: “looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” He’s now serving a life sentence.

And long before the the German case, or the cannibals of the old west, or the Maori, Neanderthals probably ate one another. Scientists have found several pieces of evidence that the bones of preserved Neanderthals were cut with the same blades they used to slice meat off other game. The signs of cannibalism might even live in our cells, writes National Geographic:

A growing body of evidence, such as piles of human bones with clear signs of human butchery, suggests cannibalism was widespread among ancient cultures. The discovery of this genetic resistance, which shows signs of having spread as a result of natural selection, supports the physical evidence for cannibalism, say the scientists.

“We don’t in fact know that all populations did select. The selection may have occurred during the evolution of modern humans before they spread around the world,” said Simon Mead, a co-author of the study from the Medical Research Center with University College, London.

Today, cannibals scare us, but for a long time cannibalism was a survival technique, a cultural practice, and a legitimate source of protein.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How Common Was Cannibalism?
Early Cannibalism Tied to Territorial Defense?

An international group of artists was brought in to paint what is now the East Berlin Gallery, a 1300 meter stretch of the remnant Berlin Wall. Photo: Mike McHolm

It’s been nearly a quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall—a symbolic end of the Cold War and a physical destruction of the barrier separating East and West Germany. Parts of the Berlin Wall still stand, including the 1,420 yard-long portion now known as the East Side Gallery, a long, chipped stretch of concrete heavily adorned in paint.

But threatening a 22-meter piece of the East Side Gallery, says the CBC, is “a 14-storey luxury apartment block featuring floor-to-ceiling glass fronts.” To build their new apartments, Berlin-based Living Bauhaus wants to rip down the wall. And Berliners, it seems, are not happy with this idea.

“Several hundred demonstrators turned out on Friday, when work to remove the Wall temporarily stopped mid-morning after a crane had removed a first panel,” says The Local.

 ”I cannot and do not want to tolerate the little that remains standing of the Berlin Wall being damaged,” local Green party politician Hans-Christian Ströbele said.

The CBC says that the art on the wall will not be destroyed with the wall. Rather, the paintings will be moved to a nearby park. The protests stalled the deconstruction efforts for now, says Der Speigel. The wall will remain up for sure until at least March 18—the scheduled time of a meeting between the city and the developers.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Beyond the Wall: Berlin

Barbed wire at the Auschwitz concentration camp Photo: European Citizen

In the years leading into and during World War II, Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi party carried out a terrifying project to imprison, force into slavery or murder millions of Europeans, largely Jews, “homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe.” The Holocaust was an atrocious act of inhumanity and violence, but, says The New York Times, our long-standing understanding of the scale and extent of the Nazi’s system of concentration camps and imprisonment ghettos has been, disturbingly, a drastic underestimate.

New research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says the Times, found there were tens of thousands more components of the Nazi’s network than anyone previously realized.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The finding, says the Times, “shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

The growing tally of sites devoted to carrying out Hitler’s machinations, the Holocaust Museum’s Martin Dean told the Times, “left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.”

You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Resistance to Nazis in a Land Riddled with Caves
Fifty years ago, the trial of Nazi War criminals ended: the world had witnessed the rule of law invoked to punish unspeakable atrocities

Image: Elena Pleskevich

For the rest of the world, soccer (football, excuse me) is a big deal. A really big deal. So big that they actually have heart attacks about it. Seriously. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at just how many heart attacks occurred in Germany during the World Cup they hosted in 2006. What they found might shock you. During the World Cup, for both men and women, “the incidence of cardiac emergencies was 2.66 times that during the control period.” The authors conclude that watching a soccer game actually doubles your risk of a heart attack.

Now, it doesn’t matter necessarily whether your team wins or loses, the authors say. A stressful win could trigger a heart attack just as much as a stressful loss. An earlier study showed that when a national team loses a penalty shoot-out, the number of heart attacks goes up. And this study shows that even when they win, that number goes up.

Quartz writes about another curious trend in the data:

Interestingly, the only match that didn’t cause a spike in heart attacks was the third-place game against Portugal, confirming that once a team has been knocked out of contention for the World Cup title, nothing really matters. That semifinal loss to Italy, a team that has long tormented Germany and went on to win the tournament, left Deutschland quite literally with its hearts broken.

The study was also able to break down the risks and rates to different parts of the game. The authors write:

Averaged over all seven games involving Germany, the incidence of events increased during the several hours before the match, the highest incidence was observed during the 2 hours after the start of the match, and the incidence remained increased for several hours after the end of the match.

So it really is the stress of watching game play that can push people’s hearts over the edge from die-hard to defibrillated.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Vuvuzela: The Buzz of the World Cup

Gooooal! Two Technologies Compete to Sense Soccer Goals

Large amounts of fuel had been spotted sailing into the jungle. Photo: National Archives – College Park, MD

In October 1941, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a strange bit of war intelligence in a classified document, the Appendix details. The correspondence warned that a secret German airbase had gone up deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. In a note quickly sent to the Assistant Secretary of State, Hoover warns:

“As of possible interest to you, information has been received from a reliable confidential source that there are rumors current in Brazil as to a German air base, reported to exist in the Rio Negro district of the upper Amazon. Additional information will be furnished you concerning this when it is received.”

Particularly concerned about an attack on the Panama Canal, the FBI began collaborating with Brazil’s secret police.

In December, another worrying message came through. The suspected culprits behind the scheme were a colony of German monks. The FBI wondered if these forest-dwelling worshippers may be preparing for a secret base for the Luftwaffe, the airborne arm of the German military.

The following July, Hoover received another piece of evidence. Large amounts of fuel had been spotted traveling upriver in Bolivia. Given that gasoline was very much in short supply given the world war, the numerous canisters raised suspicions. The FBI worried that the fuel could be headed to the secret jungle airbase, still yet to be discovered.

In the end, though, military leaders concluded that stockpiling enough supplies deep within the jungle would not be possible. The would-be Nazi monks were left to live their own quiet, solitary lives in nature.

Here’s the monk memorandum, for closer examination:

Photo: National Archives – College Park, MD

More from Smithsonian.com:

Hitler Plotted to Kill Churchill with Exploding Chocolate 
Behind Enemy Lines with Violette Szabo 

The Smithsonian Air and Space museum is in possession of the remains of an original Horten Ho 229.

At the close of World War II, Nazi scientists led by the pioneering Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten, designed, built, and tested what was likely the most advanced aircraft to exist at the time: the Horten Ho 229, a jet-powered flying wing that historians believed to have been the first stealth fighter.

A few years ago, a team of engineers from Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company, re-created a model of the craft. In Hitler’s Stealth Fighter, a documentary that tracked the effort, the team found that the Horten Ho 229 did indeed employ some basic stealth technology.

Nearly 70 years on from this first foray into stealth aircraft design, the basics of veiling a ship from detection remain unchanged, says David Axe for Wired‘s Danger Room. Innovations made over the years have remained the closely-guarded secrets of a few advanced militaries:

It’s no secret how America’s stealth warplanes primarily evade enemy radars. Their airframes are specifically sculpted to scatter radar waves rather than bouncing them back to the enemy. Somewhat less important is the application, to select areas, of Radar Absorbing Material (RAM) meant to trap sensor energy not scattered by the plane’s special shape.

In short, the four most important aspects of stealth are ”shape, shape, shape and materials,” to quote Lockheed Martin analyst Denys Overholser, whose pioneering work resulted in the F-117 Nighthawk, the world’s first operational stealth warplane.

In a descriptive list, Axe lays out some of the advanced tricks used by the American aircraft engineers to keep U.S. warplanes out of sight, everything from strict procedures on radio silence, to custom sensor packages, radar-absorbing paint jobs and intricate cooling systems.

Airplanes generate a lot of heat. And even if you completely mask a plane’s radar signature, it might still give off telltale infrared emissions, especially around the engine exhaust but also from electronics, moving parts and surface area exposed to high wind friction.

The B-2 and F-22′s flat engine nozzles spread out the exhaust to avoid infrared hot spots, but to save money all 2,400 planned U.S. F-35s will have a traditional, rounded nozzle that spews a lot of concentrated heat. The Spirit, Raptor and Joint Strike Fighter apparently all feature gear for cooling hot leading edges such as the fronts of wings. They also boast systems that sink much of the heat generated by the on-board electronics and actuators into the fuel.

But just like the Nazi-era Horten Ho 229, the most advanced technologies of the day are likely masked from view.

Perhaps the most remarkable quality of America’s stealth warplanes is their continuing ability to escape public notice during years or even decades of development, testing and initial operations.

…Today the Air Force is apparently designing or testing at least two new, radar-evading drones plus the new Long Range Strike Bomber, an even stealthier successor to the now-25-year-old Spirit. But the only evidence of these classified programs is oblique references in financial documents, vague comments by industry officials and the occasional revealing commercial satellite photograph. Who knows what new qualities the next generation of stealth planes might possess in addition to those of the current armada.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Horten H IX V3
Introducing the USS Zumwalt, the Stealth Destroyer
The Ultimate Spy Plane

Photo: Eoin C

Naturalists in Berlin celebrate over recent news: farmers spotted a pack of wolves in a village 15 miles south of Berlin for the first time in more than 100 years. The wolves seem to have moved into a deserted former Soviet army military exercise area, the Independent reports.

The wolf pack includes both adults and pups, which the World Wildlife Fund is now excitedly monitoring with infra-red night vision cameras.

Germany’s “last wolf” was reputed to have been shot and killed by hunters in 1904. In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the animals were declared a protected species and the population began to grow again. Wolves were sighted in remote areas of eastern Germany after they entered from neighbouring Poland.

Though the wolves are living quite close to the German capital, the area they call home largely consists of uninhabited forest with plenty of dear and wild boar.

A LEGO rover (not the one used in the experiment.) Photo: legoalbert

Whenever some fancy new robot or robot-related advancement gets bandied about, you’re sure to be greeted with a few cries of “Ahh! Robot Apocalypse!” Most of those cries are just for fun and even a bit tacky (probably). And most of the fears are unwarranted (hopefully). But a new report by the BBC—that NASA and the European Space Agency have just successfully tested their ability to use a shadow internet to control a robot on Earth from up in space—could leave a person shaking his head and muttering, “Come on people. What are you thinking?”

The technology, known as Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN), is just like the internet, only hardier and meant for transmitting data over long distances through somewhat less hospitable conditions. In late October, says the BBC, ”[International Space Station] Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams used a laptop with DTN software to control a rover in Germany.”

The goal of the project is to have a more robust way of controlling our rovers and satellites as humanity continues to push into the next frontiers of solar system exploration. According to NASA, the space-controlled robot rover was made of LEGO, which makes the whole thing harmless and fun.

Robot apocalypse fear mongering bonus points, courtesy of the BBC:

The DTN is similar to the internet on Earth, but is much more tolerant to the delays and disruptions that are likely to occur when data is shuttling between planets, satellites, space stations and distant spacecraft.

… The system uses a network of nodes – connection points – to cope with delays. If there is a disruption, the data gets stored at one of the nodes until the communication is available again to send it further. This “store and forward” mechanism ensures data is not lost and gradually works its way towards its destination.

Which means it can’t be stopped.

More from Smithsonian.com:
Robot Apocalypse Inches Closer as Machines Learn To Install Solar Panels
Why You Should Stop Worrying About the Robot Apocalypse
Don’t Trust Robots? The Pentagon Doesn’t Either

Photo: jlongland

Animal bridges, aka ecoducts or wildlife crossings, allow wildlife to safely cross potential deathtraps, like highways. These nifty creations are popping up all over the world, from German autobahns to New Jersey interstates.

According to Twisted Sifter, a wildlife crossing includes anything that acts as “underpass tunnels, viaducts, overpasses and bridges, amphibian tunnels, fish ladders, culvets and green roofs.”  These bridges keep countless animals safe and also help drivers avoid costly and potentially dangerous collisions with wildlife.

Some cool facts:

• The first wildlife crossings were constructed in France in the 1950s
• More than 600 tunnels are installed along roads in the Netherlands to help protect the endangered European badger
• The longest ecoduct is in the Netherlands, which runs 800 meters across a highway, railroad and golf course
• Each year, drivers in the U.S. spend $8 billion on wildlife-related collision damage to cars
• In the US, wildlife crossings have popped up over the past 30 years to help animals as diverse as mountain goats, salamanders, big horn sheep, desert tortoises and Florida panthers and others to cross the road

Some examples of cool animal bridges:

An animal bridge at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Roswellsgirl

Wildlife crossing on the Netherland’s A50 highway. Photo: Woeste Hoeve

A wildlife crossing under construction. Photo: PDI

Another wildlife bridge in Banff National Park. Photo: Sangudo

More from Smithsonian.com:

Do Wildlife Corridors Really Work?

How Did the Tortoise Cross the Strait?

Photo: Like_the_Grand_Canyon

Nazis are infamous for their heinous wartime tactics and plots. Now, assassinating explosive chocolate can be added to that list, as revealed by a 60-year-old letter stamped “Secret.”

The Telegraph reports:

Giving a new meaning to the dessert name “death by chocolate”, Adolf Hitler’s bomb makers coated explosive devices with a thin layer of rich dark chocolate, then packaged it in expensive-looking black and gold paper.

German secret agents planted in Britain planned to place the “chocolate” amongst other luxury items in the War Cabinet’s dining room where Winston Churchill often hung out. After being unwrapped and tampered with, seven seconds later the sweet slabs of destruction would detonate and kill anyone within several meters of their chocolatey impact.

But the plot was foiled by British spies who discovered the chocolate was being made and tipped off one of MI5’s most senior intelligence chiefs, Lord Victor Rothschild, before the wartime prime minister’s life could be endangered.

Lord Rothschild got busy warning the Brits to be on the lookout for exploding candy bars. He typed up a letter on May 4, 1943, and sent it to an illustrator friend, Laurence Fish, asking him to draw up poster-sized depictions of the nefarious candy.  Years later, Mr. Fish’s wife uncovered the correspondence while sorting through her husband’s possessions after his death in 2009.

The letter, marked “secret”, reads: “Dear Fish, I wonder if you could do a drawing for me of an explosive slab of chocolate.

“We have received information that the enemy are using pound slabs of chocolate which are made of steel with a very thin covering of real chocolate.

“Inside there is high explosive and some form of delay mechanism…When you break off a piece of chocolate at one end in the normal way, instead of it falling away, a piece of canvas is revealed stuck into the middle of the piece which has been broken off and a ticking into the middle of the remainder of the slab.”

Lord Rothschild also reportedly included a very poor drawing of the device in his letter.

Luckily, the diversion worked. The plot was foiled, and today the only chocolate antagonism between Germans and British is over whether Milka or Cadbury is the more delicious treat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Becoming a Chocolate Connoisseur 

UK vs USA: A Cheap Chocolate Showdown 

The excavation of Sliasthorp. Photo: University of Aarhus

According to Niels Ebdrup reporting at ScienceNordic, archaeologists working in northern Germany may have found one of the most important cities in Viking history—Sliasthorp, where once sat the first Scandanavian kings.

“[H]istorians have doubted whether Sliasthorp even existed. This doubt is now starting to falter, as archaeologists from Aarhus University are making one amazing discovery after the other in the German soil.

Referencing the Royal Frankish Annals, an early history of Denmark, Ebdrup says,

The aggressive Viking king Godfred, the text says, decided to turn the town into a military power centre near the border of the early Danish kingdom. At the start of the 9th century he arrived with his army to what was then a small settlement and turned it into a key strategic military location.

The finding changes the way that archaeologists view Viking society, supporting the idea of stark class division. Ebdrup says,

“Sliasthorp, which was the size of 14 football pitches, was much smaller than the nearby Hedeby, which spread over 50 football pitches.

In the Viking Age, people spread out,” says Dobat. “Craftsmen, the marketplace and all the other dirty things were in one city. The elite – religious leaders and the military – had however withdrawn to another town. So the regional elite did not live in Hedeby. It was located some five kilometres away.

“Our studies have given us a completely new view on the anatomy of the very earliest cities. It differs greatly from what we see in the Middle Ages and today.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Raiders or Traders?

The Vikings: A Memorable Visit to America

Karl Marx. Source: Library of Congress

In London, starting today, the Socialist Workers’ Party will be hosting Marxism 2012, an annual event whose organizers say is growing in popularity with young people. It’s not just impressionable young people who are falling back in love with Marx, though, as the Guardian reports:

Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and…Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy…Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There’s even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital’s renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

One explanation: Younger people may not be as versed in the horrors of Stalinism as their elders. But also, this is a newer, gentler version of Marxism, explains Owen Jones, working class hero:

“Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it.”

Or, as the protest crowd likes to put it: “All We Want For Christmas Is Full Communism.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Reds versus Whites
Once Upon a Time

Dust jacket of the book Mein Kampf, written by Adolf Hitler. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Starting in 2015, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf will once again be available to German readers. Banned from publication in the country at the end of World War II, the two volume text will go back on the market when the copyright—held by the Bavarian state government—expires.

Hitler’s text has always been available to German audiences, through the internet and second-hand booksellers. Owning the book is completely legal, as is using it for educational purposes. But, as one would expect, tensions remain high at the thought of new copies arriving on the market. Historians, political scientists, and other groups around the world are divided on if the book should be printed at all, and if so, in what form.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the government has plans to issue annotated versions of the text, with that work being handled by the Institute of Contemporary History, in Munich, Germany.

“Mein Kampf is like a rusty old grenade. We want to remove its detonator,” explains Christian Hartmann, who leads the Munich team. “We intend to defuse the book. This way it will lose its symbolic value and become what it really is: a piece of historical evidence—nothing more.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

One Man Against Tyranny