Tag Archives: Netflix

The evil of Georg Bessau

I watched ‘Charité at War’ on Netflix the last few nights. Although I felt that one or two portrayals gave a bit too much credit to some characters, overall I believe it was a good reflection of the situation in the hospital during the last years of the war.

The show takes place in 1943 at the hospital under the Nazi regime during World War II and shows how the war affected the doctors, nurses and students at Berlin’s renowned learning hospital. The series includes the using of archival film from the time to set the tone. It has a mix of fictional and real characters.

There are a few subtle nuances which I found quite powerful, but may not have been picked up by everyone watching the show. For example there is reference made how the mother of one of the Doctors could not visit Berlin because a shortage of trains.

One character in the show, although not a main character. was Dr. Georg Bressau. he was a German pediatrician and university professor. There are a lot of aspects to Dr Bressau’s career. for example in 1939 he introduced the preventive treatment of rickets with vitamin D in infants.

But there is a much more evil side to him too.

In Berlin he was continuing following his well-known research into a dead vaccine against tuberculosis. After the Lübeck vaccination accident in 1931, the use of live vaccines was banned.

The incident was a disaster caused by use of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) for tuberculosis vaccination, which struck the German city of Lübeck. During 1929 and 1930, 72 babies died from tuberculosis out of 252 vaccinated. Many other infants were made ill as a result of vaccination. The vaccine used was later found to have been contaminated with a human tuberculosis strain being studied in same lab where the vaccine was produced.

Initially Bressau conducted animal experiments and there were promising signs for the experimental vaccine. However he then continued doing experiments on humans .For the experiment Bessau used physically and mentally disabled children from several children wards and hospitals . These were institutions that continued to covertly pursue the killing of disabled children after the end of the “T4 action”. In Berlin it was the children psychiatric clinic “Im Wiesengrund” in the Reinickendorf district.

Between 1942 and 1945, 175 children were tortured here. And 81 were murdered. These children were seen as rejects by the state and therefore no consent was needed from the parents to experiment on these kids.

The picture at the start of the blog is of the clinic.

Bressau wasn’t the only Doctor carrying out these experiments, but he was one of the most senior ones.

In his honor, the intensive care unit of the children’s clinic at the University of Giessen (now the University Clinic Giessen and Marburg ) was named “Ward Bessau” until a few years ago.

Dr Bressau wasn’t the only Doctor portrayed in the show. Dr Ferdinand Sauerbruch, is a prominent figure in the show. Although they do make some sort of reference to him signing some approvals, they don’t mention that he allegedly personally approved the funds which financed August Hirt’s experiments with mustard gas on prisoners at Natzweiler concentration camp from 1941 until 1944.

I do recommend the show though.

sources

https://research.uni-leipzig.de/catalogus-professorum-lipsiensium/leipzig/Bessau_15/

https://gedenkort.charite.de/en/locations/pediatric_clinic/

Die zwei Gesichter des Kinderarztes Georg Bessau

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/children/berlinwittenau/berlinwittenau.html

stc3a4dtische_nervenklinik_fc3bcr_kinder_und_jugendliche_wiesengrund

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/tuberculosis-l%C3%BCbeck-disaster

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4721647/

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Juan Catalan the unlikely “Curb your enthusiasm” star.

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Some people  say that TV has a bad influence on especially younger people.Juan Catalan will wholeheartedly disagree with that.

Juan Catalan was 24 when he was wrongly charged with gunning down 16-year-old Martha Puebla on her doorstep outside her home in Los Angeles.Martha had earlier testified in a  gang-related murder case ,involving Catalan’s gangster, and police were convinced that Juan was the killer.

In the days after the murder in May 2003, he was arrested by cops who pointed a gun to his head after pulling him over in his SUV.

 

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He had apparent motive in the girl’s killing, he frequented the neighborhood where the crime took place, and a composite artist’s sketch drawn from eyewitness testimony appeared to put him at the scene as the man who pulled the trigger.

From the outset, Catalan maintained that he had an alibi: on the night of the murder, May 12, 2003, he took his six-year-old daughter to the Dodger Stadium to watch a game against the Atlanta Braves.
nintchdbpict000358349029But despite providing his ticket stubs, police weren’t convinced of his innocence and proceeded with prosecuting him, which if he had been convicted, could have seen him face the death penalty.

While awaiting trial in jail, Catalan recalled that there was a film crew shooting something during the Dodgers-Braves game on the fateful night of Puebla’s murder.

‘I wasn’t supposed to be at that game, and that would replay in my head over and over,’ Catalan says in the trailer for a new Netflix documentary about this case.

And his defense attorney Todd Melnick discovered that cameras had been at the baseball ground to film an episode of the comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm called ‘The Carpool Lane.

Convinced that Catalan didn’t fit the profile of a murderer, his defense attorney Todd Melnik pulled out all the stops to free his client and vindicate his claims of innocence. He convinced Dodger management to allow him to comb through hours of “Dodger Vision” camera footage, images of the crowd that had been shot during the game. He spent an entire day watching dozens of videotapes in slow motion, and though he was able to spot Catalan and his daughter in their seats, the image resolution wasn’t clear enough to conclusively identify them.

When pressed for other possible ways to confirm his story, Catalan remembered that there had been a crew shooting some kind of video in the stands, with a man (who Catalan didn’t recognize) walking up and down the aisle. That man turned out to be Larry David.

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As it happened David was there to shoot an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Car Pool Lane,” the one where Larry hires a hooker so he can use a freeway car pool lane to beat the traffic and get to the Dodger game on time.

Todd’s legal team then were allowed to scour hours of footage taken that night to try and find pictures to prove that Juan was part of the 56,000 crowd.

And eventually they found proof of Juan walking his young daughter to their seats inside the stadium.

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The evidence was enough for the case against Juan to be dismissed and after five and a half months in jail he was released and later received $3285,000 in compensation from the LAPD.

A year later, gang member Raul Robledo received a life term for Martha’s murder.

In September  2017 Netflix released a documentary called “Long Shot” on the Juan Catalan case.

Prior to his arrest, Juan Catalan never watched Curb Your Enthusiasm, but after his release from jail, he said became an avid fan of the series.

As for David, he quipped at the time that he was quitting his show ‘to devote the rest of my life to freeing those unjustly incarcerated.

 

The tragic life of John Paul Getty III

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Most people will be aware of the name Getty be it from Getty Oil or Getty Images

Getty Oil was founded by J.Paul Getty sr. in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American,while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world’s richest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approximately $8.8 billion in 2016).At his death, he was worth more than $2 billion (approximately $8.3 billion in 2016). A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived, based on his wealth as a percentage of the gross national product.

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Despite his wealth, Getty was notably frugal.Getty famously had a pay phone installed at Sutton Place, helping to seal his reputation as a miser. Getty placed dial-locks on all the regular telephones, limiting their use to authorized staff, and the coin-box telephone was installed for others.

He famously negotiated his grandson’s, John Paul Getty III, ransom.

At 3 a.m. on 10 July 1973, Getty, then age 16, was kidnapped in the Piazza Farnese in Rome.A ransom note was received, demanding $17 million in exchange for his safe return. When that ransom message arrived, some family members suspected the kidnapping was merely a ploy by the rebellious youngster as he had frequently joked about staging his own kidnapping to extract money from his frugal grandfather. He was blindfolded and imprisoned in a mountain hideout. A second demand was received, but had been delayed by an Italian postal strike.John Paul Getty, Jr. asked his father for the money, but was refused.

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Getty Sr. argued that were he to pay the ransom, then his 14 other grandchildren could also be kidnapped. In November 1973, an envelope containing a lock of hair and a human ear was delivered to a daily newspaper with a threat of further mutilation of Paul, unless $3.2 million was paid: “This is Paul’s ear. If we don’t get some money within 10 days, then the other ear will arrive. In other words, he will arrive in little bits.”

At this point Getty Sr. agreed to pay a ransom, although he would only pay $2.2 million, because that was the maximum amount that was tax deductible. He loaned the remainder to his son who was responsible for repaying the sum at 4% interest. The reluctant Getty Sr. negotiated a deal and got his grandson back for about $2.9 million. Getty III was found alive in a filling station of Lauria, in the province of Potenza, on 15 December 1973, shortly after the ransom was paid.

Nine of the kidnappers were apprehended, including a carpenter, an hospital orderly, an ex-con and an olive-oil dealer from Calabria, as well as high-ranking members of the ‘Ndrangheta — a Mafia-type organization in Calabria — such as Girolamo Piromalli and Saverio Mammoliti. Two were convicted and sent to prison; the others, including the ‘Ndrangheta bosses, were acquitted for lack of evidence. Most of the ransom money was never recovered.In 1977, Getty had an operation to rebuild the ear that had been cut off by his kidnappers.

Getty spent most of his childhood in Rome, Italy, while his father headed the Italian division for the Getty family’s oil business. His parents divorced in 1964 and his father married again in 1966 to model and actress Talitha Pol.

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They adopted a hippie lifestyle and spent much time in England and Morocco during the 1960s. Getty stayed in boarding school at St. George’s English School (later St. George’s British International School), in Rome. In early 1971, he was expelled from St. Georges after having painted the hallways of the school one night, taking inspiration from Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter. Later that year, his stepmother died of a heroin overdose in Rome.While his father moved back to England, he remained in Italy, where he lived a bohemian life, frequented nightclubs, and took part in left-wing demonstrations. Endowed with a considerable artistic inclination, he reportedly earned a living making jewelry, selling paintings and appearing as an extra in movies.

In 1974, Getty married German Gisela Martine Zacher (née Schmidt), who was five months pregnant. He had known her and her twin sister Jutta since before his kidnapping. Getty was 18 years old when his son, Balthazar, was born in 1975. The couple divorced in 1993.Getty tried his hand at acting in European films: he played supporting parts in Raúl Ruiz’ The Territory and in Wim Wenders’s The State of Things, which was shot at the same time as Ruiz’s film, using part of its cast and crew.

Getty was an alcoholic and drug addict. In 1981, he imbibed a valium, methadone, and alcohol cocktail which caused liver failure and a stroke, leaving him a quadriplegic and nearly blind. He never fully recovered and remained severely handicapped for the rest of his life. By 1987, however, a daily regime of exercise, physiotherapy and speech therapy during which he reportedly showed “extraordinary willpower,” had helped him regain some degree of autonomy.

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He could again visit concerts and cinema, and was even able to ski, when strapped to a metal frame.

In 1999, Getty, along with several other members of his family, became citizens of the Republic of Ireland as part of the “Passports for Investment” scheme of approximately £1 million each, under a law which has since been repealed.They lived in the Gurthalougha House, on the shores of Lough Derg here in Co Tipperary.

Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, also purchased eleven Irish passports in 1990 as part of this scheme.

On 5 February 2011, aged 54, Getty died at Wormsley, Buckinghamshire, following a long illness. He had been in poor health since his 1981 drug overdose. He was survived by his son and his mother.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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