Herschel Grynspan and the Nazis

I read book review “A pawn in a deadly game” by Colin Greenwood in the UK Spectator issue 2 Feb 2019, a while ago and remembered it for today, the first day of Passover in the Jewish calendar. Greenwood was reviewing “Hilter’s Scapegoat: The boy Assassin and the Holocaust” written by Stephen Koch published by Ambereley Press.

It’s an interesting tale.

PRELUDE

On 7 November 1938, an impoverished seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, obsessed with the whereabouts of his family —  A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich; Grynszpan had received news that his parents, residents in Germany since 1911, were among them.

The previous month, close to 18,000 Polish German Jews had been dumped by train on the Polish border. Among those rounded up in Hanover for the Aktion were Grynszpan’s family: his parents Sendel and Rivka, his brother Mordecai and his sister Berta. Herschel himself had been sent to Paris two years earlier by his parents for his own safety, and lived there with his aunt and uncle, in Casablanca-esque limbo, along with some other 50,000 refugees from Nazi persecution.

The inner ring is Herschel; the outer the guesstimate time of the killing. No known times of either are known, but we think that the Grynszpan ascendant is fairly solid: 19 Aquarius (round down here, it won’t change much.)

But his parents found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of Zbaszyn in the border region between Poland and Germany. Living illegally in Paris Grynszpan sought to exonerate his guilt by making a “guilt offering” of the Nazi, embassy secretary, Ernst vom Rath.

the processional

When the secretary died two days later, Adolph Hitler, previously highlighted ove here, and Goebbels used the event as an excuse that Jews were conspiring against the Reich and started commemorations of the the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918; the Munich Putsch of 1923 (the ersatz Nazi birth day), the ‘Movement Day Banquet’. Hitler slipped away from the celebrations while Goebbels whipped up the mob, all in preparation of their pre-planned anti-Semitic terror program known as Kristallnacht where a 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 sent to the camps.

Ernst Eduard vom Rath, embassy Secretary in Paris, France

Overnight Herschel Grynszpan, found himself world-famous, his face on front pages everywhere, and a pawn in the Nazi machine. Instead of being executed, he was privileged prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels prepared a show-trial — an excellent propaganda opportunity.

Incarcerated in Paris, Herschel was now facing a murder trial and the eventual guillotine. Worse, he too was taken in by the propaganda and believed to be responsible the tragedy:

God, oh my God!’,he wrote from prison, ‘I did not want that. Is this the price [Kristallnacht] for the act of one desperate, foolish man like me?’

herschel grynszpan wrote in his diary in jail

The French government prevaricated over the trial. If Herschel were to be found guilty, anti-Nazi opinion would be inflamed. If innocent, then Hitler would be enraged. In any event, the trial was derailed by the invasion of France in June 1940. Herschel was shuttled from town to town as the legislature fled south, before being seized by the Gestapo and transported to their Nazi headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 in Berlin.

the recessional

Grynszpan soon realised that he was being kept alive writing he was ‘the safest Jew in Germany.’ As he calmed down and began to be removed frmo the Kristallnacht propaganda, Herschel saw that his appearance as star defendant at a grotesque Nazi show trial was another pretext for even greater terrors against his people and family. He began to rethink his strategy.

Herschel at 19 Aquarius (HS) Astrologers at work — the ability to distinguish between elements of justice that underlies the apparent situation via strength of mind and breadth of universal understanding. Keyword: Acuity — responsive to circumstance.

First thing, he decided against was the previous defense strategy his French lawyer suggested — anger against Vom Rath and the Nazis seeing that would have no footing even with a supposed unbiased French court. Instead he decided that the killing had been a sordid gay love affair gone wrong when Vom Rath jilted him for another because of his Jewishness. The idea worked and cast a pall over proceedings. Vom Rath had been single and had no girlfriends to come forward — he had been a hardworking Nazi and that was now working in Herschel’s favour. When they could not come up with any evidence to the contrary, Hitler ordered the trial to be permanently suspended in May 1942; Herschel then fades from history.

the postlude

1. The Guardian uncovered evidence that Herschel got out of prison but died in the bombing.

Judge Brett Michael Kavanaugh to Scotus

Brett Michael Kavanaugh (born February 12, 1965 in Washington D.C. ) is a Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was Staff Secretary in the Executive Office of the President of the United States under President George W. Bush. Kavanaugh played a major role in drafting the Kenneth Starr report, which urged the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.  You can read it online via the L. A. Times website, but it dwells heavily on his extra martial affair with Miss Monica Lewinsky, and rather minimizes the real issue for the impeachment proceedings which was his lying under oath to a grand jury (perjury)  and obstruction of justice; the Democratic Senate acquitted Clinton on all accounts and he was not removed from office.

Sagittarius 24 The bluebird of happiness

Kavanaugh once clerked for the departing Kennedy.  The President said about him that “Throughout legal circles, he is considered a judge’s judge, a true thought leader among his peers… He’s a brilliant jurist with a clear and effective writing style universally regarded as one of the finest and sharpest legal minds of our time.”

 While the Sagittarius ascendant is odd for a man born and raised in D.C., the centaur also represents the law, administration &  education and in those arenas,  Judge Kavanaugh is commanding.  His specialty is administrative law, he coaches the Catholic Youth Organization basketball teams and donates pro bono  legal work to the organization as well.  This is a speculative chart nonetheless but  the aspects between his natal and his Scotus appointment date have some interesting references.

                                                                                   Speculatively speaking

His ascendant is 24 Sagittarius,  the blue bird of happiness, that alights at the door  symbolizing good luck, happiness and abundance.  It is the degree of unexpected assistance and has the keyword of Fortune.

Kavanaugh has Jupiter in Taurus in the fifth house suggesting that he would have several girls, he has two and with Saturn in the second house, he is a serious minded man and not prone to frivolities like the late Judge Scalia. even though both are Splash temperament types.

His yod between Neptune in the eleventh and Pluto make a point at his fourth house cusp so that the “head” of the yod (Pluto and Neptune are its arms) is the midheaven at 16.06 Libra suggesting that this is fulfilling a life’s dream.  E.C. Matthews says that this degree is populated with people on both sides of the law:  Winston Churchill and Jesse James giving its native a practical but inventive mind.

On the air with Dan Ingram at WABC

“You talk for 10 seconds, the music plays, you’ve got nothing to do.”

Here’s an unrectified chart for Dan Ingram, a popular deejay in New York City.  The obit is from the New York Times but I must admit for a deejay a lot of planets in the twelfth does make sense.  Also, transpluto on the eleventh house cusp — his career dependent on his fan’s is also a good fit for Dan. The topper is his Moon is conjunct Regulus.  This may not be it, but to be honest, its a close fit.

Uranus on the seventh-eighth house works as his first wife died suddenly in an automobile crash.  It is sextile Saturn showing the harsh effect it had on him — perhaps idolizing her over his future wives.  Jupiter in the first is also a good catch — he was jovial, and made good natured jokes, nothing nasty like Howard Stern.  Dan had class and that fits his Bucket with a Saturn handle.  I had a friend, now deceased, Eileen Jazwa, who loved Dan and listened to him faithfully  — interestingly her birthday was Saturday.

At the height of his fame, he had a 25 percent listening share.   Now in 2018,  ten percent is considered huge.

Just the highlights:

Dan Ingram, a popular disc jockey whose wisecracks and double entendres rippled through the air at rock ’n’ roll stations in New York City from the early 1960s to the early 21st century, died on Sunday, June 24th,  at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 83.

His son Christopher said he died after choking on a piece of steak. He had received a diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome in 2014.

Once, giving the weather report, he said: “I love brief showers. They’re fun. Watch those briefs coming down!”

Mr. Ingram preceded the era of shock jocks, but he was a quick-thinking, somewhat bawdy jester who mocked songs, singers, sponsors and the weather at WABC-AM, a powerful Top 40 station that grew in the ’60s with the popularity of the Beatles, the Motown stable of artists and others.

Later, at WCBS-FM, the groundbreaking oldies station, he continued his drollery while exhuming the music he had played decades earlier.

“I like to have fun with my listeners,” Mr. Ingram told The New York Times in 1993 when he was at WCBS-FM. “I like them to use their minds. I like them to say, ‘I don’t believe he said that.’ But I don’t like to do sleaze.”

On the Lusitania, Elbert Hubbard

                                        Unravelling Hubbard and his legacy at Roycroft

We will be tackling the various charts in Marc Jones’s How to Learn Astrology by Marc Jones over the succeeding months.  You can read the whole book online here at the Sabian Assembly site.

Our first chart  is the nativity of Elbert Hubbard who with  his second wife Alice, went down with the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915 near he Old Head of Kinsale lighthouse, Ireland . It breaks from the previous charts in the book as it is not in the piano key layout, but depicts all the planets in their respective signs & houses , making it the first complete chart.

from Hubbard’s Dictionary of Roycroft

Hubbard’s focal determinator is  his cardinal grand cross on the angular houses, & Jones comments that that split is emphasized because the Line of Vitality  (Sun aspecting Moon)  is part of one opposition and the Line of Motivation (Jupiter squared Saturn) another, so that he was not reliant on one method of success but utilized one or the other “upon a whim.”¹.

This allowed Hubbard to erect his life in concert with his dynamic aptitude of the spiritual opposition of Mars to Jupiter that appears on his Ascendant/Descendant  while simultaneously trying to meet the emotional challenges posed to him on at the squares, making him a rather adept juggler.

With his success dependent on this facile ability to adapt the desires of his spiritual vision versus the needs of his personal life —  his divorce from his first wife, Bertha Crawford Hubbard cost him $335,000( (2018 dollars) and custody of their two children but that was not much considering the 1.5 million payout he had received from Larkin Soap — he made money hand over fist and since he knew so many rich entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller, he invested wisely not that Roycroft needed it, for by 1908 Hubbard was worth an equivalent of $5.9 million on his initial investment.  As he  owned 100% of the firm, supplemented his $50 a week in salary by hitting the lecture circuit,  Roycroft did not lack for funds.  The problem was when the old man got tired, and let his sons take over, it lacked his gumption (Mars partile the Ascendant in the hidden twelfth house).

                                            It all started in Soap

Originally Hubbard worked as a salesman for Larkin Soap Co., based in Buffalo, and then as as a PR manager writing great ad copy for  Armour & Co. (meat packing), Burroughs Adding Machine, Elgin Watches, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, Burpee’s Seeds and the Equitable Life Insurance — all large corporations.

Hubbard was successful but at 35 years old, decided that there was more to life than soap and left the business.  He went to Harvard University in Boston Massachusetts and took several courses on writing.  Inspired by what William Morris was doing in England, he went there to learn from him at the Red house.  This sparked Hubbard’s s interest in printing and publishing house and the eventual formation of the Roycroft Arts and Crafts campus of handcrafted artisans.

The publishing business did well and he got up to a 100,000 subscribers.  Realizing he could expand his bookbinding, he took another cue from Morris and went into the decorative arts, and this too was quite successful, selling his wares like Sears and Roebuck via catalog.

He broke with Morris not wanting an upper crust couture line, but instead decided to cater for the new evolving upper middle class of America, much like Henry Ford, another Midwesterner he went to Michigan to meet and profile for his magazine.  Everyone was buying a house and that home had to be furnished — it was Hubbard’s desire to be the major furnisher of goods much like the department store of J. C. Penney, and Macy’s, but he would have just one store, and that in East Aurora, and do the rest via advertising and the catalog.  It was an ambitious enterprise but with Jupiter in the sixth house, there was little that Hubbard did on small scale.  Incredibly it worked.

Marc Jones on Hubbard

Marc Jones writes extensively on   Elbert Hubbard, the “sage of East Aurora” in How to Learn.  You can read the whole thing here.  We have abbreviated it for this essay.

He was a unique and stimulating literary figure, widely known in America at the turn of the twentieth century. The beginner will notice an east singleton Mars in the twelfth house. This is enlightening because of the degree to which this native carved out his own destiny (the eastern hemisphere-emphasis) by means of his own initiative via the Mars emphasis uses of the hidden resources in his own personality.

Jones’s chart is in the Placidean format.  It shows Pluto in the seventh house even though Hubbard died 17 years before its discovery.

The influence of the Mars initiative is so direct in Elbert Hubbard’s life that a first house position might seem more correct than the twelfth house place given but using our preferred Morinus method we see that the Mars is conjunct the Ascendant though not necessarily the first house (The Morinus method separates the two) and that highlights the dynamism of his personality in all his efforts.

woodcut of Roycroft

A further “look” at the Elbert Hubbard chart will show that four of the planets are near the major southern cusp, of the Mid-heaven.  Here we have Saturn  at Cancer 2°55′, which is within a fraction over nine degrees of the cusp at Cancer 12°, and Mercury is a little over a degree farther away at Cancer 1°27′. The sun, at Gemini 28°35′, is within thirteen odd degrees of the cusp, & since the 1°25′ is  in Gemini, add to it the twelve degrees in Cancer,  and you have exact distance of 13°25′.Venus, at Gemini 19°44′, measured in the same fashion, is a little over twenty-two degrees away.

The student, for whom this text is geared,  should be very careful to make sure he understands how distance around the circle is measured in signs and degrees. He should remember the normal order of the signs, seeing clearly how each represents a successive thirty degrees in the whole zodiac circle & be able to compute the distance with equal ease counterclockwise or clockwise and not rely on software to perform this job for him.

                                        By the light of the Moon

The moon lies almost directly opposite these four planets near the nadir in the north,  a little less than three degrees . Mars is at the easternmost point of the chart, exactly on the first house cusp, as mentioned.  Jupiter is over at the west angle, less than four degrees from an exact position on the seventh cusp.

Pluto is some twenty-five degrees south from this seventh cusp, and Uranus is not quite eighteen degrees farther, giving a Vigintile, one of Johannes Kepler’s minor aspects that is thought to possess a positive creative influence.   In Hubbard’s chart it shows the transformative urge to create socially pertinent things, instead of a commodity, like soap.

Neptune is little less than twenty degrees on the northern side, making another Vigintile aspect, so that there are four planets lustered closely at the midheaven , and four are lying not quite as closely at the west.  The other angles are emphasized by the  close proximity to the single planets creating the astrological configuration of “x-cross.”

The pattern of the planets here is remarkable  because they cling to the cusps of the angular houses and provide a sort of  metaphorical “crucifixion,” where the person’s spiritual ideals are tested in the material world.

Elbert Hubbard dramatizes this well, since he consistently felt himself to be in complete rebellion against the existing order of things, the Pluto-Uranus vigintile on the eighth house cusp., and his attitude gave voice to America’s growing protest against mid-Victorian artificiality making his Roycroft enterprises an expression of every soul’s need  to break the shackles of an uninteresting existence and like Icarus fly high.

 

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Footnotes:

1. In 1895 when the Hubbard’s divorced, the only reason was proven infidelity .e. adultery or abandonment.  Even with that stringent rule, the divorce rate was about 7%.
2. Lois Rodden gives another time but still in the Cardinal quadrature, for Mr. Hubbard.  Look below but the chart does have Witte’s TNPS, the legend is below 

#118 The IT Girl, Clara Bow

Clara Bow and Gary Cooper (ages 22 and 26 respectively)

Clara Bow was born in Brooklyn, New York City on July 29, 1905 to Robert and Sarah (nee Gordon)  Bow.   She was the third child born to them, at her uncle’s, a Methodist minister, house at 697 Bergen Street; their  first two girls, Alene and Emily, dying shortly after birth.  The parents expected the same of her, so they never registered her birth.

We have rectified her chart to 8:20 AM giving her a 18 Virgo Ascendant that is called a “diamond in the rough,”   alluding to her working-class background and strong Brooklyn accent of which she was ashamed; she had little formal school beyond grammar school , though Mr. Stenn notes that she was a solid B+ student, but spoke mainly in Brooklyn slang calling herself “Jes a woikin’ goil”.

Her father has a sketchy work history, it was said “he lacked drive” and was a “tart man” ¹who  moved his family all around the borough, from Carroll Park and Bergen Street to Bay Ridge and 73rd and even out of Sheepshead Bay and Flatbush  most of these areas very rural and scarcely populated, a major reason chosen because of their remoteness from  Spanish flu epidemic.  Mainly though, she grew up on 160 Sands Street that was then the  Brooklyn equivalent of the Bowery.

 

 

The advertisement from Brewster Publications “Motion Picture Classics” that Clara answered.

Her temperament type is a rather off bucket with a very strong Saturn handle highlighting her industriousness and ambition.  She was enthralled by Fatty Arbuckle and Mary Pickford and wanted to make pictures, but her mother disapproved saying that they were all “who ers”,  and Clara hid her dream.  Her sixth grade school teacher thought she had talent and nurtured it helping her get parts in several school plays and then at sixteen in 1921, she entered the “Fame and Fortune Contest” sponsored by a Brooklyn company called Brewster Publications,. The top prize, a “place in pictures” hiding her entry from her suspicious mother.

She won, having spent hours imitating Pickford in front of the mirror, by the time she was twenty-two all the rage.  F. Scott Fitzgerald would write

“She was the girl of the year, the “It” girl, the girl for whose services every studio was in violent competition.  She was the real thing, someone to stir every pulse in the nation”

with her heart shaped face, and thick wavy auburn hair (dyed flaming orange-red) . Yet beyond the Silver Screen, she had a hard time fitting in with the Hollywood scene, always snidely being called “the girl from Brooklyn.”  ²

                                  Mapping IT

The chart is from Janus 5, the latest update.  The previous version, released at Christmas,  was not this good.  It still has some flaws, but at $225.00 for those on Windows, it’s not a bad deal.  Of course Walter Pullen has Astrologica for free, but with its Mickey Mouse VGA Graphics, that’s about its worth.

                                                And now our main feature….Miss Clara Bow

Miss Bow has few trines in her chart, and their absence is notable.  Her major trine is from Mercury in the twelfth house to Uranus in its essential lord, Capricorn in the fourth, where unfortunately Uranus, totally opposite to where it should be, at the mid-heaven, is now afflicted.  It gets worse.  Her Moon is exalted in Cancer and it too has a reverse polarity, the humpty dumpty aspect of these planets is striking and their point focus at Mercury in the twelfth exasperating.

Saturn though, in the sixth house of hard work, straightens some of this out, giving Uranus a sextilian strength and a supporting trine to the mid-heaven — Miss Bow will work hard for fame and with Saturn opposing her Mercury, it will come from being “mute.”

Saturn in Pisces is not very welcome either, but manages as it is trine Neptune, that planet of the shimmering screen, in the Tenth and the preponderance in the latter house, tells us that Bow was very ambitious and the Sun in the eleventh, does suggest very well liked.  But then there is that Saturn…again that hard taskmaster  We know that Saturn and Neptune are the rulers for avant garde art form of film, and that it often stands in the horoscope for a girl’s father,  but it is also rules sex and drugs and things bacchanal.  For Miss Bow that was to prove ominous particularly with her father, and while he did not pawn her off to the peep shows, Hollywood would prove to be the ultimate white slaver and make miss Bow the first sex goddess.

That was not what Miss Bow was aiming for when auditioning in front of Mary Pickford, she was hoping to be another ingenue, but the Gish sisters had cornered that racket, and with her looks and magnetic allure, she roped the role of femme fatale all on her own and indeed, while Fitzgerald called her the ultimate flapper, she really was the first Hollywood Sex Symbol, and when she left, shortly after filming the above film “Call her savage” she left a gaping hole in Twinkle Town’s armour.  But the  city on the celluloid hill never misses a step and soon found a platinum blonde replacement, this time from Kansas City called Harlean Harlow to fill her shoes and have the same speech problem.

Alas Miss Harlow did not far as well as Miss Bow who rode off into the Capricornian sunset with her own hero, Rex Bell, and finding happiness in another Capricornian abode — the Nevadan desert ranching cattle.³

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Footnotes:

1. David Stenn, Clara Bow:  Runnin’ Wild, Cooper Square Press, c. 2000.
   1. A “tart man” is another name for a barker who entice men to enter a whore house or peep show.
   2. Originally edited, in 1988 by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
2. Laini Giles, The It Girl and Me, self-published c. 2017 Sepia Stories Publishing.  A fictionalized version of Miss Bow that despite its fantasy, has few good quotes.
3. Rex E. Bills, The Rulership Book, Tempe, Arizona: The American Federation of Astrologers c. 1971.