Hitler thought the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was one of the greatest films ever made.
Another suspect was Lena Hartog, who cleaned the building and was married to a man who worked in the warehouse. According to this theory, Hartog had learned somehow that Jews were hiding somewhere in the building; fearing for her safety and her husband’s if the Jews were discovered, she reported them to the Nazis. A third suspect was a member of the Dutch National Socialist Party named Tonny Ahlers. To date, very little evidence has surfaced to suggest that any of these suspects, or any of the others that have been proposed over the years, were actually responsible for betraying the Franks and the others hiding in the Secret Annex.
A NEW THEORY
In December 2016, Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian affiliated with the Anne Frank House, published an article in which he suggests that there may not have been a betrayer after all. He argues that it is possible that the Secret Annex was discovered by accident, when Nazi police officials searched the building while there on another matter.
One piece of evidence is the timing and the nature of the police raid. The Nazis arrived at the building sometime around 11:00 a.m. on the morning of August 4, 1944. While they were there, people were allowed to enter and leave the building freely. This suggests that they weren’t looking for people, Dr. Broek argues, because if they had been, no one would have been allowed to leave.
Jan Gies, one of the people who arrived at the building a short time after the Nazis did, left as soon as he realized they were there. He went to a nearby bridge and observed the scene from that safe vantage point, and was still there at 1:00 p.m., when the Franks and the other Jews who had been hiding in the Secret Annex were taken away. That means the raid took nearly two hours. If the Nazis were there to arrest the people in the Secret Annex, Dr. Broek asks, why did it take them two hours to do it? He suspects that the Nazis did not know that the Secret Annex was there, or that anyone was hiding in it, until they stumbled across it by accident.
“B” AND “D”
Another potential clue comes from the pages of Anne Frank’s diary. On March 10, 1944, five months before the raid, she notes that the Nazis arrested “B” and “D,” two men who dealt in illegal ration cards, “so we have no coupons to buy food with.” B and D were Martin Brouwer and Pieter Daatzelaar, two salesmen who worked in the building and who also trafficked in ration cards on the side. Neither of them knew about the Secret Annex or the people hiding there—Anne Frank writes elsewhere in her diary that when Brouwer and Daatzelaar were in the building, she and the others in the Secret Annex had to be very quiet to avoid detection.
Your body has enough DNA to reach from the sun to Pluto and back—17 times.
FOLLOW-UP
Typically when traffickers like Brouwer and Daatzelaar were arrested, the information was forwarded to a Nazi-controlled police agency called the Special Unit of the Central Investigation Division, which was set up in 1941 to investigate “illegal distribution of ration coupons and meat,” Dr. Broek writes. One of the collaborators who assisted the Nazis in the August 4 raid was a Dutch policeman named Gezinus Gringhuis—who worked for the Special Unit of the Central Investigation Division. A second collaborator, an Austrian policeman named Karl Silberbauer, was assigned mostly to property crimes, not to ferreting out Jews in hiding.
All of this information leads Dr. Broek to suspect that when the Nazis raided the building, they were there to follow up on the arrests of the ration card traffickers Brouwer and Daatzelaar, who worked there. The Nazis searched the building thoroughly for nearly two hours looking for evidence of ration card fraud, and when they got to the bookcase that hid the Secret Annex, the fate of Anne Frank and the other people hiding there was sealed.
But Dr. Broek admits that it’s just a theory: “The possibility of betrayal has of course not been entirely ruled out by this, nor has any relationship between the ration coupon fraud and the arrest been proven. Clearly,” he writes, “the last word about that fateful summer day in 1944 has not yet been spoken.”
9 U.S. STATES WITH A BALD EAGLE ON THEIR FLAG
1. Illinois
2. Iowa
3. Michigan
4. Missouri
5. New York
6. North Dakota
7. Oregon
8. Pennsylvania
9. Utah
The film shoot of Grease went through 100,000 pieces of bubble gum.
BRANDED
Do names have power? Certainly. And in the case of brand names, they have the power to help part consumers from their hard-earned money.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? The cost for a pharmaceutical company to name and brand a new drug can go as high as $3 million. But the pharmaceutical market is a $450 billion business in the United States alone, so there’s a lot at stake, financially, and if the name is right, the investment is worth it. That’s why drug companies don’t give the naming job to a few clever people who sit around a big table, order pizza and beer, and write ideas on a whiteboard, but to “branding agencies”—companies whose entire purpose is to name and brand new products. The process can be complicated because prescription drugs must have three different names: the chemical name (ibuprofen), the generic name (NSAID: nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) and the brand name (Advil).
Major branding agencies, or “naming companies,” such as Catchword, Zinzin, and the Brand Institute, go through an intense yearlong process of picking just the right brand name for a new drug. First the agency must understand the drug’s purpose. Then they compile a list of hundreds or even thousands of possible names, which is condensed to a dozen finalists. Those names are crosschecked in databases to make sure the name hasn’t already been taken. Then the company checks foreign language databases to make sure the name doesn’t translate into something shocking in another country, which is what happened to the soft drink Coca-Cola. In Chinese, “cocacola” roughly translates to “bite the wax tadpole,” which is why the company wisely changed its Chinese brand name to Kekoukele, which means “tasty fun.”
NO ROOM FOR ERROR. The rules of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency are strict. To avoid the possibility of a prescription error, the name cannot contain any medical modifiers, prefixes, suffixes, or numbers that could be confused for a dosage. According to the Institute of Medicine, at least 1.5 million Americans are sickened, injured, or die every year because of mistakes made in prescribing or dosage. Naming companies work to prevent these errors by having many test subjects write out the brand name to make sure it can’t be confused for a different drug because of sloppy handwriting.
DID YOU KNOW?
Drug names cannot promise a result, which is why Rogaine, the popular drug for hair loss, had to change its name from Regain, which appeared to promise hair growth.
Astronauts returning from space walks have described space as smelling like anything from “seared steak” to “hot metal” to “welding fumes.”
THE WOW FACTOR. Interbrand is the world’s leading branding company. In 1987 it took Eli Lily and Company’s new product—an antidepressant with the chemical name of fluoxetine hydrochloride—and gave it the brand name Prozac, which they said sounded positive, professional, and “full of zap.” Scott Piergrossi, vice president of creativity at the Brand Institute, was so impressed that he said, “Prozac is what I call the big bang of pharmaceutical naming. It came out of nowhere, it means absolutely nothing, and it really just said, ‘Wow! Okay, now this is blockbuster naming in the drug world.’ ” Since the launch, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 55 million adults and children. It has even been given to dogs, cats, parrots, elephants, and polar bears.
THINK UP! Arlene Teck, creative director at ixxéo Healthcare, is a rock star in the product branding business for naming the drug that treats erectile dysfunction, or ED. In 1992 she ran a focus group with urologists to discuss this condition. She asked one of the doctors what it felt like for a man when his E
D was cured. He told her to visualize a “strong stream.” With that image in mind, Teck combined the words “vigorous” and “Niagara” and came up with Viagra.
WE TRY HARDER. With Viagra as king of the erectile dysfunction market, how did other drug companies offering similar drugs compete? They had to be just as clever in their naming process, so if Viagra was addressing the “action” resulting from taking the drug, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company decided its ED drug should describe the “feeling.” They started with the word ciel, which means “sky” in French, and added the word “bliss” to get Cialis. Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline partnered to offer a third contender in the impotence market: Levitra. The name is designed to make consumers think of words like “lever,” “levitate,” and “leverage.” (The creative team must have decided to overlook the fact the LEV stands for “low-emission vehicle” in the automotive industry.)
YOU COULD DIE. The average broadcast television viewer is over 60 years old. This could explain why the TV networks run back-to-back commercials for medications to treat heart disease, diabetes, COPD, incontinence, and erectile dysfunction. But what explains the 15 seconds spent on describing the benefits of the drug versus the 45 seconds spent listing the horrific side effects? You might think hearing of the possibility of shortness of breath, nonstop diarrhea, erections that last more than 48 hours, and sudden death would be a deal-breaker for consumers, but it’s exactly the opposite. According to a study reported in the New York Times, the fact that a drug could have such dire side effects actually makes potential users more confident in its power to cure.
The fact that a drug could have such dire side effects actually makes potential users more confident in its power to cure.
More votes were cast for 2006 American Idol winner Taylor Hicks than for Ronald Reagan’s reelection as president in 1984.
A CURE FOR INSOMNIA
Can’t sleep? One of these weird cures might help…or not—some of them are so gross, they might actually keep you awake thinking about how gross they are.
•16th-century Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano developed many important theories, including the probability theorem. He was also a doctor who told patients who had trouble sleeping to rub a dog’s earwax on their teeth.
•Old Japanese folk remedy for sleeplessness: Eat the entrails of a sea slug just before bed.
•Old French folk remedy for sleeplessness: Eat fried lettuce just before bed.
•Ancient Egyptians had another lettuce-based insomnia cure. They drank lactucarium, a powerful, opium-like narcotic made out of extracts of different leafy greens. (So it probably worked.)
•Charles Dickens claimed to have cured his sleep troubles by making sure his bed was pointed to the north.
•In 1621 English doctor Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy that foot massages could cure insomnia. Specifically, foot massages in which the fat of a dormouse was rubbed on the soles of the feet.
•The health page of an 1898 issue of Scotland’s Glasgow Herald told insomniacs to soap their hair with yellow soap and “rub it into the roots of the brain until it is lathered all over,” then tie up the wet hair in a towel, wash it out the next morning, and repeat the process daily for two weeks.
•In modern-day Japan, “sleep concerts” are a thing. Held in large rooms or theaters, attendees sit in big chairs or lie in sleeping bags while live bands play slow, relaxing music.
•In Babylonia, conventional wisdom held that insomnia was a result of one being haunted by the uneasy spirits of dead relatives. To get to the root of the problem, insomniacs had to sleep with the relative’s skull for a week. That was thought to clear things up, as long as the person also licked the skull each night.
•Hemlock is a poison—the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates had to drink it to fulfill his death sentence. And yet in 1879 the Canadian Journal of Medicine advocated small amounts of hemlock to sleep for just a little while. (Take too much and you’ll “sleep” for a lot longer.)
What do Nimes, France, and Genoa, Italy, give us? The phrase “denim jeans.”
TELEVISION BY THE
NUMBERS QUIZ
Guess which character we left off of these TV show casts. (Answers on page 501.)
1) Which of the eight Eight Is Enough Bradford kids is missing?
David, Mary, Joanie, Nancy, Elizabeth, Tommy, Nicholas
2) Of the seven Camden kids on 7th Heaven, which one isn’t here?
Sam, David, Ruthie, Lucy, Mary, Simon
3) Which of the six Brady kids from the The Brady Bunch isn’t listed?
Bobby, Marcia, Cindy, Greg, Peter
4) There were five Huxtable kids on The Cosby Show. Who’s missing?
Sondra, Denise, Rudy, Vanessa
5) Of the eight Walton children that survived infancy on The Waltons, who did we forget to say “good night” to?
John-Boy, Jason, Mary Ellen, Ben, Erin, Elizabeth
6) There were four Conner kids on Roseanne. Who got left out?
Becky, D.J., Darlene
7) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was a musical film and a TV show. Which TV brother is missing?
Ford, Crane, Adam, Daniel, Guthrie, Evan
8) Hey, hey, hey! Which one of Fat Albert’s seven friends from the Junkyard Band isn’t here?
Dumb Donald, Weird Harold, Bill, Russell, Rudy, Bucky
9) Who’s the fifth member of the Archies on The Archies?
Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie
10) Which kid living in the house on Full House got left off this list?
D.J., Michelle, Alex, Nicky
11) Who’s the missing kid from the 1990s blended family sitcom Step by Step?
Dana, Mark, Brendan, Karen, J.T.
12) There were six “Angels” throughout the run of Charlie’s Angels. Who’s not here?
Sabrina, Tiffany, Julie, Kelly, Kris
13) Which member of the Partridge family did we forget?
Shirley, Keith, Laurie, Danny, Chris, Tracy
14) In the large extended family on Modern Family, which kid is missing?
Haley, Alex, Luke, Joe, Lily
15) Of all these hosts of The Tonight Show, who did we neglect to include?
Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon
Comic book creator Stan Lee’s first writing job: writing advance celebrity obituaries for a newspaper.
WRITER’S BLOCK!
Uncle John’s surefire cure for writer’s block: Writing about other people who’ve suffered from writer’s block.
VICTOR HUGO (1802–1885)
Claim to Fame: French author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables, and other works
Blocked! Like a lot of writers, Hugo spent a lot of time cooped up indoors, writing plays and novels when he would rather have been outside having fun. Sometimes when the temptation to play hooky grew too great, Hugo would strip naked and order his valet to hide his clothes. Then he would lock himself in a room containing nothing but a writing desk, a pen and some paper, and a blanket (in case he got cold), and start writing. Whether this improved his productivity is open to speculation; Les Misérables, published in 1862, took him nearly 20 years to finish.
RAYMOND CHANDLER (1888–1959)
Claim to Fame: One of the giants of “hard-boiled” detective fiction, Chandler wrote seven novels and numerous short stories that are considered classics of the genre.
Blocked! Chandler also wrote movie screenplays. In 1945 he was hired by Paramount Pictures to rush out a script for Alan Ladd, one of the studio’s biggest stars, who was about to be called up for military service. Chandler came up with a story called The Blue Dahlia, in which a navy aviator’s cheating wife is murdered the night he returns home from the war. The police suspect he’s the killer; his only hope of proving his innocence is to go on the lam and catch the murderer himself.
That was a nice beginning, but four weeks after filming got underway, Chandler still hadn’t come up wi
th an ending. A recovering alcoholic, he decided that the only path to breaking his writer’s block was by drinking alcohol. He told the studio that he needed to work at home instead of on the Paramount lot, which was usually not allowed. And he needed to be provided with six secretaries “in three relays of two” to be available around the clock to support him whenever he was sober enough to work. He also needed “two Cadillac limousines, to stand day and night outside the house with drivers” to fetch his doctor, take finished pages to the studio, or run whatever errands needed running, plus “a direct telephone line open at all times” to producer John Houseman’s office by day and the Paramount switchboard at night.
Paramount agreed to the terms and Chandler relapsed into his alcoholism. A few weeks later he finished work on the story that the Hollywood Reporter called “a kick-em-in-the-teeth hit,” and that earned him his second Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. (But he lost.)
Walruses inflate their pharyngeal pouch to keep themselves floating while they sleep.
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873–1943)
Claim to Fame: Russian pianist, composer, and conductor
Blocked! When Rachmaninoff’s Symphony no. 1 was performed in public for the first time in 1897, it was conducted by a man named Alexander Glazunov, who may have been drunk at the time. The performance was not well received by critics, one of whom compared it to the ten biblical plagues of Egypt. Though Rachmaninoff denied that he cared about what the critics thought, he slipped into a depression that lasted for three years. In that time, he was able to compose only a few short pieces of music and had to support himself by giving piano lessons. Even a visit from the writer Leo Tolstoy, one of Rachmaninoff’s favorite authors, failed to improve his spirits. It wasn’t until 1900, when Rachmaninoff began receiving psychotherapy and hypnotherapy treatments from a physician and friend named Nikolai Dahl, that his depression began to lift and he was able to compose again. His Piano Concerto no. 2, which he completed in April 1901, is dedicated to Dahl. Fortunately for lovers of his music, Piano Concerto no. 2 received good reviews, spurring Rachmaninoff on to further work.
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