THE EXPERIMENTAL SHOP:  HORIZON RADIO & TV PLANT – MINSK 1992  
Photo Copyright ©Peter Wronski  1992

It is possible that Oswald worked at two locations during his term of employment at the Horizon Minsk Radio & TV Plant.  Prior to being posted in a metal lathe shop, Oswald was first assigned to the “Experimental Shop”, where parts were produced for new technologies and components in research and development. 

In 1992, we were not allowed to film inside the Experimental Shop, due to its sensitive work for the Russian Air Force, but we were allowed to film the exterior.  The Horizon Factory, not only produced and produces today, consumer radios and televisions, but also electronic components for the Russian military and space program.  The factory official giving us the tour of the facilities, could not confirm for us if the Experimental Shop was a high a security zone in 1960, when Oswald was assigned there.

However, It should be noted that in an essay on the Minsk factory, Oswald describes the experimental shop as “a two-story building with no particular mark on its red brick face.” 
 [ CE 3134, Volume XXVI  Warren Hearings ]
  
The shop in which he was later employed, is indeed located in a two story building.  If it had a red brick face, it had been plastered over by the time I saw it in 1992.

I could not determine the date on which Oswald might have been transferred away from the Experimental Shop, if he was indeed transferred; I was told by witnesses that they thought it was “six weeks to several months” after his arrival; early in his Minsk part of the journey.  If the Experimental Shop was a high security area in Oswald’s time, then he might have been deliberately first assigned there in an attempt to “flush” him out as a spy.  When after at least six weeks in a sensitive area, Oswald did not compromise himself in any manner, the KGB and factory officials probably concluded:

A.  Oswald is too cautious an operative to immediately expose himself to the obvious intelligence temptations of the Experimental Shop, therefore, he should be moved out of there before he out waits the KGB surveillance;

B. Oswald is a genuine defector, but is unskilled, uneducated, and suffers from a bad work attitude, and therefore, should be moved out of the sensitive Experimental Shop before he breaks something or drags behind important production plan quotas.

(For the record, Minsk KGB officers deny that they had anything to do with Oswald’s work assignments.)

In a strange way, Oswald’s employment in the Experimental Shop, eerily foreshadows his brush with another industrial security perimeter at work, that of Jaggars-Chiles- Stoval in Texas, the photo-lithography firm with military contracts, where Oswald worked from October 12, 1962 to April 6, 1963. 

DAY 6:  Wednesday, October 21    THE “SUICIDE ATTEMPT”

On October 21, the Presidium Secretary confirmed the KGB’s recommendation that Oswald be ordered to leave the USSR.  It is interesting to note that the matter is brought to the personal attention of  Marshal Kliment Ye. Voroshilov, Stalin’s confidant and former Minister of Defense.   Voroshilov survived to become Chairman of the Presidium under Khrushchev until he was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev in 1960. 
      The letter from the Presidium to the Communist Party Central Committee was released by the Soviets in 1999 and the US State Department translation is reproduced below:

October 21 is a highly controversial day in Lee Harvey Oswald’s history.  In his Historic Diary  [CE 24]Oswald is very specific in describing the hours of the day and the chain-of-events.  Yet at the same time, he is entirely inaccurate! Why?  It is hard to believe that Oswald’s inaccuracies are simple mistakes.  For example, in his diary Oswald writes that he slashed his wrist in his Moscow hotel room sometime around 7:00 p.m.  But official Soviet medical records released to the Warren Commission back in 1964 indicated that he was hospitalized as early as 4:00 p.m.   
     As there were no witnesses, the contradictions between Oswald’s diary entry and the Soviet documents, understandably spun-off a variety of conspiratorial theories all centered on the notion that Oswald was either dispatched somewhere other than a hospital or that something was done to him in the hospital. These theories were not without some merit.  The discrepancy in the times provided by the Soviets could have been attributed to their ignorance of the existence of Oswald’s journal.  Furthermore, the Soviet history of using hospitals and psychiatric facilities for intelligence and repressive security purposes is well documented.  But in 1991, I located the first of many witnesses who would come to confirm the Soviet timetable–Oswald was indeed taken to the Botkinskaya Hospital at the time which the Soviets indicated.  While this vacated one mystery, it opened another:  why did Oswald alter his timetable by some five hours?  Surely he would remember accurately a momentous event as having to self-inflict a wound and remember the difference between the dark of  7:00 p.m. and the daylight at 3:00 p.m..?

It is worth analyzing almost line by line what Lee Harvey Oswald wrote in his Historic Diary for this day:

1.  Oct. 21. (am) Meeting with single official. Balding ,stout, black suit, fairly good English, asks what do I want? I say Soviet citizenship; he asks why, I give vague answers about “Great Soviet Union.” He tells me “USSR only great in Literature.” Wants me to go back home.” I am stunned. I reiterate, he says he shall check and let me know whether my visa will be extended (it expires today).

2.  Eve. 6.00-Receive word from police official. I must leave country tonight at 8.00 P.M. as visa expires. I am shocked!! My dreams! I retire to my room. I have $100 left. I have waited for 2 years to be accepted. My fondest dreams are shattered because of a petty official; because of bad planning – I planned too much!

3.  7.00 P.M. I decide to end it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist. Then plunge wrist into bathtub of hot water. I think “when Rima comes at 8 to find me dead it will be a great shock. Somewhere a violin plays as I watch my life whirl away. I think to myself, “how easy to die” and “a sweet death,” (to violins)

4.  About 8.00 Rima finds me unconscious (bathtub water a rich red color) she screams (I remember that) and runs for help. Ambulance comes, I am taken to hospital where five stitches are put in my wrist. Poor Rima stays by my side as my interpreter (my Russian is still very bad) far into the night, I tell her “go home” (my mood is bad) but she stays; she is “my friend”. She has a strong will; only at this moment I notice she is pretty.

1.    The “balding stout” black suited English-speaking official to whom Oswald refers was probably the KGB officer Abram Shaknazarov, who posed as an OVIR functionary during his interview of Oswald.  But the meeting took place the day before, on October 20, according to KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiperenko’s book, Passport to Assassination.  If, as Nechiperenko claims, Skaknazarov was a veteran of the security forces since the 1920’s, he must have been a remarkable personality.  He not only witnessed and participated in the Stalin purges of the 1930’s, the Second World War, and the execution of his boss Beria following Stalin’s death–but also survived these events!  How did as experienced a KGB officer as Shaknazarov miss the hints that Oswald was dropping in the previous days that he had something of value to offer the Soviets?  Or did Oswald backtrack on his offer during the interview?  As Shaknazarov is no doubt as dead as Oswald is today, we will probably never know until the KGB opens their file on the specifics of that interview.
      What did Oswald do that morning of October 21?  According to Rimma Shirakova’s testimony in Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, she on her own initiative revealed to Oswald in the morning what she had learned the previous evening:  that Oswald was going to be ordered to leave the Soviet Union by the end of the day.  She remained with Oswald who was very upset until lunchtime, she told Mailer.

2.   Nichiperenko quotes a KGB document which states that “at twelve o’clock noon the hotel informed Oswald, in the presence of his translator, that he must be at OVIR at three o’clock and that train tickets to Helsinki had been ordered for him.”  Thus Oswald was officially informed of the decision by 12:00 noon and not at 6:00 p.m. as he writes.

3.   According to Shirakova, she goes to take her lunch around noon, agreeing with Oswald to meet in the lobby some time after 2:00 p.m. so that they can depart by automobile for a 3:00 p.m.appointment at OVIR.  Therefore, sometime between 2:00 and 3:00, Oswald slashed his wrist.

This time period was confirmed for me by Rosa Agafonova, the Chief Interpretor at the Hotel Berlin.  She told me that she remembers very specifically ordering a car for Lee Harvey Oswald for 2:40 p.m. so that they could arrive at OVIR for 3:00.  She also told me that everybody knew by then that Oswald’s request to remain in the USSR had been turned down and that Oswald knew as well.
    When I was interviewing Agafonova in 1991 and 1992, we had not yet learned that Shirakova revealed to Oswald that morning the official decision or that he was informed by telephone at noon that he must depart by the end of the day.  Yet it was obvious that Oswald somehow knew of the decision.  My assumption back then was that Oswald had a clandestine contact who revealed the decision to him and that Oswald altered the times of the events afterwards to protect the identity of that contact.  I wrote so in the Third Decade article.  Now we know more.  Although it is not clear whether Shirakova violated any regulations by telling Oswald in the morning the bad news, by noon he was informed by somebody from OVIR–thus there was no motive to cover his sources.  Why Oswald alters the times of the events, remains a mystery.

4.   Rosa Agafonova recalled that shortly before 3:00, Rimma Shirakova became concerned when Oswald did not come down from his room because he was always punctual.  She telephoned his room but received no answer.  Agafonova says she instructed Rimma to go to Oswald’s room with the dyzhurnaya and a pass key. (In Soviet hotels, each floor has a “key lady” known as the dyzhurnaya (“duty person”) who sits in front of the elevators and with whom the room key is left. This ensures that nobody visits the guest without the duty person checking their identity.)  Rimma recalled that she and dyshurnaya found the door bolted from inside.  Security was called and the door was broken down.  Rimma told Mailer she never entered the room but was told by security that Oswald was in the bathroom and had cut his wrist.    Agafonova said that Rimma came running down to the lobby and told her what had happened.  “I called an ambulance,” Agafonova stated.  “They asked what year he was born in.  I said, ‘He’s bleeding to death, there is no time to look up his date of birth.”

    Agafonova says they took him away at about 3:30 p.m.  She could not see whether Oswald was conscious.   According to the KGB report, Oswald was found on the floor with his arm in a bathtub filled with warm water.  Shirakova told Mailer that Oswald’s clothes appeared dry when he was taken out of the hotel.  She accompanied Oswald to the hospital and remained with him late into the night.

[above]  Views of the Botkin Hospital Gates – Moscow 1992     

Found in Oswald’s room was a note which states, “I have made such a long journey to find death, but I love life.”  But from the medical reports, it appears that Oswald’s wound was superficial–approximately two inches in length.  It did not appear to be very deep either.  Oswald’s brief psychiatric evaluation (the second in his life — the first being the 1953 New York City Youth House evaluation) found no psychotic symptoms and concludes that he was of no danger to other people.  It is abundantely clear that Oswald’s “suicide attempt” was not a genuine attempt to kill himself.  Its purpose was to stall his departure from the USSR.  In that Oswald was successful.

[CE 895] includes official medical records released by the USSR to the Warren Commission.  Unfortunately, only US State Department traslantions are published in the Warren Hearings volumes. I have never seen the Russian language originals.

    As Oswald was a foreigner, he was kept hospitalized much longer than might have been necessary:  better safe than sorry, was the Soviet attitude.    
    The KGB in the meantime, searched his room and found nothing of interest to report other than a letter written in English, addressed to nobody in particular, requesting political asylum as a “Communist and Marxist” while Soviet authorities consider his request for citizenship.

Accompanied by Rimma Shirakova, Rosa Agafonova visited Oswald at the hospital. She was ordered to do so by the Berlin Hotel management and she brought some fresh fruit from the hotel for him.  She recalled in 1991 that he appeared pale but was sitting up on the edge of his bed.  His arm was bandaged and in a sling.  They joked lightly but never spoke of his “suicide attempt” then or later.  His hotel room, she told me, was vacated of his things and assigned to somebody else.

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PART 3-A  Military-Intelligence Functions of the Toronto Police  During the U.S. Civil War Era and the Fenian Threat 

NEW 2011 PUBLISHED AS Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada Penguin-Allen Lane, 2011
                See www.ridgewaybattle.ca for further information.  
[ abridged version pending publication in print and completion of doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto 2009-2010 ]

This is a shortened version of a previously larger website on the subject of the military intelligence functions of the Toronto Police during the American Civil War era and during the Fenian Threat on the eve of Canada Confederation.  (1858-1866)

Some of the previously available material on this web page is temporarily unavailable as it currently being revised into Terror and Border Security in Canada West during the Civil War Era and the Fenian Threat, my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto history department, as well as into a book from Penguin tentatively entitled, 1866 Ridgeway:  The Fenian Threat and the Battle That Made Canada and scheduled for publication in 2010.

The material removed from this website should become available again in the form of a journal article some time in the next eighteen months following May 2007.    
Click here for more information.

FENIAN CASUALTY AT ECCLES HILL NEAR THE QUEBEC – VERMONT BORDER – 1870 This was the third Fenian raid into Canada since 1866

Military Intelligence Functions of the Toronto Police During the American Civil War Era and the Fenian Threat

In June 1866, the Province of Canada (pre-Confederation Ontario and Quebec) was shaken by an event as cataclysmic to its sense of security  as 9/11 was recently to that of the United States.  A force of nine hundred well armed Irish American nationalists, all sworn to the Fenian cause, attacked Canada across the Niagara River near Buffalo at Fort Erie.  Their objective was to destabilize Britain’s rule in Ireland by sparking a military crisis in Canada.  Whether the Fenian plan was entirely mad or perfectly plausible remains a question still debated by historians today. 

The invasion across the Niagara River climaxed with the deaths of seven inexperienced Canadian militia soldiers—boys actually—four were University of Toronto students called out by church bells the previous morning to go and die at a hamlet near Fort Erie called Ridgeway.  The volunteer soldiers, ordered in the heat of battle to form into a densely packed square by a panicked command to stand ready for a cavalry charge that would never come, made a perfect target for the expert volleys of concentrated musket fire unleashed by the Fenian riflemen.  Many of the Fenians were recently demobilized battle-hardened Civil War veterans who had purchased back from the US government their war-issue weapons at post-war surplus prices.  So disciplined was the Fenian fire that the Canadians thought they had come under fire from state-of-the-art Spencer seven-shot “repeater” rifles.  In reality the Fenians were armed with an assortment of single-shot muzzle or breech-loaders.  The subsequent retreat of the Canadians forces with their dead and wounded from the Battle of Ridgeway [see also] was a humiliating military defeat on home ground, and was to be celebrated by Irish patriots as their first victory over the British military since Fontenay in 1745 when an Irish Brigade with the French Army routed the Coldstream Guards.  While it is generally believed that the invaders would have been defeated by a reinforced and re-grouped Canadian counter-attack, in the end the invasion had been broken by the US authorities’ subsequent interruption of Fenian supply lines across the Niagara River and the arrests of Fenian reinforcements attempting to cross the river into Canada.

IDEALIZED IMAGE OF THE BATTLE OF RIDGEWAY In reality the sides never met in a line formation on an open field nor  did the all the Canadians wear red uniforms.  The Queen’s Own Rifles wore green tunics while the Hamilton 13th Battalion was clad in the tradition scarlet red. The Fenians wore an assortment of uniforms ranging from US Civil War Union and Confederate tunics, green tunics with brass “IRA” buttons and civilian dress with green Fenian scarves .

The attack, when it happened was a surprise, but it should not have been.  In the years prior to the invasion there had been a gathering fear in Canada of a Fenian assault from the United States aided by a possible insurrection of local Irish Catholic nationalists residing in Canada.  This was further compounded by a fear of the United States itself brought to a crisis point by the unfolding Civil War in 1861-1865.  As there were mutterings from Union politicians about “compensating” for the possible loss of territory to the Confederacy by the seizure of territory from Canada, Britain began to urgently ship troops to Canada.  Blockade and high-sea naval incidents raised the tension further as the Confederacy attempted to develop lines of trade and relations with Britain.   Making matters worse, Confederate guerrillas launched a raid from Canadian territory into Vermont and escaped back to the safety of Canada.  The fear of invasion by US forces was dramatically palpable in the wake of all those incidents.

The city of Toronto lay in the immediate vicinity of the US border directly in the path of a possible invasion.  Buffalo was the most likely site for the mustering of US forces for a ground attack into southern Ontario—and in 1866 it would serve precisely that function for the Fenians.  Wagons, boats, food, weapons, supplies, and billeting for thousands of Fenians arriving in waves from as far as Tennessee were all concentrated at Buffalo and supported by the city’s native population of Irish Catholics.   

By the 1860s Toronto also had a large Irish Catholic population of its own with a substantial faction of vocal nationalist activists, Fenian supporters, and even secret card-carrying Fenians, all calling for the independence of Ireland.  Long-standing local Irish Catholic and Protestant sectarian tensions in Toronto were caught up in this growing threat of a Fenian invasion.  In Toronto, the Fenians penetrated the executive of the militant but well-connected and legal Hibernian Benevolent Society, the Irish Catholic response to the Protestant Orange Order.   The question was, how many Irish Canadians would take up arms in aid of the Fenian invasion if it came?  That issue fell squarely into the jurisdiction of the Toronto Police under Chief Constable William S. Prince.    

The Chief of Police played an active, and sometimes leading role in assessing and confronting the gathering threat of the Fenians over the years prior to the invasion, not only inside the city of Toronto, but also in areas as near or distant as Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago and New York City.  The reach of the Toronto Police intelligence gathering efforts extended beyond the perimeters of the city.  This paper describes how Chief Prince collected intelligence reports from contacts, spies and informants on weapons purchases in Buffalo, on Fenian meetings in Detroit and Chicago, and even on the leisure activities of Irish servant girls in New York City.

The Green Above the Red Engraver: McNevin, John, active ca. 1856-1867. Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana at the National Archives of Canada [graphic material, cartographic material] (R9266-0-1-E)

While the Toronto Police reached far and wide in its attempt to assess the Fenian threat and recruit agents, it was also prepared to respond militarily to the kind of mass threats it gathered intelligence about.  This paper explores the military functions of the Toronto Police parallel to its intelligence gathering function.  The article looks at the diplomatic, political and peacekeeping functions of the Chief of Police in those times and how he directed police power from that office during times of crisis.

Historians have so far overlooked the military intelligence functions of the Toronto Police.  Many historians currently claim that the police directly progressed from a bumbling corrupt parish-like constabulary of the first half of the 19^th century to a reformed “agency of social and class control” in the second half of the century.  According to this historiography, before becoming “crime fighters” in the 20^th century, the reformed Toronto Police was primarily occupied with prosecuting drunks and prostitutes, and later, breaking industrial strikes.  Gene Homel, for example, portrays the late 19th century Toronto Police as focusing almost all its efforts on the suppression of the more unruly aspects of popular working class culture: prohibiting bonfires, restraining weekend revels, preventing ballgames in the street, banning firecrackers, and curbing the activities of ‘mischievous urchins’ who sought to soil the crinoline dresses of respectable ladies on national holidays.  Similarly Nicholas Rogers writes:  

Whereas the early force had served as an intermittent check on lawlessness and was constrained by its size, by its links with the community and by the easy-going, indulgent attitude of the authorities, the mid-century police were called on to discipline in new ways.  It became a coercive agency of moral reform, the task force for the new respectability.  To be sure, the dominant forces in Victorian Toronto could not always agree on the form police reform should take.  But they were always unanimous about the force’s function as a vanguard of ‘improvement,’ active in the campaign against ruffianism, drunkenness, and immorality.

Another historian of the Toronto Police, Helen Boritch, echoes Rogers, “In Canada, as elsewhere, the preeminent focus of urban police forces centered on regulation of working-class recreations, morality and lifestyles which violated conventional middle-class notions of respectability and urban order.”  Boritch however, takes it a step further.  In discussing the Toronto Procession Riots of 1875, she asserts that the disorders “made police authorities aware of the force’s inadequacies in suppressing collective disorder.  As a result, an important consequence of the riots was the inception of intensive weekly training sessions in ‘street skirmish drills.’”

This article argues the exact opposite.  The Procession Riots of 1875 were memorialized in Toronto Police literature precisely for their success in suppressing the last of the violent mass clashes between Protestant and Catholic extremists in Toronto without resorting to the tremendous force available to the police.   In the Toronto Police ethos, these riots represent a disciplined withholding of a formidable firepower by the police—firepower that by 1875 it had already long possessed and was well trained to use.  The relationship between force and collective disorder had been addressed in Toronto Police training fifteen years earlier and tightly incorporated into its training and esprit de corps.   The Procession Riots for the Toronto Police were a symbol of its success in overcoming the mobs with professional restraint and not at all representative of  “the force’s inadequacies in suppressing collective disorder,” as Boritch suggests.    A Toronto Police departmental history recalls:

Revolver shots were fired by the mob with startling frequency, while stones and other missiles fell among the Police and processionists like hail.  Many were seriously injured; and although fully armed not a single man so far forgot himself as to return the fire, but throughout all behaved with remarkable coolness and with a degree of forbearance that was certainly very creditable.

The “class control” model of police history forces a link with a supposed arming and militarization of the police with a response to the rise of widespread labour activism in Toronto in the 1870s.  As Boritch attests, “Police expansion, organizational innovations and technological advances in policing during the late nineteenth century were predominately a result of the increasing role of the police in strikebreaking activities.” 

The problem here is that the history of the Toronto Police in the decade immediately following it reform in 1859 is a ‘dark age’ for its historians. This is a critical period that falls between the pre-industrial brawling drunken frontier Toronto under a “parish watch” police and the Victorian ‘Toronto the Good’ of the latter part of the century under a professional constabulary deployed for moral reform.  This article argues that after the reform in 1859, the former parish-like Toronto Police were doing much more than just curbing ‘mischievous urchins’ seeking to soil crinoline dresses of respectable ladies.  The 1860s unfolded long before the moral reformers pressed Toronto Police constables into their roles as “urban missionaries.”  This was an era more dangerous and militant then current historians of the Toronto Police acknowledge.  This article endeavors to describe precisely the threats confronted by the Toronto Police in those times, how they were perceived, assessed and responded to, and what role Chief Prince played in setting police objectives, priorities and training.  The security and intelligence function of the Toronto Police and its early military training to deal with mass disorder are for the first time described here, as are some of the diplomatic peacekeeping functions undertaken by the Chief.

This article concludes that the threat in Prince’s estimation at the beginning of the disorders of the 1860s was not the Hibernians, Fenians, or even the Irish Catholics.  Prince estimated the more pressing threat to come from entirely opposite quarters—those parallel to the police—the local Volunteer Militia—significantly in a time when the United States was becoming mired in a bloody Civil War of it own.  While that perception would be a source of political strife with Toronto City Council for Prince, it will also be the key, at least during one crisis, to a successful diplomatic defusing of a situation dangerously close to exploding in violence in Toronto.                            

It has been said that the Fenian raids into Canada are one of the points where Irish, American and Canadian history meet.  Indeed there is a historical synchronicity to the 1858 St. Patrick’s Day killing in Toronto of a Catholic by the name Matthew Sheedy and to the founding on the same day in Dublin of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the American branch of which would become known as the Fenians…  [further material withheld pending publication]

NEW 2011 PUBLISHED AS Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada Penguin-Allen Lane, 2011
                See www.ridgewaybattle.ca for further information.

May 2007  

[abridged version pending publication] Regretfully the remainder of this article is temporarily unavailable as it currently being incorporated into my forthcoming doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto, Terror and Border Security in Canada West during the Civil War Era and the Fenian Threat, as well in a book from Penguin tentatively entitled, 1866 Ridgeway:  The Fenian Threat and the Battle That Made Canada and scheduled for publication in 2009.

The currently withdrawn material should become available again in the form of a journal article some time in the next eighteen months following May 2007.  
Visit here for updates on availability and publication schedule.    
Click here for more information.                     

NOMINAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ROLL OF THE TORONTO POLICE FORCE 
ON THE 31st December, 1860

COMMISSION OF POLICE

Adam Wilson, Esquire, Mayor        George Duggan, Esquire, Recorder     George Gurnett, Esquire, Police Magistrate

CHIEF CONSTABLE

William Stratton Prince, Esquire, Late Captain 71st Highland Light Infantry

DEPUTY CHIEF CONSTABLE

Fredrick Robinson, Esquire, late Australian Police Forces

OFFICERS AND CONSTABLES

 PREVIOUS PAGE                         NEXT PAGE:  TORONTO POLICE 1875-1920                              NEXT PAGE

 5.  THE FALL OF MONTSEGUR –  MARCH 1244 

On March 1, 1244, Pierre-Roger Mirepoix emerged from the fortress and negotiated a fifteen day truce at the end of which Montsegur was to be surrendered.  The Catholic troops gave the Cathar forces generous terms.  The mercenaries would be allowed to leave with their arms.  Any Cathars who abjured their heresy, would be forgiven. Lords and ladies, knights, soldiers, craftsmen, servants, would be allowed to depart after being deposed by the Inquisition and abjuring Cathar beliefs.

Most of the Cathar perfecti declined the offer, and twenty-six mercenaries, knights, soldiers and followers actually asked for consolamentum on March 13th–the spring equinox.  This would guaranteed their death at the end of the truce.

At some point, either during the truce or before, or perhaps at two separate occasions,  two or four Cathars snuck out of the fortress and descended down the steep northern-eastern slope, carrying with them some sort of valuable objects.  Because many of the French Catholic troops were locals of dubious loyalty pressed into service, the Cathars found it easy to slip through the enemy lines.  Their fate and destination is now a subject of myth and legend.  It is, however, generally believed that the cache consisting of monetary valuables–the Cathar Church treasure and that it was smuggled from Montsegur and made its way to Cathar bishops in Italy where it was used to sustain the church there.  Treasure hunters, nonetheless, continue today to rummage and dig around the vicinity of Montsegur for this lost cache.

On the morning of March 16, between 205 and 225 Cathars marched down the southern slopes of the pog and positioned themselves on a mass execution pyre of wood and logs prepared earlier at the foot of the hill.  Either they climbed ladders to the top of the bier or entered into an enclosure and were tied to stakes positioned in the wood.  After the saying of prayers the pyre was set on fire.

Approximately sixty of these individuals have been idenitified by historians and researchers.

Montsegur was destroyed in its entirety and no trace of the Cathar fortress built by Raymond de Pereille survived.   The ruins of the terraced Cathar habitations, however, can still be seen today.  [Click to Part I for more details on the current ruin and its relationship to the Cathar epoch.]

 6. THE AFTERMATH:  MYTH AND LEGEND  

On July 1245, the new seigneur of Montsegur, Guy I des Levis, took his oath to the King of France.  The Levis would rebuild the fortress that today stands at the peak in the traditional style of French Royal military architecture.  A small village named Montsegur  was established further down the slopes where it still is located today.  A village church was built around 1620.  The fortress itself underwent extensive renovation, expansion and restoration as it was actively garrisoned by France well into the 16th century against possible Spanish incursions.  In 1757 it was still in the possession of the Levis family.  The fortress fell into disuse and ruin in the late 18th century.

During the 20th century, Montsegur became the focus of various occult and Gnostic revival cults.  In 1909 the French neo-Gnostic patriarch Synesius (Fabre des Essarts) took as his title “Bishop of Paris and Montsegur.”

Because of its Grail myths, Montsegur became the focus of Nazi archeological expeditions by the Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage Society”) — a criminal agency of Heinrich Himmler’s notorious SS dedicated to identifying  past Aryan links with modern Germany through archeology and anthropology.  It was the Ahnenerbe which collected skeletons and skulls of concentration camp prisoners specially selected and carefully killed as specimens.  

Montsegur was brought to the attention of the Nazi’s by Otto Rahn who explored the ruins of Montsegur in 1929 and went on to write two popular Grail novels linking Montsegur and Cathars with the Holy Grail:  Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (“Crusade Against the Grail”) in 1933 and Luzifers Hofgesinf (“Lucifer’s Court”) in 1937.    In 1936 Rahn joined the Ahnenerbe with a junior NCO’s rank in the SS.  After supposed disciplinary problems he was assigned to a tour of duty at the Dachau concentration camp in 1937–a training depot and punishment center for SS men at the time.    On the13 March 1939 — almost on the anniversary of the fall of Montsegur–Otto Rahn mysteriously died in the snow on the Tyrolean mountains.  His death is believed to be a suicide.

On March 16, 1944, on the 700th anniversary of the fall of Montsegur, Nazi planes are reported to have flown patterns over the ruins–either swastikas or celtic crosses, depending upon the sources. The Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg was reputed to be on board one of the airplanes.  None of these reports have been satisfactorily proven.

In 1947, the French government made some restorations of the fortress walls.  Between 1964 – 1976 an extensive archeological dig was conducted at Montsegur and its vicinity.  Many of the artifacts recovered can be seen today in the village museum.

The mythology of Montsegur reached a new peak during the 1980’s with the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, a best-seller that linked the reported missing treasure of Montsegur with mysterious events in the nearby village of Renne-le-Chateau.   It is the authors’ intriguingly original assertion that the contents of the Cathar treasure were in fact genealogies of Jesus Christ’s surviving family which were looted by the Romans in 71 AD from the Temple of Jerusalem.  According to the authors, The Visigoths in turn captured this hoard when they sacked Rome in 410 AD and brought it with them to the Languedoc region of France where they eventually established their community.   The Visigoths, who practiced an Arian heretical Christianity, and did indeed settle in the region, eventually interbred with the local populace, infusing them with a propensity for heretical faiths and the key to Jesus Christ’s ancestry, the authors suggest.  This genealogy is what the authors allege was smuggled from Montsegur in 1244 and hidden in the village of Rennes-le-Chateau until its discovery in the late 19th century by a local priest who subsequently became fabulously rich for it (by blackmailing the Vatican) and rebuilt the local church in a bizarre manner–still standing today for all to see.  (The village church of Rennes-le-Chateau is indeed decorated in a most peculiar and untraditional manner.)   

Copyright © Peter Vronsky, 2002-2015   www.petervronsky.org

On December 2, 1919, on the same day that Canadian theater tycoon Ambrose Small received a check for one million dollars, he vanished in the streets of downtown Toronto, leaving his money behind safely deposited in a nearby bank.

Small’s bizarre disappearance captured the imagination of the press worldwide and was for the longest time dubbed  “Crime of the Century.” Headlines in London, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago announced that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was to consult the investigation. Frustrated Toronto Police hired clairvoyants in their desperation. A $50,000 reward was offered for information about Small’s disappearance, an extraordinary sum in those days. No trace of the vanished millionaire was ever found.

In Canada the mystery continued to capture headlines for years, culminating with an extraordinary Ontario Attorney-General’s Special Inquiry in 1936, sixteen years after the disappearance.

Although the case was officially closed in 1960, police were still receiving and investigating letters purporting to disclose Ambrose Small’s burial location forty-five years later.  As late 1965, Toronto Police detectives inspected a possible grave site in Rosedale Valley.

By 1970, the story was reaching mythical proportions: the ghost of Ambrose Small was reported haunting one of his former properties, the Grand Theater in London, Ontario and is credited to have saved the theatre’s most prominent architectural feature from unintentional demolition. The disappearance was still a big enough story in 1974, for the Toronto Sun tabloid to print a series of six full-page accounts of the case.

More recently the story of Ambrose Small’s disappearance has resurfaced several times in literary form, including Michael Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of the Lion, and in Fred McClement’s The Strange Case of Ambrose Small, which forms the basis of Sleeping Dogs Lie – a 1999 Sullivan Productions made-for-TV movie.

The Ambrose Small mystery has remained unsolved–at least until now!

Small’s wife, Theresa, whom Ambrose married after making his first fortune, was a Toronto socialite from the wealthy Kormann family. She was well educated, spoke several languages and was a formidable businesswoman in her own right. Described as a “paragon of virtue,” she was a devout Roman Catholic passionately involved in raising funds for Catholic charities. Her funeral in 1935 was one of the largest in Ontario’s history at the time, attended by Members of Parliament and of the Provincial Legislature, among other dignitaries and high officials of the church. Throughout her life, Theresa was a relentless donor to the church and willed her entire fortune to it. But she was also the silent but significant financial partner in her husband’s shady dealings, unabashedly and shrewdly enjoying their profits. The fact that Theresa was Catholic but Ambrose a Protestant, did not stand in the way of their marriage.  It only became an immense issue–if not the only one–after his disappearance. The fortune that Theresa inherited from her husband, and which she promised to will to the Catholic Church, became a subject of a fifteen year public controversy and legal struggle in sectarian Ontario. Toronto was essentially a Protestant city, with public office, government posts, awards and contracts dominated by the ultra-Protestant and militant Orange Order. With the Order’s backing, numerous attempts were made through the courts and public opinion, to prevent Theresa from inheriting her vanished husband’s estate. The issues were often shrill with mobs descending on the courthouse demanding that Theresa be investigated in her husband’s disappearance. An underground tabloid newspaper was founded, The Thunderer, which featured hard core pornographic photographs of models resembling Theresa, posed in sexual acts with supposed priests and nuns.

In the end, the courts ruled that Theresa Small’s reputation was beyond question and she successfully inherited and willed her estate to the Catholic Church. But even after her death in 1935, the issue of a possible role in her husband’s disappearance sixteen years earlier was so intense, that the Ontario Attorney General held an extraordinary Special Inquiry into the fate of Ambrose Small. At its conclusion, the Inquiry publicly declared that Theresa Small was not linked in any manner to the disappearance, and historians since have written that both lead investigators from Toronto Police and Ontario Provincial Police, were unanimous in their conclusions that Theresa had nothing to do with the crime. The official report made no reference to a secret memorandum which so profoundly contradicts the Attorney General’s final public pronouncement.

The Disappearance of Ambrose Small: Canada’s Coldest Case Closed will reveal for the first time to the public, an inside story of the case as left behind in a report by it’s lead provincial police investigator.  

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Announcements

With apologies, essays submitted on time in lecture are still not ready as was promised to be returned at the exam.  I am entirely at fault but the quality of the work was so high, it was thought better to give each essay the attention it deserves.  ESSAY MARKS WILL BE POSTED OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS BEFORE DEC 21, IDENTIFIED BY THE LAST FOUR DIGITS OF YOUR STUDENT NUMBER, BEGINNING FIRST WITH THE ESSAYS SUBMITTED ON THE DUE DATE IN LECTURE AND INDICATING THE SECTION NUMBER.

 The final exam will be reviewed this week in the Tues lecture for Section 1 and the Wed lecture for Section 2. 

I will not respond to subsequent e-mailed inquiries regarding the nature, structure, requirements and content of the final exam.  Refer to this course website and your lecture notes for information on the final exam.   Final Exam Info

A Final Exam Discussion group is now available on Blackboard for students to consult each other on exam issues if they missed the final lecture – exam review.

Previous Announcements

Final exam information has been posted above.  Additional information will be posted in the near future.

  Final exam will be reviewed in the last lecture day of the semester and no e-mailed inquiries on the final exam will be accepted after the final lecture.

Midterm Marks are being returned this week (Nov 9 & Nov 10.)  As per course outline, marks will be returned only in lecture or in office hours (see course outline for hours.)  I am not able to e-mail you the midterm mark.

Office hours – JOR501:
Tuesday 12:00-1:00PM;
Wednesday 2:00–3:00 PM;
 Friday 3:00-4:00PM

Essays Due This Week:

• Sec 1 – Tues in Lecture
  Sec 2 – Wed in Lecture

INDICATE YOUR SECTION NUMBER ON THE ESSAY COVER SHEET

Only those essays submitted on the due date in hard copy in lecture will be guaranteed a return by no later than the final examination day.

Essay schedule and requirements have been updated — see essay instructions and course outlines for details. Essay due date is now

(Sec 1 Nov 9 – Sec 2 Nov 10 in lecture)

Announcements

new

 Final Exam Wednesday  August 11 in Class

No late assignments will be accepted after the exam day.

Essays Due in Class
Wednesday August 4

Only those essays handed in class in hard copy stapled and page numbered in the required format, will be considered for return with comments and mark at the end of the final exam.  All other essay marks will only be released after the final mark is issued on August 24.

Introduction–Oswald in Minsk

Many people have characterized Minsk as a Soviet provincial backwater.  They are wrong.  Located halfway between Moscow and Warsaw, Minsk during Oswald’s time was the capital of the Belarus Republic with a population of a million people. Literally translated, Belarus means “White Russian” but that should not be confused with the Russian Civil War tsarist “White Russian” factions.  Belarussians are a unique people with their own language and a culture residing somewhere between the Poles, Balts, and the Russians.  Minsk was also the home of a substantially large Jewish community which suffered some of the worst Nazi holocaust excesses recorded during World War II.  After the war the Jewish population was rebuilt with refugees from different parts of Eastern Europe under Soviet control, thus Minsk developed a slightly more cosmopolitan edge to it than a typical Soviet city.

In 1960 Minsk would have been at the zenith of a massive postwar rebuilding campaign.  Eighty percent of the city was destroyed by the Nazis, and using mostly German POW slave labor, the Soviets effectively rebuilt the city between 1945-1955 before allowing the German prisoners to return home.  Housing in Minsk was more available and of better quality than in Moscow.  Minsk had been a major industrial center before the war, and many industries returned to the region in the postwar era.  The city was also the home for several important academic institutions, research centers and military, police and intelligence academies. (Even though the CIA reported there were no intelligence schools there.) 

I cannot say how Oswald felt about Minsk when he arrived. While Minsk nor Moscow in Oswald’s time were anything like they were in the 1990’s, I personally found Minsk a welcoming relief from Moscow with its ugly frowning crowds, dirt, noise, mercenary women, gangsters, chaos, bad food, bad air, bad manners, and generally bad attitude towards everything and anything.  While Minsk may not have had as many museums and clubs as Moscow, its crowds were relatively friendly and sane.  In Oswald’s time it must have been one of the more positive urban centers in the Soviet Union and that is precisely why the Soviet authorities sent him there.