30313: Simidor (FYI): Haitian Holocaust Survivor Johnny Nicholas (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <danielsimidor@yahoo.com>

Who is Johnny Nicholas?

Born in 1918, Jean Marcel “Johnny” Nicholas was a
young Haitian dilettante and member of the French
Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris.   He
spent the last year of his life at the Dora
concentration camp in Germany, where Wernher von Braun
and Arthur Rudolph were developing the Third Reich's
V2 rocket.  Nicholas survived Camp Dora and the war by
working as a doctor, or rather as an assistant to Dr.
Karl Kahr at the camp infirmary, but he died shortly
thereafter of tuberculosis.  His story is told in
Clarence Lusane’s “Hitler’s African Victims: The
Historical Experience of Afro-Germans, European
Blacks, Africans and African Americans in the Nazi
Era,” (Routledge, 2003).  There is also a website,
johnnynicholas.com, with interesting details about his
Haitian upbringing and his lifestyle in Paris.  What
follows is excerpted from a 2001 article, “Blast Off!
How Nazis, Rockets, and Disney Gave Birth to Seattle's
Pointiest Landmark,” by Charles Mudede in The Stranger
newspaper.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=8385

“Billions and billions of years after our universe was
created by the big bang, a black man from Haiti
entered hell. The year was 1943, and the place was
Camp Dora, which was near the city of Nordhausen in
the heart of Nazi Germany. There and then, hell for
Johnny Nicholas, and thousands of slaves from all over
Europe (Russians, Poles, Gypsies, members of the
French Resistance, Jewish children) was an underground
factory called Mittelwerk, which manufactured Hitler's
"wonder weapon," the V2 rocket.   How did Johnny
Nicholas end up in this hell? It all began in
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he was born into a
prosperous and well-connected family. During these
early years, Johnny Nicholas spent much of his time
dreaming about the American way of life. He learned
English from the British, and American gestures and
accents from the U.S. Marine Corps stationed in Haiti,
and told everyone he met that he was an American. So
obsessed was he with America that he changed his name
from Jean Marcel Nicholas to the all-American Johnny
Nicholas.

“After getting in trouble with the law in his teens,
Johnny Nicholas fled to France where, as J. Carl
Ganter writes in his short Black History Month article
for MSNBC, "Forgotten Black WWII Chameleon," Nicholas
reinvented his identity as an American. He was rich, a
big-time gambler, a charming playboy who had film
stars for friends and a luxurious apartment near the
Eiffel Tower. Even after the Nazis marched into France
in June 1940, handsome and athletic Johnny managed to
live on in comfort as the rest of Paris suffered. He
owned a big car, had lots of cash to spend, and held a
German pass that permitted him to drive around the
city after curfew hours. He also reinvented himself as
a gynecologist, and displayed a fake medical degree
from some Boston university in his office.

“Johnny, who rescued downed American and French pilots
in his spare time, might have breezed through the
nightmare that consumed Europe had he not been turned
in to the Gestapo by a heartbroken lover named
Florence. He was then promptly sent to Camp Dora,
where he was registered as Dr. Johnny Nicholas, a
medical doctor and a captured American fighter pilot.
"Like so many of those who were in the prison camp,"
explained Huge Wray McCann, author of In Search of
Johnny Nicholas, "he had to use his wits to survive.
If you couldn't tell a good story then you didn't
stand a chance in the camps. And that is what Johnny
did so well; he was a charmer who could tell a great
story."
“Despite his lack of any real qualifications, Johnny
became something of a hero in Camp Dora, where he
prolonged the lives of his fellow prisoners with
improvised medical services. "He prescribed drugs,
sutured wounds, performed surgery, set broken limbs in
casts improvised out of paper," J. Carl Ganter writes.
"He relieved skull fractures using carpenters' tools."
It was a "magnificent hoax" that kept hundreds of men,
women, and children from death at the darkest hours of
the war.

“While the 27-year-old Dr. Johnny Nicholas tended to
exhausted slaves, a 27-year-old rocket scientist named
Dr. Wernher von Braun worked hard to inflict more pain
and suffering on the slave population at Camp Dora.
The son of a baron and baroness, von Braun was the
leading scientist at Camp Dora and an influential
member of the SS. His fascination with rockets began
in his mid-teens, and by age 20 he had designed his
first weapon. His early rockets never flew, but his
enthusiasm so impressed Nazi generals that he was
hired to lead the military's rocket artillery unit. By
1944, von Braun was the main man at Mittelwerk,
ensconced in a comfortable office with a window that
looked out onto the courtyard where any slaves caught
attempting to sabotage his mad inventions were
tortured and hanged.

“Near the end of the war, Johnny Nicholas escaped
Mittelwerk and "hobbled 60 miles to the town of Lubz,
where troops from the U.S. 87th Cavalry Reconnaissance
Squadron evacuated him to a Paris hospital," according
to Ganter. Baron Wernher von Braun, on the other hand,
left Mittelwerk in the comfort of a passenger train,
for the welcoming arms of American "Counter
Intelligence." A month later, von Braun and 100 of his
Nazi scientists were in the United States of America,
where they were "deemed vital to national security" by
the U.S. War Department. Meanwhile, Jean Marcel
"Johnny" Nicholas, who had contracted tuberculosis
while in Camp Dora, was in a hospital spending the
last two months of his life composing a now-lost
manuscript about the dreadful underworld that was the
birthplace of the space age.

"’Everything that is now in space had its origins [at
Mittelwerk], not in America or Russia," said Rene
Steenbeke, a retired Belgian army officer who survived
Camp Dora. "This is where a new science started, but
it is also where science and death met’ (Reuters).
Indeed, 27,000 slaves died at Mittelwerk during the
war.”





____________________________________________________________________________________
We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love
(and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list.
http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265