I had written emphatically that I could never collect such evil stuff and wondered how anyone else could. I’d even gotten a few emails from readers who vilified me for that post – one of whom ranted that the Civil War was not about ending slavery. I have no idea how the Civil War and the Nazis are connected.

Then I got a much saner email from English, who’s been collecting Nazi, World War II and Holocaust items since he was 5 years old. “Google my name Darrell English to learn more about me and my work,” he wrote.

And so I did. One site told about a talk he had given at a community college, with photos of and text about his items. His local newspaper in North Adams, MA, wrote an article on him back in 2007. In several instances, he offered comments on stories about collecting World War II and Nazi stuff.

Nazi artifacts sold at auction last year included these medals.

Intrigued, I wanted a collector like him to explain to someone like me the whys of collecting Nazi artifacts. So I asked him to answer a few questions by email.

He told me that he has 10,000 items in his collection, not all of them Nazi-related, and he’s been collecting for 40 years. He gives talks on the Holocaust and other subjects, and brings along items from his collection.

He collects, English says, because he has to. Many of the WWII veterans are dying off and he wants to make sure the world does not forget what the Nazis were and did, he said.

“You have to show it for what it is,” he said. “We’re not all insane. We’re not Neo. We’re just historians.”

Here are the answers to the questions I sent him, along with answers from a follow-up telephone interview:

How long have you been collecting Nazi memorabilia and how did you get started?

Blame Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes,” English said. He recalled Wallace doing a show in the 1960s that included items from World War II. English found some Nazi coins in his mother’s sewing basket in the attic that her uncles had sent her as a girl from the war. Then he went around his neighborhood asking for similar stuff.

“It kind of took off from there,” he said. “It started innocuously. … We just clicked.”

What was your first purchase?

“The first item I bought it was a belt buckle. I think I paid $2 for it.”

Why do you collect Nazi paraphernalia? Why is it important to collect it?

“The Nazis were fascinating, macabre, sick, twisted,” he said. “They started out in a benign way of trying to be this great society. They were going to elevate man in all society to its greatest ethos. Along the way, they twisted things, they subverted things.”

“Fifty million people were violated. They did it in such a manner that it was all legal,” he added.

Nazi soldiers would roll into a town and the killing squads – made up of men with law and medical degrees – would round people up and kill them, English said. “How can you get into their minds and tell them it’s acceptable?” 

He considered the Nazis “the most fascinating study of human nature. How a society could … go to the darkest realm of the human mind and get people to go along and make it seem OK. I don’t think anyone has come to the point where they’ve understood the why.”

Hitler is “our psychological bogey man. He’ll haunt us forever.”

Nazi artifacts sold at auction last year.

What makes you a different collector, one who’s not mesmerized by the Nazis?

“Some people are transfixed the wrong way with the Nazi stuff. I’m not what I collect. I’m not a Nazi. I’m just an average guy who collects. I’m confident with that.”

“I collect to save a part of time in human history most folk would rather see burned, and I say if you do that, then you are only aiding the naysayers who are out there waiting for time to do its work. Once anyone who can remember what took place between the years 1919-1945 to 1948 (have gone), then the ones who say it never happened will stand up and say show us proof.”

“… I’m a preserver of this history.”

How many items do you have in your collection? Where do you store them?

“About 10,000 items, not all of them are Nazi. I collect everything that deals with World War II, but the Nazi are my personal fav. They are a study in human nature – an odd bit of human history.”

English says he has 300+ uniforms that he keeps in his attic. Other items are in rooms in his home, including 300 to 400 books. He was told that a museum to hold his collection would need 40,000 square feet of space and would cost about $60 million to build, he said.

Where do you buy your items?

Yard sales, auctions, antique shops. Ten years ago, he said, he got a call from a man who was clearing out an estate. The man had letters from GIs pleading with Virginia de Luce, who appeared in movies and Broadway shows, to send them pin-up photos of her. She had kept hundreds of the letters. (De Luce later infiltrated the American Indian Movement as an informer for the FBI.)

What’s the value of your collection?

“I do not put a price based upon what others might. To me, each item … tells a story all its own.”

What items do you have in your collection? The most historic? The most horrific?

“Photos/posters/uniforms/and a whole lot more. The Zyklon-B can must be the most horrific, although the photos of a (concentration) camp inmate at the time of liberation is the most gripping and sad. There are four pictures of the naked skeleton (of a man) walking around the yard. He is bending into a barrel looking for food. His dead body on a pile of other dead bodies. The last 40 seconds of this person’s life taken by a GI at the time the camp was freed.”

English sent me the answer to this question in an email. I had never heard of Zyklon-B, so I Googled it and saw that it was gas that the Nazis used in the gas chambers to kill humans. When I interviewed him, I asked him about the can.

Zyklon-B, he explained, was crystallized blue-green cyanide pellets that turned to gas when exposed to air. His can is empty. An Army nurse picked it up at a concentration camp, and years later gave it to him. For about a dozen years, it was on exhibit with about 60 other artifacts at a Jewish community center’s museum in Springfield, MA, he said. The exhibit has now closed.

What types of response do you get from people when you first tell them you collect Nazi paraphernalia?

“Most people are glad that someone like me is doing what I do. I have only run into one so-called Neo. A sad case in itself. He was a WW2 re-enactor. I met him a dozen years ago at a small museum a few friend of mine ran for about three years in Vermont. A lunch at an event we had going on, he started to talk to me that the Holocaust never happened. I went to one of the guys in his unit and told him what he just told me. He was kicked out of the unit.”

The man, a German-soldier re-enactor, told English that he had photos of Olympic-sized swimming pools in the camps, of ovens for baking bread, he said. This is the type of mis-information he wants to dissipate, English said.  

This letter from a doctor-soldier recounts the horrific scene he saw during liberation of a concentration camp in Austria, near Salzburg, in 1945.

Where do you give your talks? How often?

He gives about 10 talks a year on the war at museums, schools, for organizations and more. He does a Holocaust presentation each year for a friend’s eight-grade class as part of a program in which the children participate. He brings his artifacts and is joined by a Holocaust survivor.

Do you collect other items?

He collects 18^th-century medical items from the Revolution, and anything dealing with the Free Masons “since I’m one,” he said. He also collects slave documents (he has a “Negro Passport” issued by the Confederate states), Ku Klux Klan memorabilia from the North (from places like York, PA) – “places people didn’t realize had Klan activity.”

He collects items starting from what he says was the official day World War I ended – 11/01/18 – to the day the second world war ended – Aug. 1-12, 1945. He has papers documenting both, he said.

His wife collects “home-front stuff” from WWII, including letters and jewelry, he said.

Tell me a little about yourself. What’s your background?

He’s loved history all his life, and it was his major in college. His father was an auctioneer, and so was he, though the field has gotten slow and he hasn’t done it in a couple years. He thinks he’ll collect for another 15 years and then call it quits.

Related posts:

1. A bad taste for Nazi memorabilia
2. A trial, a Nazi guard & a soldier’s letter
3. When museums have to sell art and artifacts

I know the name of Lincoln’s actual killer John Wilkes Booth. I’ve even read newspaper stories about Dr. Samuel Mudd who also was convicted of having a role in the assassination (and later pardoned by President Andrew Johnson). Mudd’s supporters have for years tried to clear his name, to show that he was not one of the conspirators.

Mary Surratt, left, was hanged in the plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, right. A movie "The Conspirator" chronicles her trial.

But Mary Surratt? Where did she come from?

Redford’s movie was as educational as it was engaging, its aura as dark as the period in history that it portrayed. It told the story of a Maryland-born woman living in Washington who sympathized with the Confederates in the Civil War. Maryland was considered a Union state but had plenty of people who sided with the South and its bull-headed adherence to slavery.

Her son John was a Confederate spy who lived at his mother’s boarding house along with some of the others convicted in the conspiracy. Booth visited there often, and some believe this is where they all plotted to initially kidnap the president and exchange him for the release of Confederate prisoners. That plan did not pan out, however.

The assassination occurred at the tail end of the war, around the same time that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, VA, and the South had lost the fight. Strict loyalty to the Union was very important and disloyalty was suspect.

What Surratt knew about the plot and whether she received a fair trial are at the crux of Redford’s movie. The movie raised the question of whether she was actually part of the conspiracy or just a devoted mother who turned a blind eye to her own son’s involvement. Redford painted the federal government as a crazed vigilante in its efforts to convict “someone” for the murder. The triggerman Booth had already been killed, so Surratt and the others had to share the blame and punishment of death.

Surratt’s defense attorney John Aiken, who had served in the Union army, was not initially keen on defending her because he thought she was guilty. He soon determined that her guilt or innocence was not as important as the notion that everyone by law was entitled to a fair trial before a jury of their peers – even in the midst of war.

Surratt was the first woman executed in the United States, by hanging, according to wikipedia. Once I read that, I was certain that I must have come across her name before but just didn’t remember it. With this new movie, Redford may have helped make her place in history a little less unknown.

It was a fascinating movie, coming amid the country’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the war in 1861. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more stories that bring this period of history to life – and remind us of other people like Mary Surratt.

Related posts:

1. Mystery of a Virginia poem

What I saw were trees and bushes in a low valley, green vegetation on a nice summer day. I was on the turnpike with my friend Yvonne (who writes the Soul Rhythms blog) to pick up her daughter and all her ”stuff” from college. (It’s amazing how much college students buy and accumulate these days; all I remember is a black metal trunk and a few sturdy blue suitcases.)

When Yvonne asked if I’d like to take the trip, I jumped at the chance because I just love road trips. It’s all about seeing this vast country, trying something new, being adventurous – because you never know what you’ll find or come across (just like auctions). Photo above is by drquuxum.

I’d never been past Pittsburgh and had never taken a drive in a car through western Pennsylvania, so I Googled to see what was interesting along the way. You can imagine my surprise when I came upon “Negro Hill Tunnel” and “Negro Mountain.”

I just had to know what that was all about. It wasn’t a find in an auction, but it was a “find” nevertheless.

The mountain is part of the Allegheny Mountain range and runs 30 miles from Garrett County, Md., to Somerset County, Pa. Its highest point is Mount Davis in Pennsylvania. The mountain appeared to be more Maryland than Pennsylvania: That state has erected a highway sign and a road-side marker on National Road (US Alternate 40) near Grantsville. Yvonne recalled seeing a sign when she’d taken the trip through northern Maryland to Ohio.

There was not a marker or a sign in Pennsylvania indicating we were on Negro Mountain, so I was watching diligently for the mile post.

The history of the tunnel is intertwined with the history of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In the late 1800s, the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad were in a tug of war over territory (as in routes). So William H. Vanderbilt of New York Central struck first, deciding to build a railroad between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh in the heart of PA Railroad country. By 1885, he and his investors had spent millions of dollars laying tracks over 209 miles and carving six tunnels into the Allegheny Mountains. J.P.Morgan, after becoming a member of the New York Central board, said enough of this bickering. The project was stopped, and it became known as “Vanderbilt’s folly.”

 Negro Mountain Tunnel – or Negro Hill Tunnel, as it is also called – was one of those tunnels (there were supposed to be nine). When the Pennsylvania Turnpike was proposed in the 1930s, the tunnel was among those bypassed by the state.

How did the mountain get its name? I found various versions of its origin – most of which apparently are legends – and wikipedia offered four of them. It said that the most popular (supported by newspaper accounts) was of a black slave or scout named “Nemisis.” He joined Col. Thomas Cresap in 1756 when he led a team to the mountain to fight Native Americans during the French and Indian War. Nemisis was killed in battle and the mountain was named to honor him.

There have been challenges to the name Negro Mountain. Albert Feldstein, an amateur historian in western Maryland, has several articles about it on the Western Maryland’s Historical Library website. In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Rosita C. Youngblood introduced a resolution in 2007 (and it looks like she proposed re-introducing it last year) to create a commission to study a name change of either the mountain or Mount Davis to honor Nemisis (or Nemesis, as I also found it spelled). Mount Davis is named after the settler who owned the land.

On our drive back through western Pennsylvania, I took out my camera to at least record what I saw at milepost 116.7 on the south side. Basically, the same thing as the north side – except for a hill with what looked like a little building on it.  The website Pennsylvania Turnpike Tunnels says the tunnel is on the north side of the roadway, located under an old coal mine, and that parts of it are in the original condition. Another site said it was also north of the turnpike with an opening about 400 feet into the woods. 

Here’s a photo from the Pennsylvania Turnpike Exit List website of what it looks like.

Related posts:

1. On a search for ‘Negro Motorist Green Book’
2. Negro Leagues pitcher Terris McDuffie
3. Poster for a Negro Leagues baseball game

I was delighted to find a book and pamphlet published by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first black Greek-letter sorority founded in 1908 at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The AKAs celebrated their 100^th anniversary in 2008 with a huge convention/boule in the city. And Mattel even came out with a special AKA Barbie doll to commemorate the centennial.

I’m not an AKA (I pledged Sigma Gamma Rho in college and never got around to joining a graduate chapter). But I’m pleased with the good work that all four black sororities – including Delta Sigma Theta and Zeta Phi Beta – do through their community projects. As I perused the AKA book, it seemed that they’d been doing good the first 50 years, too. One chapter in the book focused on a health project begun in the 1930s that grew out of a project to upgrade the standards of rural teachers.

The auction book, a first edition from 1958, is a history of the organization by educator Marjorie H. Parker called “Alpha Kappa Alpha 1908-1958.” Parker went on to write four more editions of the book, the latest in 1999. Parker died in 2006. (Her photo at right is from the AKA website.)

Parker had been commissioned by the AKAs in December 1956 to write the history. She was an associate professor of education at the District of Columbia Teachers College and a visiting lecturer in history and philosophy at Howard. In August 1958, she became basileus/president of the sorority when the 50^th anniversary convention was held in Washington.

The book included all the boules, officers and chapters of the sorority.

The book was published by the sorority itself. It still had its pink dust jacket with the green ivy leaf (there were some tears at the top). The hardcover had some marks on the front and back, and the book itself was slightly warped. The owner had written her name on the outside edges of the pages: Ivy Barbara Inez McCray. She wrote on the pamphlet that was a member of the Zeta chapter.

The 24-page pamphlet appeared to be part of a Negro Heritage Series. This one was “Negro Women in the Judiciary,” produced by the AKAs in 1968. According to the introduction, this was the “first in a series of publications on the Negro heritage of individual achievement against great odds.” The pamphlets were distributed in schools and organizations as stories of inspiration.

Profiled were 10 black female judges, including Juanita Kidd Stout (Pennsylvania Supreme Court), the first black woman elected judge in the United States, and Constance Baker Motley (New York), a federal court judge who initially made her mark as a civil rights attorney in Brown v. Board of Education.

This was a good find, especially since a lot of our history has been lost or wasn’t written.

Also, read about Bernice Greene, one of the earliest members of the AKAs who was profiled as one of our Mighty Black Women.

Related posts:

1. The colors of black sororities
2. Patterson-Greenfield in early car history book
3. A dream book of lottery numbers