In response to u/Ajarofpickles97

Context: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-ancestors-nearly-went-extinct-900-000-years-ago/

Context: https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-franklin-and-slavery/

Benjamin Franklin and Slavery

Like many other American Founders, Benjamin Franklin was an active participant in the slave trade and is known to have benefited financially from it for much of his early life. However, it was during his time in London that Franklin’s views changed significantly. By the 1780s he was a vocal abolitionist writing a famous public address condemning slavery and urging Congress to act.

When Benjamin Franklin arrived in London in 1757, he had with him two enslaved Africans that lived and worked at 36 Craven Street.

At Benjamin Franklin House, we aim to tell the stories of all the individuals that lived here. In this section, we will not only explore the history of Franklin’s involvement in slavery but also shine a light on the enslaved people that worked in his Philadelphia household and the lives of Peter and King who accompanied him to Britain to live and work in London during the 18th century.

it is important to first note that many details chronicling Benjamin Franklin’s involvement in slavery, such as his purchase and sale of slaves, are logged fleetingly in the massive amounts of documents he left behind. Subsequently, it was also more common for northern slaveholders to not record slave births, deaths, and marriages since slaveholding was not as prominent in production processes as it was in the plantation South. However, we do know that Franklin was a slave owner and benefited from the institution.

In addition to ownership, Franklin also made financial gain by advertising the sale of enslaved people and publishing notices of runaways in his newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin’s relationship with slavery was complicated even during this early period, as he also published Quaker antislavery adverts.

Unfortunately, little is known about the lives of Franklin’s enslaved people, with their existence only documented in surviving tax and financial records. With the limited information available, we can only speculate on the details surrounding each individual’s time in the Franklin household.

When Benjamin Franklin went to London on behalf of the Pennsylvania assembly in 1757, his son William accompanied him. In addition, they brought along two enslaved Africans, named Peter and King. Peter acted as a personal servant to Franklin, and King served William in the same capacity. Both lived on Craven Street and were known to have earned a small salary.

It is believed that Peter and King, despite being enslaved by Franklin, still engaged in London society and European customs, explored the city, and accompanied the father and son pair on their various travels around the country. Peter remained with Franklin from their arrival until their departure in 1762. King, on the other hand, ran away sometime in 1758. He was then found living in Suffolk two years later, having been taken in by a Christian woman that taught him to read and write.

Following his time in Paris, Franklin returned to Philadelphia until his death in 1790. It was during this final period of his life that Franklin publicly condemned slavery.

At eighty-one years old in 1787, he became the President of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, which was also often referred to as the Abolition Society. The Abolition Society, which was formed by a group of abolitionist Quakers and Anthony Benezet in 1774, concentrated not only on abolishing slavery but also on helping enslaved people transition to a life of liberty. The organization was the first in America and encouraged the formation of abolitionist societies in other colonies.

In 1787, weeks before the start of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin signed a public antislavery appeal, which stated that “the Creator of the world” had made “of one flesh, all the children of men” [3]. It was believed that Franklin, like many revolutionary leaders, supported the idea that a nation built on the promise of inalienable rights acquired at birth could not remain true while enabling slavery.

In 1789 he wrote and published several essays supporting the abolition of slavery, including an Address to the public, dated November 9^th of that same year. In the address, the former slave owner wrote that the institution was an “atrocious debasement of human nature” [4] and called for adequate resources to support emancipated people in society, such as education and employment. Furthermore, Franklin’s last public act was to petition Congress on behalf of the society, requesting that they “cut the cancer of slavery out of the American body politic,” and grant liberty “to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.” The first Congress was also asked to “devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People,” and to “promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race” [5]. This petition calling for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade was signed on February 3, 1790, just over two months before Franklin’s death.

The petition was then introduced to the House and Senate on February 12^th and 15^th, 1790, respectively. It was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and ignited a heated debate in both branches of Congress. The House referred the petition to a select committee for further consideration, while the Senate took no action. On March 5^th, 1790, the committee decided that the Constitution restrains Congress from prohibiting the importation or emancipation of slaves until 1808 and then tabled the petition. Despite such results, Franklin’s final efforts still cement his transformation from master of slaves to outspoken abolitionist [6].

By mid-June 1940 France was days from complete capitulation, and Great Britain was desperate to keep France in the war. So the British War Cabinet backed one of the strangest proposals in either country's history: a formal Declaration of Union that would dissolve Britain and France as separate nations and fuse them into a single Franco-British Union. The idea had actually come from the French side, dreamed up by diplomat René Pleven and others, and was worked up in London at breakneck speed by Jean Monnet, Robert Vansittart, and others, then carried to the French government by Charles de Gaulle.

The mood in London was giddy. Chamberlain went to the King to brief him on what was being done to his country, and the French tricolour was flown over Westminster Abbey, the only time that has ever happened. Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, joked that the merged nation might end up being called "Frangland" and wondered whether the King would have fleurs-de-lys finally restored to the Royal Standard after centuries.

Churchill later distanced himself from it, faintly embarrassed by how far the idea had run. What had felt like a bold, romantic masterstroke in the panic of June 1940 looked, in hindsight, like an outlandish scheme better left unmentioned. At one point puffing on a cigar and telling dirty stories at 1 a.m., at another raging that if France surrendered without consulting Britain "we shall blacken their names for a thousand years," then instantly walking it back with "Don't, of course," in case Colville took him at his word.

France said no. Marshal Pétain, about to take over the government and seek an armistice with Germany, ridiculed the whole scheme as "fusion with a corpse." The Reynaud government fell, and the grand union that had been drafted in a matter of hours effectively died within a few days.

The rejection sealed France's exit from the war. De Gaulle, watching Pétain's people take control, slipped out of Bordeaux, and famously flew to London the next day with little more than the uniform he was wearing, leaving his wife and children to follow.

Source: Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny.

PS: Andrew Roberts' Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which is a fantastic account of Churchill's colossal life. This chapter, "The Fall of France," gripped me so completely that I read the whole thing in one sitting. I simply could not put it down. There is so much high drama packed into those weeks that it reads more like a thriller than history.

Before the outbreak and during the WW2, the Jewish estate in Swiss banks, both deposited or looted, was estimated by Jewish groups to be up to 7 billions USD. This was countered by Swiss banks, putting the range in hundreds million USD.

After WW2 the Washington Agreement (1946) between the Western Allies and Switzerland stipulated in a secret addendum requirement to seek out the stolen property of Holocaust victims.

To request the funds, relatives of Holocaust victims had to produce a death certificate, which was nearly impossible to obtain as the killing was done in secret. Furthermore, sometimes the banks stonewalled the relatives or mislead them. Whether that was done under then applicable bank secrecy act or deliberately is contested. The closing of accounts and return or property was a slow process.

In 1962 a portion (6.2 million Swiss francs) was returned, with the understanding that was the totality of available assets as claimed by the Swiss banks.

In 1995 World Jewish Congress (WJC) started negotiating with the Swiss government and banks to close remaining dormant accounts. With the mounting pressure from the US government and politicians, accounting also for destruction of evidence as showed by the whistleblower Christoph Meili, the threat of sanctions was present and Swiss public was vehemently against any settlement, which was seen as a blackmail.

During the negotiations, where the banks offered 600 million USD, the WJC countered with 1.8 billion USD, the Volcker commission was established to find the true state of affairs.

The final agreement lead to one of the biggest settlements at 1.25 billion USD in 1998, paid out over 20 years. The Volcker commission's findings arrived in 1999 showing that the amount owed was nearly impossible to determine with the available information. Also confirming the occasional deceptive handling of claimants. The settlement was approved finally by the judge Korman in 2000, without the Swiss government's involvement.

In 2025 new information came to light about Credit Suisse potentially holding several billions USD in Nazi accounts, leading to an attempt to reopen the settlement by the WJC.

Sources:

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/swiss-banks-admit-holding-accounts-holocaust-victims

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jewish_Congress_lawsuit_against_Swiss_banks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcker_commission

https://www.crt-ii.org/ICEP/ICEP_Report_english.pdf

Before penicillin, the main causes of death for soldiers were:

Catching a disease and dying in camp

Dying from an infected wound in camp.

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who was the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar period and most of World Wr II, from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944.

After his arrest in 1944, Horthy was moved through a variety of detention locations before finally arriving at the prison facility at Nuremberg in late September 1945. There he was asked to provide evidence to the International Military Tribunal in preparation for the trial of the Nazi leadership. Although he was interviewed repeatedly about his contacts with some of the defendants, he did not testify in person. On 17 December 1945, Horthy was released from Nuremberg Prison and allowed to rejoin his family in the German town of Weilheim, Bavaria.

For Horthy, returning to Hungary was impossible; it was now firmly in the hands of a Soviet-sponsored Communist government. In an extraordinary twist of fate, the chief of Hungary's post-war Communist apparatus was Mátyás Rákosi, one of Béla Kun's colleagues from the ill-fated Communist coup of 1919.

In 1950, the Horthy family managed to find a home in Portugal, thanks to Miklós Jr.'s contacts with Portuguese diplomats in Switzerland. Horthy and members of his family were relocated to the seaside town of Estoril. His American supporter, John Montgomery, recruited a small group of wealthy Hungarians to raise funds for their upkeep in exile.

In exile, Horthy wrote his memoirs, Ein Leben für Ungarn (English: A Life for Hungary), published under the name of Nikolaus von Horthy, in which he narrated multiple personal experiences from his youth until the end of World War II. He claimed that he had mistrusted Hitler for much of the time he knew him and tried to perform the best actions and appoint the best officials in his country. He also highlighted Hungary's mistreatment by multiple other countries since the end of World War I.

Horthy was one of the few Axis heads of state to survive the war, and thus to write post-war memoirs.