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This section contains articles devoted to phenomena or versions that in one way or another may be interesting or useful to researchers of the unexplained.
Articles are divided into categories:
Informational. Contains useful information for researchers various areas knowledge.
Analytical. They include an analysis of the accumulated information about versions or phenomena, as well as descriptions of the results of the experiments.
Technical. Accumulate information about technical solutions, which can be used in the field of studying unexplained facts.
Methods. They contain descriptions of the methods used by group members in investigating facts and studying phenomena.
Media. They contain information about the reflection of phenomena in the entertainment industry: films, cartoons, games, etc.
Known misconceptions. Disclosures of known unexplained facts, collected including from third-party sources.

Article type:

Informational

Lying like a witness

In the article "Lie detection in the study of the NOF" we have already dwelled on what options for distorting events by their eyewitnesses may occur in the study of the NOF. Here we will consider various psychological effects that affect the witness and his evidence.

One of the most famous effects is "blindness of inattention". Its essence is as follows: often a person may completely fail to notice even a very bright and significant detail that is literally “under his nose” if he is distracted by some other task (for example, trying to consider something, calculate, remember , explore). And than more important to a person it seems to be his object of distraction, the more "blind" he is to other details. As an example, we can recall a children's riddle based on distraction: “At the final stop, fourteen men and two women got on the bus. At the first stop, two men got off and two women got on. At the next stop, almost all the men got off (only three left), and at the next stop, five women got on. After driving half a kilometer, the bus stopped and another man got on. How many stops were there on the bus route? If you do not know in advance that you need to count the stops (and there are only three of them), then attention is focused on frequent variables - the number of men and women. In this case, it is often impossible to answer the final question.

The next effect "attention overload", somewhat similar to the previous one. It is based on the peculiarity of human memory, which is able to concentrate and analyze only a small number of elements at the same time. An example is a simple task: “Two workers unload two wagons in two days. How many wagons will 6 workers unload in 6 days? When solved on paper, it seems simple, but when solved mentally, it causes problems because the amount of data that needs to be kept in memory to solve it exceeds the capacity of working memory, making logical conclusions impossible. Thus, small volumes of seemingly simple information cause confusion and difficulties with its perception and analysis.

Effect "attention delays" based on the fact that human mind is able to keep attention on some event for only about 10 minutes, then he begins to be distracted by other events and details around. Thus, over time, it becomes more and more difficult to keep attention and remember information. Anyone who has listened to long lectures is probably familiar with this effect.

One of the important effects for NOF researchers is "change of memory", which lies in the fact that when you mentally or verbally reproduce events, the memory of it changes, since the neural pathways are activated differently each time. As a result, a person, under the influence of his own opinion and fantasies, as well as new knowledge gained after the incident, remembers not what he really saw and felt, but a completely new event construction. So, for example, leading questions can "force" the eyewitness to "remember" details that were not there at the time of observation.

The previous effect can also include the substitution of memories caused by strong emotions or intense anticipation of ongoing events.

A variant of the memory substitution effect is "false memory". When it manifests itself, a person, on his own or by imposing information from outside, can eventually “remember” an event that did not actually take place at all, and believe in this memory. University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus described the false memory experiment in a 1997 article for Scientific American: “When one of the participants was asked during the first conversation about this embarrassing incident at the wedding, he replied: “I don’t understand what you are talking about. . Never heard of it before." However, in the second conversation, he already answered differently: “The wedding was in the open air. We were fussing all the time, so maybe I could accidentally hit someone and spill a glass of punch or something. Yes, I made a big mistake. And then they yelled at me."

Conclusion

All people are subject to the above effects. The likelihood that they will appear depends on the emotional and physical state of the witness, both during the event itself, and after it, and during the interview. Thus, due to differences in the perception of reality, people's statements about the same incident can vary greatly. And since so many factors influence the perception, memorization and reproduction of the details of an event, it is not worth unconditionally trusting the testimony of witnesses, they can only be used as additional information to material evidence (photographs, video recordings, etc.), which should form the basis of evidence the basis of any investigation.

Memory is a document of the past

Old men and old women enter in carriages.
1st old woman. As I remember now...
1st old man. No - I remember it now!
2nd old woman. You remember how it is now, but I remember how it was before.
2nd old man. And I still remember how I used to.
3rd old woman. And I remember how even earlier, very, very early.
3rd old man. And I remember both now and how before.

V. Mayakovsky "Bedbug"

The same stormy and equally fruitful disputes break out in our country after the release of the next prime-time film or television product on a historical theme - if there are still people who lived in the era depicted on the screen.

These disputes come down mainly to assessing props: did they wear such dresses and hairstyles, did they drive such cars, did they live in such apartments, did they eat such foods ... After all, formally speaking, everyone who lived then or supposedly remembers the story perfectly grandparents, etc., can claim and often claim to be a witness. But the trouble is that outside the historical context, which is absolutely necessary for the analysis and evaluation of the proposed biographical experience or the figure of the witness himself, these memories do not give us anything at best, at worst they completely distort the real picture. It is the importance of context that is illustrated by an episode from George Orwell's 1984, where main character, trying to find out at least something about the past of his country, the traces of which he himself systematically destroys in the Ministry of Truth, asks the poor old man: what was life like before? But he does not understand the question and cannot give any intelligible answer, except that beer then cost four pence.

In this episode, both the question and the answer are important. Orwell's hero, referring to the past, is actually trying to comprehend the present: was it really so bad before that the current regime of Oceania is saving and necessary? And the old man cannot give him an intelligible answer, because the system (of which the main character himself is a part), along with historical memory, has taken away from him all the tools for understanding both the past and the present. Therefore, his memories are just fragments of a raw, undifferentiated awareness of the past, and for the hero they are completely useless.

We can safely say that for decades we have existed in the space of just such - undivided, undigested - experience. On our "memory card" long years only very small segments were distinguishable, it was difficult to compare it with individual memory. An absurd situation has arisen, the consequences of which have not been overcome Russian society until now, when millions of people were the bearers of the most difficult historical heritage, including terror, famine, war, but could not articulate it in any way. Under the conditions of prohibition, fear, censorship, and constant self-censorship, the “silent” memory underwent very significant deformations, which had the most detrimental effect on the mission of the witness.

"Thaw"

The birth of a witness

Today they write a lot about the post-Stalin decade, they see in this era some parallels with modern reality, they are looking for answers to problems in it. topical issues, but they do not mention one very important phenomenon of this time - the birth of a witness.

By the beginning of the 1960s, and by no means only in our country, but primarily in countries that had survived dictatorship, mass terror, war, the Holocaust, there was a need to evaluate and work through the past. However, many intellectuals very quickly come to the realization that it is hardly possible to describe humanitarian catastrophes (of which Auschwitz and Kolyma become symbols) using traditional methods and sources. A mediator is needed between the present and the past so difficult to describe. This is how a witness appears, who is called to become this mediator.

The special importance of the role of a witness in these historical circumstances became apparent even during the Nuremberg Trials. No wonder it was in 1961 that Stanley Kramer returned to this topic in famous movie « Nuremberg Trials". Two years later, Germany begins its own trials of Nazi criminals (in particular, the executioners of Auschwitz), where for the first time more than two hundred prosecution witnesses speak publicly. In 1964, the trial of Eichmann, which attracted world attention, also opens in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt rushes there to get in touch with herself and experience the testimony of the executioner and his victims. It is thanks to what she has heard and seen that she comes to the conclusion about the "banality of evil." It is extremely important that all these court procedures and speeches are filmed for the first time, shown on TV, and these media circumstances stimulate the memory of other potential witnesses not involved in the processes.

As the importance of the figure of the witness is realized in public discourse, the term Zeitzeuge, which can be translated as "witness of time", arises in Germany. This difference between the “witness” and the Zeitzeuge was seen by Viktor Shklovsky back in the 1920s, when he wrote about “contemporaries and synchronists” in his book The Hamburg Account. The meaning of this division in relation to the role of a witness lies in the fact that by no means everyone who lived at the same time can convey its main nerve, deep meaning, its "noise", if one resorts to Mandelstam's metaphor. By the way, Marlen Khutsiev did not find this “noise of time” in the television series “The Thaw”: “It seems to me that the name “Thaw” confuses everyone. What I see has nothing to do with the phenomenon called "thaw". It's just a story about how a movie is made... There were problems in our thaw - moral, social, public... and what problems the authors solve in the film, I still don't understand. Therefore, it should have been called differently.

The image of time can also be woven from Akhmatov's perfect "rubbish" if we place the evidence in a historical context. Here, for example, are quotes from family correspondence in 1961. Husband and wife are young scientists from the provinces, PhDs, often go on business trips:

“The other day I went to Essentuki for oil, bought 1 kg, there was a lot of it. I think to buy here a can of three liters for melted butter (I saw such butter in Essentuki). In Kislovodsk, they say, there is flour, but you have to go in the morning, and I have only one Sunday, I’ll see, I think that we have worse fats than flour.

“One Sunday I went to Nalchik, and there in the market there was pork, lamb and beef for 17-18 rubles, very fatty. The stores in Pyatigorsk have everything, but there is no sugar yet.”

“In Alma-Ata, I accidentally bought a Cheviot suit from a Leningrad factory in a store, size 48, height 3, dark blue, just right for me, and for only 399 rubles. If you don’t like it, then for 500 rubles they will tear it off with your hands. I also bought myself for 50 rubles. kapron white hat. See what a spender I am."

What does this typical example of Soviet correspondence from exactly the same year as the TV series "Thaw" say? About everyday earthiness, about the lack of spirituality of the authors? Not at all, with the same zeal they chased books that were impossible to get, the husband managed to serve several years in the Stalinist camp, just a boy. Here a very important background is created for a life that was still extremely difficult, gray and full of everyday humiliation, completely different from the one that, even with the best intentions, is portrayed on the screen today.

In the thaw decade, for the first time, voices are heard testifying to what constituted the essence of the Stalin era: about mass repressions, about the Gulag. However, very soon this topic becomes taboo again, for many years it settles in "samizdat" or "tamizdat", inaccessible to general public. This entailed great informational, psychological, analytical losses, because many witnesses were silenced forever. Memory has remained largely segmental, socially homogeneous and poorly reflected. As for another huge layer - the memory of the war, it, although in a truncated form, is still present in the censored space, in particular on the television screen. One of the best examples is Konstantin Simonov's documentary A Soldier Walked (1975).

The difficult truth about the war was constantly sought to be replaced by the official spoiler - the mythologized memory of "professional" veterans, which cut off everything that did not fit into the canon of the heroic deed of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic war. At the same time, the form of "meetings with veterans" was unusually actively exploited by Soviet propaganda and contributed to the devaluation of the very idea - the transmission of genuine living memory by a witness. But the fact that in those years when millions of its bearers were alive was perceived by many as an official fake, a propaganda screen, a dummy, today it is passed off as the truest memory of front-line soldiers, which the unvarnished truth about the war and, most importantly, about the incredible price of victory, supposedly mortally offends. .

It was literature in the censored space that replaced history, which could not reliably describe events without access to sources that were sealed with seven seals. Realizing that there is actually an Orwellian disappearance of the memory of the Gulag, many survivors sit down to remember. Evgenia Ginzburg, the author of one of the best memoirs about the camps, writes directly about this: she survived to testify. In nai more this is manifested in Shalamov's prose, where the author essentially speaks for those who will never be able to tell about their experiences. At the same time, Shalamov is one of the first to realize the limitations of a witness who broadcasts the memory of Kolyma.

"Thaw"

Birth of a Spectator

Since the mid-1960s, interest in the history of dictatorships has become so widespread that such a powerful new mediator as television cannot fail to respond to it.

It is interesting to turn to the experience of Germany, which most clearly reflects the process of the appearance of a witness on the screen and, most importantly, the connection that has arisen between him and the viewer. Gradually, the school format of an educational film about history is becoming a thing of the past, it is being replaced by non-fiction films made according to the canons of historical documentary films on the BBC. They are created according to a more or less universal recipe: a cut of chronicle film frames illustrates the comments of historians and is accompanied by an objective narrator's voice-over. Very quickly, it becomes clear to the management of TV channels and TV producers that the tapes dedicated to different aspects history of National Socialism, a huge audience potential. The seizure of power, betrayal, conspiracies, bloody crimes, on the one hand, could not in themselves - as an action - not occupy the audience, and on the other hand - all this scary tale until quite recently was the reality in which they lived.

As educational and enlightening tasks fade into the background on domestic TV, the so-called histortainment wins (entertainment on historical topics), the talking heads of experts become less and less attractive to the viewer, and also create inconvenience for the filmmakers. There is a gradual rejection of comments by historians who insist on facts and interpretations, which complicate these stories and reduce their rating effectiveness. Hence their replacement with the voices of witnesses of the era. It is their appearance on the screen that brings out such a format of documentaries in prime time. The Witness is called upon to fill the space between the viewer and the event, to bring drama and emotionality to the TV story about historical events.

This also coincides with the oral history boom that has begun, when new technical possibilities make it possible to record the memories of eyewitnesses on film very quickly and mobilely. In the 1980s, mega-projects arise when hundreds and even thousands of testimonies are recorded. It seems to many at that time that thanks to these "voices from the choir" an important key to understanding, and most importantly, to the reliable transmission of historical memory, was found. The biggest achievement in this film work with witnesses was Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985).

But by the end of the 1980s, many historians, far from dismissing the role of witnesses, realized that actually accessing memory is a very difficult task. The attempt, most clearly manifested in the format of a documentary historical television film, to replace history with memory raises serious questions. It's not about the primitive logic of the saying "He's lying like an eyewitness", but about the problems of interpretation, working with myths and repressions, and finally, with traumas experienced.

In the product put on the stream of the teleconveyor, all these doubts and difficulties are taken out of the brackets. The expansion and devaluation of the witness on the screen began to lead to the fact that the historical context disappeared, causal relationships were forced out. The question arose: what - for understanding the era or analysis historical events- can give broken quotes, interspersed with film frames, the origin of which is also very doubtful? Can, for example, be considered documentary footage from the films of Leni Riefenstahl? Or clips from the Nazi film news programs Die Deutsche Wochenschau?

What do we get as a result of evidence taken out of context - when we, for example, learn from the lips of loving grandson that his grandfather, who had signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, loved his grandchildren very much. That, deprived of a company car, he went by public transport to his grandmother in the hospital, and his chief boss was essentially an unfortunate person, with difficult children, whom he had to raise alone, because his wife died.

The format, in which witnesses replaced historians, proved to be very convenient for the television screen. In many cases, with their help, facts are replaced by feelings and emotions, and reliability is ensured by their witness status. A certain ideal type of TV witness has arisen, who, with his statements, only confirms stereotypes and clichés. This type of witness constantly appears in domestic documentary television production, creating a false image of the benevolent atmosphere of Brezhnev's stagnation, or mythological "documentary" portraits of the Soviet leaders of the Stalin era. Perhaps most often through the testimonies of nurses, cooks, personal drivers frankly boulevard production is created: "history" seen through the keyhole.

It is quite obvious to anyone who deals with the problems of historical memory that the most accurate example of the limited means available to the witness is still Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. It is no coincidence that Sergey Loznitsa documentaries and, most importantly, the film "Blockade" (2005) builds entirely on newsreel footage, refusing not only talking heads, but also from off-screen commentary.

"Thaw"

Television film as a historical source

Since the beginning of the 1980s, after the incredible success of the television series The Holocaust (1979), fiction television films and television series, in which private history is depicted against the backdrop of seemingly real historical events, have gained more and more popularity among documentaries. Speaking of domestic experience, here we should mention the huge success of two television series of the 1970s - "Seventeen Moments of Spring" (1973) and "The meeting place cannot be changed" (1979).
At the same time, both films - and here the talent of their creators was manifested - did not insist on their historical truthfulness.

As television and cinema become the main mediators of historical events, they begin to lay claim to leading role in the formation of historical memory. Of course, this is not articulated so straightforwardly by their authors and producers, but we see how historical films and television series seek to turn the viewer into a witness to the events taking place on the screen. This effect occurs when a film presents itself as authentic.

In 1991, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a survey on memory. It turned out that most people (including psychologists) believe that memory contains a literal record of events: access to it can become difficult, the brightness of impressions may fade, some parts may be missing, but in general the brain works like a video camera.

How, then, to explain the presence of false memories that feel so emotionally powerful, accurate and detailed? We are absolutely sure of their authenticity, but in vain.

Through the stencil of attention

Problems arise already at the stage of perception. We notice what our brain thinks is important this moment(deep cleavage, a gun pointed between your eyes, the dramatic twists and turns of a new book by your favorite author), and signals that are judged to be unimportant are suppressed. Magicians often use this to create their own illusions.

Internal narrative: the main thing is that the suit fits

All our memories are part of a coherent story that we are constantly creating from the chaos of data. If the brain notices a contradiction, it tries to eliminate or smooth it out. The incomprehensible and unexpected should receive at least some explanation or be discarded. The model of the world must be stable, and that's it, otherwise it will be impossible to make decisions and act normally.

This concerns not only your interpretation of what happened (Vasya fired a pistol because he is a terrorist), but also the details of what is happening (I don’t remember any police uniform Vasya was wearing, because this contradicts my opinion that Vasya is a terrorist).

By prior arrangement

Witnesses who discuss an event among themselves will unconsciously bring their memories of it to a common denominator. Not only your personal, but also the collective suit should fit well. This is called conformity.

Ideally, of course, we need other witnesses to be nice to us. If we do not like them, we will resist this process.

The main thing is the essence, and we will come up with the details

common topic And emotional background memories are stored quite accurately, and the details are thought out (well, you can’t store them all, in fact - the physical storage medium is not rubber). Moreover, they are selected in such a way as not only not to contradict, but also to reinforce and strengthen central theme and emotion. So “I caught a crucian” turns into “I caught ten crucians and a pike”, obeying the central “fishing was great”.

What matters, where it doesn't matter

The source of information is erased from memory much faster than the information itself.

This could be an important resource saving initially (what difference does it make who exactly said that a tiger is chasing us), but in modern society this can be a problem (if the N news agency said that a tiger was chasing us, then I would probably run, but if the M television channel, I would think ten times).

Also, our brain does not attach too much importance to whether the information received is true or not: if you say something and then explain that it is not true, after 3 days 27% of young people and 40% of middle-aged people will remember the statement as true and will lead yourself accordingly.

However, if you first declare that it will not be true now, and then give information, more people remember that the statement is false. Keep that in mind if you ever get into the fight against myths.

True story that happened to me

We have a tendency to place ourselves at the center of stories (I knocked out Vasya's gun, not Petya at all) and appropriate the experience that we heard about, read about or watched the program. Of course, we cannot attribute absolutely incredible (from the point of view of us today) actions to ourselves, but on trifles we can lie pretty much to ourselves and others. It's easy to remember that we were at the zoo, which we only saw on TV.

Now that you've asked, I'm starting to remember

There are quite a few studies in which subjects recall something that was not there (for example, a non-existent scene of a movie that has just been shown). This can be done by showing your photoshopped photo and/or asking leading questions.

In this light, some psychotherapeutic methods seem rather dubious. Flashbacks of childhood abuse can easily turn out to be false. Especially when your therapist is armed with a presumption of parental guilt. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis had a serious hand in its formation.

Here is an excerpt from their book “The Courage to Heal”: “Assume that your feelings are absolutely correct. If you feel that you became a victim in childhood, and this affected your entire later life, then that is exactly how it was. You don't need accurate and coherent memories as you would to testify in court."

When a psychotherapist makes his patients sincerely believe that they were abducted by aliens (and this is what John Mack became famous for), the delusion of what is happening is obvious to most. But fabricated incest memories have ruined many lives and family relations. Children have a particularly strong suggestibility. Of course, domestic violence exists, but this is not a reason to imprison and harass the innocent.

So, memories can be erased, not formed at all (if, for example, you are in a state of chronic lack of sleep), adapt to our expectations and the expectations of other people, merge with each other, and so on. We don't notice it because we usually have no reason to doubt it. There is nothing to compare the stories in our head, because no one videotapes our whole life from birth to death. What a pity: the shock of viewing the footage would have been enormous. “I remember everything differently, I don’t believe you,” many participants in the experiments say when they read accounts of bright events written by them in the past.

Welcome to the Matrix, Neo!

Although no, memory still has some relation to reality.

Sources

1. Leonard Mlodinov, "Neoconscious", 2012
2. Steven Novella, video lecture course “Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills”, 2012. Lecture 4 – “Flaws and fabrications of memory”.
3. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/224766.php
4. http://wolf-kitses.livejournal.com/72264.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%84,_%D0%9C%D1%83%D0%B7%D0 %B0%D1%84%D0%B5%D1%80
6. http://www.stopbadtherapy.com/courage/index.shtml
7. http://www.chayka.org/node/3957
8. http://skepdic.com/repressedmemory.html

Leaving for eternity Lebedev Yuri Mikhailovich

"Lying like an eyewitness"

"Lying like an eyewitness"

Until now, in Russian military historiography, the dispute has not subsided: was or was not in Germany a three-day mourning for the German liner "Wilhelm Gustloff". It was sunk on a January night in 1945 by the Soviet Submarine S-13 under the command of Alexander Marinesko.

In the book of Daniil Granin "Evenings with Peter the Great" there is such a phrase: "He's lying like an eyewitness." And then the writer continues: “There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone lives in their own time. Eyewitnesses distort - they care about the impression, they need to surprise, horrify, please.

We all have to deal with this all the time. Therefore, I treat such stories selectively. I believe them more when statements are supported by documents. In the years that have passed since the sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff on January 30, 1945 by the S-13 submarine, dozens of books, hundreds of articles have been written, films, both documentary and feature films, have been shot, not only in our country, but throughout the world. An uninitiated person's head should be spinning, because you no longer know what to believe. Was there a three-day mourning in Germany for the ship "Wilhelm Gustloff" or not? Did Hitler declare Alexander Marinesco his personal enemy for this or not? Who was transporting the ship: refugees or the elite of the German submarine fleet? Was the commander of the German convoy shot for his omissions? I'm not talking about such a myth as a three-day celebration of the sinking of the Gustloff by the C-13 crew. Marinesco and his sailors allegedly celebrated the victory for three days in a row, sinking on their submarine to the bottom at the very pier.

All this is told by "eyewitnesses", splashing out information, as a rule, in an excited state and giving free rein to their imagination. Another thing is when you work with documents. They also have a different degree of reliability, but it is much more beneficial to process them. They can be compared, finding matches and inconsistencies and thus building a real picture.

Proponents of the three-day mourning theory refer to the statement of one of the "eyewitnesses" Viktor Anisimov, who "personally held in his hands in early February 1945 the newspapers of Nazi Germany" Völkischer Beobachter "and" Schwarzes Kor ". There, according to him, "it was written in black and white about a three-day mourning." It so happened that in the 1990s I talked with Viktor Anisimov for several days in Berlin at an international seminar on the problems of perpetuating the memory of the dead. He represented the delegation of the Kaliningrad region, where he lived. I remember that at that time I was fascinated by his excellent, polished German language, which distinguished wartime specialists. The conversation confirmed that he really belonged to the old guard of connoisseurs German language and literature. It turned out that we both served in the same department, representing the interests of the country in the field of military diplomacy. He - in the war, I - much later. Captain 1st rank Anisimov was already in deep reserve, but vividly recalled how during the war years he served in the Soviet embassy in Sweden as an assistant to the military attaché. At that time I had not heard anything about "Wilhelm Gustloff", so we did not touch on this topic. A few years later, in Viktor Gemanov's book "Feat S-13", I suddenly came across the above-mentioned statement by Anisimov. And he regretted that then we did not talk about the German liner. I think that, as a colleague, he could ask him purely professional matters. For example: “Where are these newspapers themselves? How come you, comrade captain 1st rank, did not send them to the center as confirmation of this information? This is the elementary duty of every military diplomat. Is it not for this reason that your head of the People's Commissar of the Navy, N. G. Kuznetsov, in his book "On the Course of Victories" dropped the phrase through his teeth: "I learned about mourning a month after this event." It turns out that he, having his representatives in the rank of naval diplomats in each coastal country, overlooked important information. Moreover, it was elementary easy to get it, since it was available in open sources. Or maybe the wise Nikolai Gerasimovich still wanted to say in this way: “They set me up, forced me to write such a heresy in my book. I know perfectly well that there was no mourning, but in the conditions of forcing the theme of a feat, I was forced to submit to circumstances.

No one has been able to find the text of the message about the imaginary mourning for half a century. Because he didn't exist. This was confirmed by the leading specialist in naval matters of the Second World War, the German professor Jürgen Rover. This is how he answered my question: “I requested the institute modern history in Munich regarding the newspapers Völkischer Beobachter and Schwarzeskor. There is a complete selection of newspaper data for February 1945, but in none of the numbers could we find information about the death of "Wilhelm Gustloff". The disaster was first reported in Swedish newspapers such as Dagens Nyheter, as told to me by the former director of the Swedish State Archives.

Thus, the question of imaginary mourning was closed to me. But after reading the book Nobel laureate Günter Grass' Trajectory of the Crab, dedicated to the death of Wilhelm Gustloff, opened another amazing page in this whole story. It turned out that there was still mourning, but not for a ship with that name, but for a person who, by the will of tragic circumstances, was immortalized after his death in the guise of this liner. In 1937, one of the Nazi functionaries, whose name was Wilhelm Gustloff, was killed. It was for him that Hitler arranged a luxurious commemoration, marking them with a three-day mourning in Schwerin with the participation of 35,000 Nazis.

IN Soviet time, the people who had access to this classified information altered it and presented it in an interpretation that was supposed to glorify the “attack of the century” even more. The myth about the personal enemy of the Fuhrer, who became Alexander Marinesko, was also added here, although in reality Hitler called the killer of the real Gustloff, the Jewish student David Frankfurter, as such.

Well, then the last high-profile myth about the allegedly destroyed 3,700 German submariners who were on the liner, which served as their mother ship, crumbled. In fact, a battalion of 819 submarine cadets went on the last voyage on this ship. 405 sailors died, all their names are stamped today in alphabetical order on two boards at the monument to the dead German submariners in the town of Meltenort near the city of Kiel. I had a chance to go there and photograph these boards.