Someone sent me this photograph of the bottom portion of a memorial on the campus of the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado. It is interesting in that it commemorates neither the Air Force (which didn't exist as such until 1947) nor the Army Air Corps, but "overseas flyers". That is undoubtedly because the memorial seeks to include not only members of the United States armed forces who flew against Germany, but those American pilots who had volunteered and gone over even before we declared war (April, 1917) to fly with the British and French. But it does restrict the dates to official American involvement in World War One. That excludes American flyers which had been in action beforehand (such as the famed Lafayette Escadrille which had been operating from 1916) and any American flyers involved with the U.S. military intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919 and 1920. Thus, although there is very little text, it is already somewhat inconsistent.

If anyone has some more photos of this memorial, or any others from the campus, they would make a great addition to sites-of-memory.de.

The German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel reports in its online edition that an 89-year-old man showed his 1944 Wehrmacht drivers' license when stopped by police (http://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/0,1518,540060,00.html).

The Germans do not make you renew your license, so there are people who still have and use the old, fold-up paper documents from the 1950s. It seems plausible that a Nazi-era license might still be valid. In this case it wasn't however, and the man's grandson had to drive him home. The story has another unfortunate detail: The man does in fact have a "normal" license, but has "done without it for a while." Wouldn't the story have been cuter if he had been driving for over 60 years with the same military license he had probably used in France, Italy or Poland?

Nonetheless, the story retains a certain charm. What was the man thinking? It probably wasn't meant as a statement of identity or Nazi sympathies. Did he lose his original and hesitate to go back for a replacement, fearing he would be denied do to infirmity or poor vision?

Documents from the era are in and of themselves nothing particularly special, of course. Many are still valid and in effect, from property deeds and legal judgements to marriage licences, birth certificates and international treaties that Nazi Germany signed. Someone still carrying a Wehrmacht driver's license in his wallet, probably with a little swastika stamp over the photo of his youthful, uniformed face, just seems absurdly funny.