Diary (January 20, 2021)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Wednesday January 20, 2021.

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Diary

Inauguration Day

Three cheers for Not Alarming!

Jagiellonian University

Jagiellonian University (nonfiction)

Compare:

• Jagiellonian Guard (nonfiction)
• Praetorian Guard

Prisoner of war bank

In November 1944 the officers created a bank which printed banknotes.

• Oflag II-D @ Wikipedia

In October 1944, actual paying out of salaries was stopped, and instead of receiving notes, the amounts were deposited to the prisoner's account. At this time prisoners requested "The Oldest of the Camp" to create their own financial institution, the "Bank of the Oflag IID" (Bank Obozu IID).

Official permission was granted, and all the formalities fulfilled. A monetary unit was called a "piast", and was divided into 100 groszy. (Piast was the name of the first Polish king's dynasty. It was never used as a name for monetary units, but in 1919 in the independent Poland, one proposition was to name a new Polish monetary unit "piast". Then, in 1924, after Grabski's monetary reform, the name "zloty" won). Currency was covered by cigarettes, deposited in the bank's vault. One box of American or British cigarettes was equal to 10 piast. Banknotes were printed in the camp printing house, with emission date October 16, 1944. They were put into circulation on November 1, 1944.

• The Bank of the Camp IID Gross by Tomasz Sluszkiewicz.

Artificial deserts in Poland

The town of Borne Sulinowo traces back its roots to two distinct villages founded in the area in the 16th century by local Pomeranian nobility. Modern town occupies the place of the village of Linde (linden tree), which in 1590 had 12 inhabitants. A nearby village named Großborn was home to 14 peasants.

Both villages developed very slowly. In the late 19th century, the area of the village of Linde was bought by the Prussian government and converted into a military training ground. However, it was not until the advent of Nazism in Germany that changes really arrived there.

During the first World War, there was an outcamp from Schneidemuhl prisoner of war camp at Gross Born.

In 1933 the new German authorities bought all of the area and started the construction of a large military base, a training ground and various testing grounds there. Most of the local inhabitants were resettled and their homes razed to the ground. In place of the village of Linde, a small military garrison and a town was built. Paradoxically, it was given the name of the nearby village of Gross Born (which was also levelled), despite the fact that the actual namesake was located several kilometres to the south-east. All facilities were officially opened by Adolf Hitler on August 18, 1938. Soon afterwards the Artillery School of the Wehrmacht was moved there. Shortly before the outbreak of the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the training grounds housed Heinz Guderian's XIX Army Corps. During the later stages of World War II an artificial desert was built there for the units of Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps (the other such training ground was established in the Błędów Desert near Olkusz). At the same time the area became part of the so-called Pomeranian Rampart, a line of almost 1000 concrete bunkers guarding the pre-war Polish-German border and eastern approaches to Berlin.

• Borne Sulinowo @ Wikipedia

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles