You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.
Well, well, well, what do we have here?
We have another episode of The Past and the Curious for you.
My name is Mick Sullivan and welcome to the show.
I'm releasing this episode the weekend after around Thanksgiving.
And you know what?
I'm really grateful and thankful for the fact that I get to make this show, that I have the time and the ability to, and I'm really grateful that you're listening.
So thank you so much.
I hope you enjoy this episode.
We get a lot of requests for stories about World War II.
I don't do a lot of war-related things and that's not exactly what this is, but these are two stories from World War II that focus on Well, the first one is about a woman who saved a bunch of art from being destroyed or stolen by the Nazi army.
It's a great story.
And the second story is about a malfunctioning toilet that brought down or brought up, I guess, a submarine.
You know, it's a classic.
It's a classic story from World War II.
If you haven't heard it before or you don't know anything about it, buckle up.
I think you're going to enjoy.
Let's get started.
Rose Voland had planned to be an art teacher, but she became a spy instead.
Plans can change, and in her case they most certainly did.
The spy thing just kind of happened.
But it's the sort of thing that can just kind of happen when Nazis take over your town.
Rose wasn't going to let them get away with terrible things, especially not in the city she called home Paris, France.
Rose was born to a humble family in 1898 near the Alpine Mountains in southern France.
Her father was a blacksmith, and it was always planned that Rose would go to school.
What she found there was that she didn't always fit in, but she always worked harder and earned higher marks than most of her classmates.
Working hard can open a lot of doors for people.
And her hard work eventually opened up the door to the Jeu de Paume Museum.
She first started at the art museum in Paris, France in 1932.
And though teaching art had been her intention, she found a passion for art history.
And it was work as a curator that brought her joy.
She loved art history and was moved by the works around her.
At the time, the Jus de Paume was affiliated with its neighbor, the Louvre, one of the most famous art museums in the world.
While she was there throughout the 1930s, the art collection of the Jus de Paume was mostly modern art, so not the old classics from centuries before her lifetime, but many of the artists who were still living and working at that time.
So she was fortunate to spend solo up-close time with incredible works of art by painters like Matisse and Picasso.
But by 1940, Paris had become a scary place to be.
World War II was overtaking the continent and Nazi soldiers from neighboring Germany were pushing their way across Europe with a plan to dominate all of the other countries and make them part of the German Empire.
Today we won't go deeply into the terrible things the Nazis did to people, particularly the Jewish population of Europe.
There are plenty of ways to learn about those sad times, if you're ready to explore them.
It's just important to know that millions of innocent everyday people were met with tremendous horror and violence because of the racist and cruel actions of the Nazi Party.
But one good thing about history is that anytime there are cruel people in power, you will find good people who resist.
There are always people who find ways to fight back.
And Rose Valland was one of these people.
Her boss at the museum had been a hero for the French during World War I, and a new war meant they needed him back.
So while he was called to military service, he asked Rose to step in and help lead the museum.
When the Nazi army first made their way into Paris, she led efforts to evacuate the museum staff and their families.
She not only got 150 people to safety, but she also led the work to protect the art inside.
As the German army came in, they would drop bombs from planes.
And as you might guess, exploding bombs and fine art are a bad combo.
So paintings were protected, windows were covered, and statues that were too big and heavy to move were surrounded by layers of sandbags and wooden crates to shield them from explosions.
Rose Valant got out of Paris to the French countryside just as German tanks rolled in and bombs dropped around her city.
It was certainly scary and hard to say goodbye but, as circumstances would have it, within a year she was back at the Jeu de Paume.
Not for reasons she would like, but she decided to use her position to help how she could.
The German army had taken over the city.
This time is called Occupied Paris because well, the city Paris was occupied by Nazis rather than the Parisians to whom it was actually home.
And wherever they went, the Nazi army looted the homes of people they captured or chased off.
Those homes were full of things like Furniture, jewelry, and art.
All of this was taken by the invading army.
The furniture was sent back to Germany and used for German people.
The jewelry was collected because it was valuable.
And the art?
That was another story.
Art is valuable, yes.
But the Nazi leaders had strong ideas on what made good art.
The art that they did not like, modern things like Matisse and Picasso, they intended to destroy.
What a loss that would be for the world.
But the other stuff, the classic paintings that fit their visions of great art, they stole.
Many pieces were taken by party leaders to hang up in their homes and offices, but others were collected for a museum they intended to build in honor of their leader, called the Fuhrer Museum.
You can imagine why Rose found this upsetting.
All of that art, stolen, irreplaceable, and some of it destroyed.
Other pieces were taken by men with no right to it, who behaved terribly towards innocent people.
But as they stole art from homes and museums, they needed a place to keep it, to sort through it, to catalog it and then to send it to Germany or else destroy it.
They chose the Jeu de Paume Museum as a place to do all of this work.
And to go with it.
They needed someone methodical, someone who knew the art, someone who knew the building and someone who didn't speak German.
Rose was the person for the job.
And yes, they believed that Rose did not speak German.
Were they right?
They were worse than right.
They were wrong.
Rose spoke more than a bit of German, and she learned more as time went by.
That meant Rose could read what they wrote and hear what they said.
And she used that information.
For four years under Nazi occupation, Rose worked in the museum.
She knew so well as the Nazis brought art from all over France, stolen from the homes of citizens.
What they didn't know though, some suspected, was that she was keeping track of all of the stolen art, taking pictures, writing lists, even stealing documents, and then sharing her information with the underground French resistance.
If she had been caught, it would have been the end of her life.
But she was committed not just to protecting the collections any way she could, but also keeping track of what went where, in case she could ever help get the art back to its rightful owners.
In August of 1944, Allied forces, the team of countries who had joined together to defeat Nazi Germany, were close to retaking Paris.
This time is known as the Liberation of Paris.
But the Nazis weren't just going to walk away empty-handed.
The men who had taken over her museum were going to try to get everything out of France that they could.
Before the Allied forces arrived, they loaded up dozens and dozens of train cars with treasures from the Jeu de Paume.
Hundreds of thousands of items were stacked practically to the roof of each rail car in the train.
Furniture, random home goods, and a priceless collection of art.
And, as she had done four years before, Rose made sure the art was safe as possible in case bombs fell near the train.
When the Nazis first arrived, she really couldn't do anything to stop the German invasion.
But now she could do something about their stealing of art.
Thanks to secret communication with her boss in the military and her own network of French citizens resisting the Germans in any way they could, they delayed the trains at the train station.
Uh, yeah, train won't move.
It's too heavy.
You overloaded it.
The Nazi officer in charge was anxious because he knew the Allies would be in Paris soon.
So they lightened the load of the train a bit.
Oh no, now something's wrong with the engine car.
Must have stressed it out with the heavy load.
It's gonna take a while to repair that.
So the art stayed a little while longer.
Well, I got good news and I got bad news.
Good news is the engine works again.
Bad news is that the signal system up the tracks, yeah, it's down.
Too dangerous.
Train might crash.
You don't want that, do you?
Not with all that, what was on here?
Art, right?
The pressure to leave grew.
Finally, the train left Paris, but it only made it a short distance.
You'll never believe this, but there's a train that exploded just up the line.
Darnedest thing.
A broken train was put there up on the tracks by the French resistance to slow down the Nazi train of stolen art.
And it worked.
When the Allies retook Paris, Rose showed them where to find all of the art.
And it took a long time to unpack it all.
But once it was done, Rose laid it on the museum floor and let herself be surrounded by all of the art one last time.
It was her wish that it be returned to the museums and individuals and families from whom it was stolen.
But for one last time, all of that handmade beauty was there together, in the museum that had been taken by enemies, freed once again, with the woman who had risked her life to save it all.
After the war, Rose was made a captain in both the French and US armies and was a major part of the famous Monuments Team of World War II.
These were the people who worked in art restitution the job of returning thousands of stolen artworks to their original owners after the war.
As you can imagine, all of the records and details bravely kept by Rose Valland made that job much easier.
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Last month we had the first of two brothers from South Carolina.
So, as promised, here comes Elijah.
Take it away, buddy.
My name is Elijah and I'm from Anderson, South Carolina.
My 30 Seconds is about Hippocrates.
Hippocrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who was born in 460 B.C. on the island of Kos.
He became a doctor and is known today as the father of medicine.
Other doctors at that time believed a patient's health was influenced by spirits.
Sometimes they were ordered by a king to poison a patient.
Hippocrates believed doctors should do no harm to their patients and taught his students the same.
Today, doctors take the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
Nice work, Elijah.
The Hippocratic oath, I love a good namesake, right?
I love something that's named after somebody who did something important in history.
And that's a big one.
That's a great one.
Nice work.
Thank you so much for submitting.
If anyone else out there, any pair of siblings perhaps too, that'd be fun.
Do another sibling pair.
Has a you have 30 seconds.
All you got to do is record it.
It's super easy.
Put it on your phone, your tablet, whatever it might be, or record it on an audio cassette and mail it to me.
That would be fun.
I dare someone to do it.
It's quiz time.
It's quiz time.
It's quiz time.
Time, time.
Okay.
In honor of Rose Valen's love of art, here are some art questions for you, two of which are from previous episodes.
So number one, a New York woman, became an art sensation in her 70s when she truly first focused on painting.
Featured her on the show, and you may recall that her paintings were first shown at the Museum of Modern Art when she was 79 years old.
What was her name?
Her full name was Anna Mary Robertson Moses, but everyone knew her as Grandma Moses.
If you haven't listened to the episode featuring her, it's a really fun one.
She was an inspiring and fascinating woman who found a successful art career late in life.
I think that was episode 71 of The Past and the Curious.
Okay, question number two.
In the news earlier this year, 2025, there was a notable art heist at the Louvre in France.
But do you remember the name of the Boston Art Museum from which there was a mysterious art heist in 1990?
Yes, that was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and that story is fascinating.
Paintings were cut from the frames and have been missing since that day.
It was the day after St.
Patrick's Day.
The woman who founded that museum was as fascinating as the museum heist itself, I would say.
So if you want to learn more, check out episode 34, museum tales.
Okay, the last question, third and final question, is not related to a previous episode, but rather a painter mentioned in this episode before henry matisse was an artist.
He had trained for and begun a career in what field?
Before being sidetracked by an illness.
So what did he do before he was a painter?
He was just beginning a career in law when he was stricken with appendicitis at the age of 20.
While recovering, his mother got him some art supplies to occupy his mind.
He completely fell in love with art, grew obsessed with it and became one of the most important painters of the early 1900s.
In the German language, words are often created by putting two other words together.
The result makes for very clear and illustrative language.
For example, what is called a refrigerator in English is called a Kuhlschrank in German.
This combines the word Kuhl, which means cool, and Schrank, which means cupboard.
Pretty clear, right?
Cool cupboard.
Or there's the German word Handschuh.
This combines the word Hand, or hand, and Schuh, or shoe.
Put them together, and what do you got?
Handschuh, which is definitely a name you could call a glove.
Anyway, to get where we're going for this story, I'd like to share the German word Unterseeboot, which is actually three words put together to create a name for the thing that we today call a submarine.
Yes, that's right.
Unterseeboot or undersea boat.
Pretty straightforward, huh?
In addition to straightforward language, Germany really pioneered modern submarines.
Back in 1915, during World War I, The famous passenger ship the Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo fired by a German U-boat, which is the shortened name for Unterseeboots.
That event made everyone aware of the warships and by World War II.
U-boats were well-evolved, established and dangerous.
In the hands of the Nazi military, they were truly feared.
Of course, life in a submarine comes with its own set of fears.
One of the most vexing problems for people underwater in submarines, other than just staying alive, is what do you do with waste?
You know what I'm talking about.
It doesn't matter how deep you are, you're going to have to relieve yourself.
And so is the rest of your crew.
And that's gonna mean a lot of number one and a lot of number two.
And believe me when I tell you, those ones and twos really add up and the sum total ain't pretty.
The result is not the kind of thing you want to keep in a holding tank on board with you for long.
Can you imagine a rupture or a spill?
Your untersea boot would turn into a poop and pee boot and you'd be rushing to the surface for fresh air faster than a starving shark chasing a speeding sailfish.
But that was how things just had to be for a long time.
What else are you gonna do?
Opening a hatch deep underwater to get rid of anything would flood the submarine with sea water, and while that might be less gross than a flood of the wicked concoction of number one and number two, it would quickly mean the end for all on board.
But towards the end of World War II, German engineers developed a new toilet system, a complicated design that used a confusing and strictly controlled series of pipes and valves.
This new design allowed someone to use the toilet And, if handled correctly, clear the toilet and the pipes by sending the waste out to sea, without letting any seawater back into the pipes and open valves, which would be bad for the submarine.
The tremendous water pressure rushing in is one thing, but because space is limited on a sub, the toilet room in these new U-boats was placed right over the batteries which powered the boat while deep undersea.
This is exactly the type of stuff that you don't want to get wet.
One of the first boats with this new miracle toilet system was U-1206, which first set out in 1944 for training.
Part of that training included learning the toilet system.
Because it was so complicated and potentially dangerous, special technicians had to be trained to flush the toilet.
And it was required that one of these trained toilet technicians were around to flush any time a crew member answered the call of nature.
In the spring of 1945, U-1206 began official operations in the Atlantic with the goal of sinking British and American ships.
It was one of many Nazi ships prowling the seas in all directions, making for treacherous water.
And placed in charge of Unterseeboot 1206 was Nazi commander Karl Adolf Schlitt.
He was young at 27, but quite ambitious.
Unfortunately for him, he would not get far into his military career.
Commanders are like anybody else.
They put their pants on one leg at a time, and they occasionally find themselves on the toilet.
April 14th is a pretty historic date for many other reasons, but to Carl it began as a day like any other.
He had felt the call of nature and decided to answer it.
He made his way to the toilet, and he made use of that toilet.
As the commander, he should have known that the flush system of valves and pipes was very complicated.
In fact, he probably should have understood it as well as the toilet techs on board, one of whom should have been alerted that the commander was currently commanding the toilet seat.
But it seems that Carl did not understand it well enough.
And it also seems like he did not let anyone know that he was using it.
Carl Adolf Schlitt just must have figured that he could take care of his own business.
Was he right?
He was worse than right.
He was wrong.
After making the unwise choice to try flushing it anyway, he found the toilet did not work as he anticipated.
Was it malfunction?
Was it mistake?
Was it misuse?
Well, we don't know for sure.
But Commander Schlitt had turned some valves, and yet his business remained.
Now, he didn't want to make things worse, so he swallowed his pride and quickly found a toilet tech.
And because the toilet tech wasn't totally sure what had happened on the complicated valve system before he arrived, he tried his best to backtrack and then start the flush process again.
But his best was not good enough.
Uh.
Carl's business came back up along with a torrent of seawater.
Look, the valves were confusing and they had to be opened and closed in a very specific order, and now there are two people panicking in a mixture of toilet and seawater.
At this point, I'm not sure we can pin any blame on the toilet tech.
He couldn't fix it, and the water pressure from the deep dive didn't help.
And there were more immediate, bigger problems than who's to blame.
The seawater flowing in made it to the compartment underneath the toilet room, the one holding the giant submarine batteries.
When the salt water met the batteries, a chemical reaction occurred and the result was chlorine gas.
Their problems had just increased greatly.
Poison gas in an enclosed tube like a submarine far below the surface is bad.
In a matter of minutes.
The gas result of this toilet mishap could and would poison the over 50 crew members on board if swift action was not taken.
Commander Schlitt had no choice but to rush the boat to the surface.
They even fired off torpedoes to decrease the weight in order to get to the surface as fast as possible.
The good news for them is that they made it to the surface and were able to open the hatch to fresh air before anyone died of poison gas.
The bad news for them is that there was a British Navy ship watching it all happen.
Probably in confusion at first.
Well, what's all this then?
Oh, it looks like an untersee boot.
Oh, well, I know a bit of German.
Let me talk to him.
Hello, looks like you guys have made ein reißen feller.
Oh, I like that.
What does it mean?
It means they've made a huge blunder.
The crew of U-1206 was captured, but not before Captain Schlitt scuttled the boat, which is when a boat is sunk on purpose.
In this case, maybe he didn't want the British Navy to capture or use the boat, or maybe he was trying to hide the evidence of his unfortunate flush and the resulting toilet troubles.
That was the true huge blunder of the day.
Nevertheless, the British newspapers had a lot of fun telling the story, often in colorful ways that we can't repeat here.
The war ended a few weeks after the toilet troubles and the Nazi regime fell to the Allied powers after years of horror, loss and cruelty.
The end was momentous and the major event in many people's lives.
So the toilet story was ultimately overshadowed by bigger and more important news.
But it was never completely forgotten.
The sunken U-1206 was actually rediscovered in the 1970s and, to this date, is believed to be the only submarine ever brought down by its own captain flushing the toilet.
Thanks for listening to episode 112 of The Past and the Curious.
I'm Mick Sullivan.
I got some Patreon people to thank.
Times are tough, y'all.
This is really weird.
So I really appreciate everyone's support.
It really means a lot.
And I love to know that you're out there listening.
Like you, Madeline Miller Levine is in alabama.
Madeline miller levine madeline, thank you so much.
I'm so glad you're out there.
Uh, my regards to you from kentucky to alabama and this might be repeat, i'm not sure katherine koto, in colorado.
Thank you for your support.
I'm so glad that you uh find it valuable.
I i'm gonna keep making the show because people like you you know it's great.
Um, Speaking of Jack Lipinski in California, I also might have shouted you out last month.
If so, guess what?
Surprise second shout out.
Congratulations, Jack Lipinski.
If not, here's your first one.
Jack Lipinski.
That's great.
And same thing for Dean Absetz in Virginia.
I think that maybe there's a change in your Patreon sponsorship or something like that.
I don't, I don't care.
I'm just so glad that you're around.
Okay.
Thank you so much for your support as well.
Uh and uh.
You know I kind of want to come to Virginia sometime.
So let me know you know somewhere I should be.
Uh, oh, and, um, Yakin Rube in Minneapolis, Minnesota, all over the map today.
That's fantastic.
Uh, I hope I got your name right.
Uh, If not, you just tell me and I will give you a second shout out too, okay?
So glad that you're out there and you're listening in Minnesota.
I got some friends up there.
So, everyone else, if you want to support the show, there are so many ways you can do it.
The biggest and the best way that you can do it is to tell someone about it.
If that is, like you know, a friend group, parents group, teacher groups, a librarian, or if you do things online Boy, that would be helpful.
This is a one-man operation.
I'm just trying to spread the word.
So any help that you can offer would be great.
You can leave a review.
You can interact with wherever you see the show.
Please just subscribe and like and all that sort of stuff.
And then there's other ways too, but that's the most important.
Just tell somebody with your mouth.
That's what your mouth is for.
Remember, it's for telling people about the past and the curious.
Thank you so much.
My name is Mick Sullivan.
This has been episode 112.
I will be talking to you again soon.
