history·Wikipedia9 November 1939 · Venlo, Netherlands
Nazi agents seized two British spies at the Dutch border in 1939
the gist
On 9 November 1939 a German Sicherheitsdienst team led by Walter Schellenberg kidnapped two British Secret Intelligence Service officers, Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Stevens, near Venlo in the Netherlands, just across the border. The British men believed they were meeting German army officers who wanted to overthrow Hitler. In fact, the contacts were SD agents, and the meeting was a trap. The Germans dragged the pair over the frontier, and the interrogations revealed details of British intelligence networks in Europe. The Nazis also tried to link the pair to a bomb attack on Hitler in Munich the day before. The Netherlands was still neutral, and Germany later cited the violation as part of its justification for invading in 1940.
so what
The Venlo incident crippled British intelligence in Western Europe at the start of the war and showed how a fake resistance could be used as bait.
fun fact
Best and Stevens were held in Nazi concentration camps for the rest of the war and survived.
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Photo: Richard Opitz, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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