On Friday, Glenn and Mercury One announced they had acquired an American D-Day 48 Ensign flag that flew from the USS LST-493 landing ship throughout Normandy Invasion and saw Americans into battle on the beaches of Gold, Juno, Utah and Omaha. In addition to the newly obtained flag, Glenn explained the history of some other World War II-era artifacts in his collection on radio this morning.
Glenn first told the story of how he came to learn the D-Day flag was coming up for auction and why he felt compelled to bid for it.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Bonhams
“About a week ago, the guy who curates my library came to me and said, ‘Glenn, there is a flag coming up for auction. It is the D-Day flag.’ I have never seen a flag like this before in my life. To me, it is the 20th century's Star Spangled Banner. It is a flag that is so frayed… the only thing really left from it is the star field. Most of everything else is just frayed and gone. It landed on every beach on D-Day 70 years ago,” Glenn explained. “I saw that and it was estimated to go for a relatively low price. And I thought, ‘There's no way that that flag is going to go for that.’ I hoped and I prayed, but that didn't work. But I didn't want that flag to sit someplace and not be seen.”
Glenn then showed the uniform worn by a prison guard during the Nuremberg Trial and the chairs that were used to seat ‘people of interest.’
“This is the uniform of a man who guarded the prisoners at the Nuremberg Trial,” Glenn said. “This was his uniform.”
“In front of me is a chair. The chair is for ‘people of interest.’ It comes from Germany. It's a wooden chair with a larger seat on it than usual. It looks like a simple old wooden chair except it has leather straps on each arm,” Glenn continued. “Now, I don't know why you have to strap down people – they're just people of interest… I've looked at this chair a few times. I hesitate to even be around it, it bothers me so much, because all I can think of is who was strapped in that chair – the fear that they had just being strapped in that chair.”
There is a German inscription on the bottom of the chair that Glenn took particular interest in.
“But what's really critical is… what's on the bottom… It is branded with a German logo,” Glenn said. “And it says – in very rough translation – we would translate it somewhat into what we would call it the Department of Homeland Security. It is German state security… How many times have you heard, ‘Well, they're just a person of interest?’ That is what it turns into.”
Later in the radio program, a listener - Stan from Memphis - called in and said the transcription on the bottom of the chair is "Geheime Staatspolizei," which translates to "Secret State Police."
Glenn encouraged his listeners to take re-visit Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom – specifically the illustrated version from The Ludwig von Mises Institute – to better understand what is going on in the world today.
“It will show you… history always repeats itself. The reason to have history is to be able to say, ‘This is where you came from. This is what it cost. This is what happened to us. This is what we fought against. This is what we did when we won. This is who we are,’” Glenn concluded. “But it also has one other aspect to it… You've got to see history as this sweeping story, this epic. It's more than the memorization of the names and the places and the dates… It is about the story of the individuals and what those individuals did in the grand scheme of things.”