Death of a hero

According to the Guardian Miep Gies has died at the age of 100 after a brief illness. Madame Gies, who was one of those who helped hide the Frank family, also saved the teenager's diary ensuring that it survived to be published.

Born Hermine Santrouschitz on 15 February 1909 in Vienna, Gies moved to Amsterdam in 1922 to escape food shortages. She lived with a host family, who gave her the nickname Miep.
In 1933, she took a job as an office assistant in the Otto Frank's spice business. After refusing to join a Nazi organization in 1941, she avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies.

As the Nazis increased their arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Gies, to help hide his family in the annexe above the company's warehouse on Prinsengracht in July 1942. Jan and Miep Gies worked with four other employees of the firm to sustain the Franks and those who shared the annexe.

In her own book, Anne Frank Remembered, Gies recalled being in the office when the German police, acting on a tip that historians have failed to trace, raided the hideout in August 1944. After the raid she even offered the police a bribe for the Franks' release, but to no avail.

After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, where he lived with the Gies family until he remarried in 1952.Miep worked for him as he compiled the diary, then devoted herself to talking about the book and answering letters with questions from around the world.After Otto Frank's death in 1980, she continued to campaign against Holocaust deniers and refute allegations that the diary was a forgery. She suffered a stroke in 1997, which slightly affected her speech, but remained in generally good health as she approached her 100th birthday.

As with many of the wartime generation Madame Gies brushed aside rewards and decorations for helping hide the Frank family as being more than she deserved "This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an email to the Associated Press days before her 100th birthday in February.

Gies was bestowed with the title of Righteous Gentile by the Israeli Holocaust museum. She has also been honoured by the German government, the Dutch monarchy and educational institutions. Despite this in 1997 she told schoolchildren:

"I don't want to be considered a hero. Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."

A hero is not a lantern-jawed, muscle-bound macho man in uniform (although of course they can be). A heroes are ordinary people acting in an extraordinary manner. These last words describe a hero to me.

Stanislav Petrov - the man who saved the world

There are few people who can say that they have saved the world but Stanislav Petrov is one of them. 25 years ago today a calm and collected Petrov ensured that large swathes of our planet were not turned into radioactive dust. The following is taken form an article in the First Post

When Lt Col Stanislav Petrov arrived to work at the secret command bunker near Moscow from which the Soviet Union's early warning satellites were monitored, he was anticipating another routine stint. But shortly after midnight on September 26, 1983, alarms started blaring and a red button on the console in front of Petrov began to flash the single word: "Start". This signified that an American ballistic missile had been launched and was heading towards the USSR: then the computers linked to the satellites reported that four more missiles were on the way.

As commander of the bunker, Petrov was responsible for deciding whether the data was accurate. If it was, standing orders required immediate notification of the Soviet high command, which would then consult the Kremlin about initiating a swift and massive retaliatory strike against the US. After five minutes of frantic activity Petrov concluded that the incoming launch reports were almost certainly false. In his judgment, nobody would carry out a first strike with just five missiles: he was also aware the system had a history of malfunctioning. "My gut feeling was that we were experiencing another systems failure, so I made the decision to report a false alarm."

Petrov's hunch was subsequently confirmed by an official investigation: the satellite alerts that might have created a holocaust were triggered by an unusual combination of sunlight and high-altitude cloud formations, wrongly interpreted by the computers as a missile launch. Although Petrov's conduct initially drew high praise an official investigation later accused him of serious disciplinary offences. Petrov was formally reprimanded, demoted and shuffled into a much less responsible post

It was not until the late-1990s that the story of that dramatic night in the bunker became public knowledge in Russia. An American expert on Soviet defence doctrines during the Cold War described the incident as "the closest we've come to an accidental nuclear conflict". By then, Petrov was surviving on a meagre military pension in a squalid apartment block in a town near Moscow, drinking too much and mourning the death of his devoted wife from cancer. He would tell Western journalists that he did not consider himself a hero, just a conscientious officer who did his duty at a moment of great peril for mankind.

In my view Petrov is a hero. If it were not for Petrov many of us would have been living Threads in 1983 and not watching it the following year. A less composed commander may well have concluded that it was not a glitch but a real nuclear attack. The Soviet high command and leadership were convinced that the USA planned a pre-emptive strike on the USSR and would not have hesitated in launching a retaliatory strike which would have devastated North America and Western Europe. East/west tensions were even higher than usual – not least because KAL007 had been shot down less than four weeks before and the Able Archer nuclear exercise was set to take place just over a month later.