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Azincourt | Table of Content | About, Toponym, History, Population, Sights, International relations, See also, References, External links |
Albert Speer | short description | Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (; ; 19 March 1905 – 1 September 1981) was a German architect who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
An architect by training, Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party, and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commissioned him to design and construct structures, including the Reich Chancellery and the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. In this capacity he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin. In February 1942, Speer was appointed as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Using misleading statistics, he promoted himself as having performed an armaments miracle that was widely credited with keeping Germany in the war. In 1944, Speer established a task force to increase production of fighter aircraft. It became instrumental in exploiting slave labor for the benefit of the German war effort.
After the war, Speer was among the 24 "major war criminals" charged by the International Military Tribunal for Nazi atrocities. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labor, narrowly avoiding a death sentence. Having served his full term, Speer was released in 1966. He used his writings from the time of imprisonment as the basis for two autobiographical books, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer's books were a success; the public was fascinated by the inside view of the Third Reich he provided. He died of a stroke in 1981.
Through his autobiographies and interviews, Speer carefully constructed an image of himself as a man who deeply regretted having failed to discover the crimes of the Third Reich. He continued to deny explicit knowledge of, and responsibility for, the Holocaust. This image dominated his historiography in the decades following the war, giving rise to the "Speer myth": the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionizing the German war machine. The myth began to fall apart in the 1980s, when the armaments miracle was attributed to Nazi propaganda. Twenty-five years after Speer's death, Adam Tooze wrote in The Wages of Destruction that the idea that Speer was an apolitical technocrat was "absurd". Martin Kitchen, writing in Speer: Hitler's Architect, stated that much of the increase in Germany's arms production was actually due to systems instituted by Speer's predecessor (Fritz Todt) and that Speer was intimately aware of and involved in the Final Solution; evidence of which has been conclusively shown in the decades following the Nuremberg trials. |
Albert Speer | Early years and personal life | Early years and personal life
Speer was born in Mannheim, into an upper-middle-class family. He was the second of three sons of Luise Máthilde Wilhelmine (Hommel) and Albert Friedrich Speer. In 1918, the family leased their Mannheim residence and moved to a home they had in Heidelberg. Henry T. King, deputy prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials who later wrote a book about Speer said, "Love and warmth were lacking in the household of Speer's youth." His brothers, Ernst and Hermann, bullied him throughout his childhood. Speer was active in sports, taking up skiing and mountaineering. He followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and studied architecture.
Speer began his architectural studies at the University of Karlsruhe instead of a more highly acclaimed institution because the hyperinflation crisis of 1923 limited his parents' income. In 1924, when the crisis had abated, he transferred to the "much more reputable" Technische Hochschule München (now Technical University of Munich). In 1925, he transferred again, this time to the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Chalottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin) where he studied under Heinrich Tessenow, whom Speer greatly admired. After passing his exams in 1927, Speer became Tessenow's assistant, a high honor for a man of 22. As such, Speer taught some of his classes while continuing his own postgraduate studies. In Munich Speer began a close friendship, ultimately spanning over 50 years, with Rudolf Wolters, who also studied under Tessenow.
In mid-1922, Speer began courting Margarete (Margret) Weber (1905–1987), the daughter of a successful craftsman who employed 50 workers. The relationship was frowned upon by Speer's class-conscious mother, who felt the Webers were socially inferior. Despite this opposition, the two married in Berlin on 28 August 1928; seven years elapsed before Margarete was invited to stay at her in-laws' home. The couple would have six children together, but Albert Speer grew increasingly distant from his family after 1933. He remained so even after his release from imprisonment in 1966, despite their efforts to forge closer bonds. |
Albert Speer | Party architect and government functionary | Party architect and government functionary |
Albert Speer | Joining the Nazis (1931–1934) | Joining the Nazis (1931–1934)
thumb|left|upright|Speer shows Hitler a project at Obersalzberg.
In January 1931, Speer applied for Nazi Party membership, and on 1 March 1931, he became member number 474,481. The same year, with stipends shrinking amid the Depression, Speer surrendered his position as Tessenow's assistant and moved to Mannheim, hoping to make a living as an architect. After he failed to do so, his father gave him a part-time job as manager of his properties. In July 1932, the Speers visited Berlin to help out the Party before the Reichstag elections. While they were there his friend, Nazi Party official Karl Hanke recommended the young architect to Joseph Goebbels to help renovate the Party's Berlin headquarters. When the commission was completed, Speer returned to Mannheim and remained there as Hitler took office in January 1933.
The organizers of the 1933 Nuremberg Rally asked Speer to submit designs for the rally, bringing him into contact with Hitler for the first time. Neither the organizers nor Rudolf Hess were willing to decide whether to approve the plans, and Hess sent Speer to Hitler's Munich apartment to seek his approval. This work won Speer his first national post, as Nazi Party "Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Party Rallies and Demonstrations".
Shortly after Hitler came into power, he began to make plans to rebuild the chancellery. At the end of 1933, he contracted Paul Troost to renovate the entire building. Hitler appointed Speer, whose work for Goebbels had impressed him, to manage the building site for Troost. As Chancellor, Hitler had a residence in the building and came by every day to be briefed by Speer and the building supervisor on the progress of the renovations. After one of these briefings, Hitler invited Speer to lunch, to the architect's great excitement. Speer quickly became part of Hitler's inner circle; he was expected to call on him in the morning for a walk or chat, to provide consultation on architectural matters, and to discuss Hitler's ideas. Most days he was invited to dinner.
In the English version of his memoirs, Speer says that his political commitment merely consisted of paying his "monthly dues". He assumed his German readers would not be so gullible and told them the Nazi Party offered a "new mission". He was more forthright in an interview with William Hamsher in which he said he joined the party in order to save "Germany from Communism". After the war, he claimed to have had little interest in politics at all and had joined almost by chance. Like many of those in power in the Third Reich, he was not an ideologue, "nor was he anything more than an instinctive anti-Semite." Historian Magnus Brechtken, discussing Speer, said he did not give anti-Jewish public speeches and that his anti-Semitism can best be understood through his actions—which were anti-Semitic. Brechtken added that, throughout Speer's life, his central motives were to gain power, rule, and acquire wealth. |
Albert Speer | Nazi architect (1934–1937) | Nazi architect (1934–1937)
thumb|left|The Cathedral of Light above the Zeppelintribune
When Troost died on 21 January 1934, Speer effectively replaced him as the Party's chief architect. Hitler appointed Speer as head of the Chief Office for Construction, which placed him nominally on Hess' staff.
One of Speer's first commissions after Troost's death was the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg. It was used for Nazi propaganda rallies and can be seen in Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The building was able to hold 340,000 people. Speer insisted that as many events as possible be held at night, both to give greater prominence to his lighting effects and to hide the overweight Nazis. Nuremberg was the site of many official Nazi buildings. Many more buildings were planned. If built, the German Stadium in Nuremberg would have accommodated 400,000 spectators. Speer modified Werner March's design for the Olympic Stadium being built for the 1936 Summer Olympics. He added a stone exterior that pleased Hitler. Speer designed the German Pavilion for the 1937 international exposition in Paris. |
Albert Speer | Berlin's General Building Inspector (1937–1942) | Berlin's General Building Inspector (1937–1942)
thumb|right|Model of the Große Halle (also called Ruhmeshalle or Volkshalle) with the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate
On 30 January 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital. This carried with it the rank of State Secretary in the Reich government and gave him extraordinary powers over the Berlin city government. He was to report directly to Hitler, and was independent of both the mayor and the Gauleiter of Berlin. Hitler ordered Speer to develop plans to rebuild Berlin. These centered on a three-mile-long grand boulevard running from north to south, which Speer called the Prachtstrasse, or Street of Magnificence; he also referred to it as the "North–South Axis". At the northern end of the boulevard, Speer planned to build the Volkshalle, a huge domed assembly hall over high, with floor space for 180,000 people. At the southern end of the avenue, a great triumphal arch, almost high and able to fit the Arc de Triomphe inside its opening, was planned. The existing Berlin railroad termini were to be dismantled, and two large new stations built. Speer hired Wolters as part of his design team, with special responsibility for the Prachtstrasse. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to the postponement, and later the abandonment, of these plans, which, after Nazi capitulation, Speer himself considered as “awful”.
thumb|upright|left|The Volkshalle's Great Dome can be seen at the top of this model of Hitler's plan for Berlin.
Plans to build a new Reich Chancellery had been underway since 1934. Land had been purchased by the end of 1934 and starting in March 1936 the first buildings were demolished to create space at Voßstraße. Speer was involved virtually from the beginning. In the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, he had been commissioned to renovate the Borsig Palace on the corner of Voßstraße and Wilhelmstraße as headquarters of the Sturmabteilung (SA). He completed the preliminary work for the new chancellery by May 1936. In June 1936 he charged a personal honorarium of 30,000 Reichsmark and estimated the chancellery would be completed within three to four years. Detailed plans were completed in July 1937 and the first shell of the new chancellery was complete on 1 January 1938. On 27 January 1938, Speer received plenipotentiary powers from Hitler to finish the new chancellery by 1 January 1939. For propaganda Hitler claimed during the topping-out ceremony on 2 August 1938, that he had ordered Speer to complete the new chancellery that year. Shortages of labor meant the construction workers had to work in ten-to-twelve-hour shifts. The SS built two concentration camps in 1938 and used the inmates to quarry stone for its construction. A brick factory was built near the Oranienburg concentration camp at Speer's behest; when someone commented on the poor conditions there, Speer stated, "The Yids got used to making bricks while in Egyptian captivity". The chancellery was completed in early January 1939. The building itself was hailed by Hitler as the "crowning glory of the greater German political empire".
thumb|upright|Hitler in Paris in 1940 with Speer (left) and sculptor Arno Breker
During the Chancellery project, the pogrom of Kristallnacht took place. Speer made no mention of it in the first draft of Inside the Third Reich. It was only on the urgent advice of his publisher that he added a mention of seeing the ruins of the Central Synagogue in Berlin from his car. Kristallnacht accelerated Speer's ongoing efforts to dispossess Berlin's Jews from their homes. From 1939 on, Speer's Department used the Nuremberg Laws to evict Jewish tenants of non-Jewish landlords in Berlin, to make way for non-Jewish tenants displaced by redevelopment or bombing. Eventually, 75,000 Jews were displaced by these measures. Speer denied he knew they were being put on Holocaust trains and claimed that those displaced were, "Completely free and their families were still in their apartments". He also said: " ... en route to my ministry on the city highway, I could see ... crowds of people on the platform of nearby Nikolassee Railroad Station. I knew that these must be Berlin Jews who were being evacuated. I am sure that an oppressive feeling struck me as I drove past. I presumably had a sense of somber events." Matthias Schmidt said Speer had personally inspected concentration camps and described his comments as an "outright farce". Martin Kitchen described Speer's often repeated line that he knew nothing of the "dreadful things" as hollow—not only was he fully aware of the fate of the Jews, he actively participated in their persecution.
As Germany started World War II in Europe, Speer instituted quick-reaction squads to construct roads or clear away debris; before long, these units would be used to clear bomb sites. Speer used forced Jewish labor on these projects, in addition to regular German workers. Construction stopped on the Berlin and Nüremberg plans at the outbreak of war. Though stockpiling of materials and other work continued, this slowed to a halt as more resources were needed for the armament industry. Speer's offices undertook building work for each branch of the military, and for the SS, using slave labor. Speer's building work made him among the wealthiest of the Nazi elite. |
Albert Speer | Minister of Armaments | Minister of Armaments |
Albert Speer | Appointment and increasing power | Appointment and increasing power
thumb|260x260px|Albert Speer at an exhibition in Lisbon in 1942 with the President of Portugal
As one of the younger and more ambitious men in Hitler's inner circle, Speer was approaching the height of his power. In 1938, Prussian Minister President Hermann Göring had appointed him to the Prussian State Council. In 1941, he was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 2 (Berlin–West). On 8 February 1942, Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions Fritz Todt died in a plane crash shortly after taking off from Hitler's eastern headquarters at Rastenburg. Speer arrived there the previous evening and accepted Todt's offer to fly with him to Berlin. Speer cancelled some hours before take-off because the previous night he had been up late in a meeting with Hitler. Hitler appointed Speer in Todt's place. Martin Kitchen, a British historian, says that the choice was not surprising. Speer was loyal to Hitler, and his experience building prisoner of war camps and other structures for the military qualified him for the job. Speer succeeded Todt not only as Reich Minister but in all his other powerful positions, including Inspector General of German Roadways, Inspector General for Water and Energy and Head of the Nazi Party's Office of Technology. At the same time, Hitler also appointed Speer as head of the Organisation Todt, a massive, government-controlled construction company. Characteristically Hitler did not give Speer any clear remit; he was left to fight his contemporaries in the regime for power and control. As an example, he wanted to be given power over all armaments issues under Göring's Four Year Plan. Göring was reluctant to grant this. However, Speer secured Hitler's support, and on 1 March 1942, Göring signed a decree naming Speer "General Plenipotentiary for Armament Tasks" in the Four Year Plan. Speer proved to be ambitious, unrelenting and ruthless. Speer set out to gain control not just of armaments production in the army, but in the whole armed forces. It did not immediately dawn on his political rivals that his calls for rationalization and reorganization were hiding his desire to sideline them and take control. By April 1942, Speer had persuaded Göring to create a three-member Central Planning Board within the Four Year Plan, which he used to obtain supreme authority over procurement and allocation of raw materials and scheduling of production in order to consolidate German war production in a single agency.
Speer was fêted at the time, and in the post-war era, for performing an "armaments miracle" in which German war production dramatically increased. This miracle was brought to a halt in the summer of 1943 by, among other factors, the first sustained Allied bombing. Other factors probably contributed to the increase more than Speer himself. Germany's armaments production had already begun to result in increases under his predecessor, Todt. Naval armaments were not under Speer's supervision until October 1943, nor the Luftwaffe's armaments until June of the following year. Yet each showed comparable increases in production despite not being under Speer's control. Another factor that produced the boom in ammunition was the policy of allocating more coal to the steel industry. Production of every type of weapon peaked in June and July 1944, but there was now a severe shortage of fuel. After August 1944, oil from the Romanian fields was no longer available. Oil production became so low that any possibility of offensive action became impossible and weaponry lay idle.
As Minister of Armaments, Speer was responsible for supplying weapons to the army. With Hitler's full agreement, he decided to prioritize tank production, and he was given unrivaled power to ensure success. Hitler was closely involved with the design of the tanks, but kept changing his mind about the specifications. This delayed the program, and Speer was unable to remedy the situation. In consequence, despite tank production having the highest priority, relatively little of the armaments budget was spent on it. This led to a significant German Army failure at the Battle of Prokhorovka, a major turning point on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Red Army.thumb|left|upright|Speer (wearing Organisation Todt armband) and Heer general Eduard Dietl at Rovaniemi Airport in Finland, December 1943
As head of Organisation Todt, Speer was directly involved in the construction and alteration of concentration camps. He agreed to expand Auschwitz and some other camps, allocating 13.7 million Reichsmarks for the work to be carried out. This allowed an extra 300 huts to be built at Auschwitz, increasing the total human capacity to 132,000. Included in the building works was material to build gas chambers, crematoria and morgues. The SS called this "Professor Speer's Special Programme".
Speer realized that with six million workers drafted into the armed forces, there was a labor shortage in the war economy, and not enough workers for his factories. In response, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel as a "manpower dictator" to obtain new workers. Speer and Sauckel cooperated closely to meet Speer's labor demands. Hitler gave Sauckel a free hand to obtain labor, something that delighted Speer, who had requested 1,000,000 "voluntary" laborers to meet the need for armament workers. Sauckel had whole villages in France, Holland and Belgium forcibly rounded up and shipped to Speer's factories. Sauckel obtained new workers often using the most brutal methods. In occupied areas of the Soviet Union, that had been subject to partisan action, civilian men and women were rounded up en masse and sent to work forcibly in Germany. By April 1943, Sauckel had supplied 1,568,801 "voluntary" laborers, forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners to Speer for use in his armaments factories. It was for the maltreatment of these people that Speer was principally convicted at the Nuremberg trials. |
Albert Speer | Consolidation of arms production | Consolidation of arms production
thumb|Speer with Luftwaffe field marshal Erhard Milch and aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt, May 1944
Following his appointment as Minister of Armaments, Speer was in control of armaments production solely for the Army. He coveted control of the production of armaments for the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine as well. He set about extending his power and influence with unexpected ambition. His close relationship with Hitler provided him with political protection, and he was able to outwit and outmaneuver his rivals in the regime. Hitler's cabinet was dismayed at his tactics, but, regardless, he was able to accumulate new responsibilities and more power. By July 1943, he had gained control of armaments production for the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. In August 1943, he took control of most of the Ministry of Economics, to become, in Admiral Dönitz's words, "Europe's economic dictator". His formal title was changed on 2 September 1943, to "Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production". He had become one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany.
Speer and his hand-picked director of submarine construction believed that the shipbuilding industry was being held back by outdated methods, and revolutionary new approaches imposed by outsiders would dramatically improve output. This belief proved incorrect, and Speer and Merker's attempt to build the Kriegsmarines new generation of submarines, the Type XXI and Type XXIII, as prefabricated sections at different facilities rather than at single dockyards contributed to the failure of this strategically important program. The designs were rushed into production, but the completed submarines were crippled by construction flaws. While dozens of submarines were built, few ever entered service.
In December 1943, Speer visited Organisation Todt workers in Lapland, where he seriously damaged his knee and was incapacitated for several months. He was under the dubious care of Professor Karl Gebhardt at a medical clinic called Hohenlychen where patients "mysteriously failed to survive". In mid-January 1944, Speer had a lung embolism and fell seriously ill. Concerned about retaining power, he did not appoint a deputy and continued to direct work of the Armaments Ministry from his bedside. Speer's illness coincided with the Allied "Big Week", a series of bombing raids on the German aircraft factories that were a devastating blow to aircraft production. His political rivals used the opportunity to undermine his authority and damage his reputation with Hitler. He lost Hitler's unconditional support and began to lose power.
thumb| Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Generaloberst Alfred Jodl and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer brought New Year's greetings "to the Führer" on January 1, 1945.
In response to the Allied Big Week, Adolf Hitler authorized the creation of a Fighter Staff committee. Its aim was to ensure the preservation and growth of fighter aircraft production. The task force was established by 1 March 1944, orders of Speer, with support from Erhard Milch of the Reich Aviation Ministry. Production of German fighter aircraft more than doubled between 1943 and 1944. The growth, however, consisted in large part of models that were becoming obsolescent and proved easy prey for Allied aircraft. On 1 August 1944, Speer merged the Fighter Staff into a newly formed Armament Staff committee.
The Fighter Staff committee was instrumental in bringing about the increased exploitation of slave labor in the war economy. The SS provided 64,000 prisoners for 20 separate projects from various concentration camps including Mittelbau-Dora. Prisoners worked for Junkers, Messerschmitt, Henschel and BMW, among others. To increase production, Speer introduced a system of punishments for his workforce. Those who feigned illness, slacked off, sabotaged production or tried to escape were denied food or sent to concentration camps. In 1944, this became endemic; over half a million workers were arrested. By this time, 140,000 people were working in Speer's underground factories. These factories were death-traps; discipline was brutal, with regular executions. There were so many corpses at the Dora underground factory, for example, that the crematorium was overwhelmed. Speer's own staff described the conditions there as "hell".
The largest technological advance under Speer's command came through the rocket program. It began in 1932 but had not supplied any weaponry. Speer enthusiastically supported the program and in March 1942 made an order for A4 rockets, the predecessor of the world's first ballistic missile, the V-2 rocket. The rockets were researched at a facility in Peenemünde along with the V-1 flying bomb. The V-2's first target was Paris on 8 September 1944. The program, while advanced, proved to be an impediment to the war economy. The large capital investment was not repaid in military effectiveness. The rockets were built at an underground factory at Mittelwerk. Labor to build the A4 rockets came from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Of the 60,000 people who ended up at the camp, 20,000 died due to the appalling conditions.
On 14 April 1944, Speer lost control of Organisation Todt to his deputy, Franz Xaver Dorsch. He opposed the assassination attempt against Hitler on 20 July 1944. He was not involved in the plot, and played a minor role in the regime's efforts to regain control over Berlin after Hitler survived. After the plot Speer's rivals attacked some of his closest allies and his management system fell out of favor with radicals in the party. He lost yet more authority. |
Albert Speer | Defeat of Nazi Germany | Defeat of Nazi Germany
thumb|Speer (left), Karl Dönitz and Alfred Jodl (right) after their arrest by the British Army in Flensburg in Northern Germany in May 1945
Losses of territory and a dramatic expansion of the Allied strategic bombing campaign caused the collapse of the German economy from late 1944. Air attacks on the transport network were particularly effective, as they cut the main centres of production off from essential coal supplies. In January 1945, Speer told Goebbels that armaments production could be sustained for at least a year. However, he concluded that the war was lost after Soviet forces captured the important Silesian industrial region later that month. Nevertheless, Speer believed that Germany should continue the war for as long as possible with the goal of winning better conditions from the Allies than the unconditional surrender they insisted upon. During January and February, Speer claimed that his ministry would deliver "decisive weapons" and a large increase in armaments production which would "bring about a dramatic change on the battlefield". Speer gained control over the railways in February, and asked Heinrich Himmler to supply concentration camp prisoners to work on their repair.
thumb|upright|Survivors of the Mühldorf concentration camp upon liberation in 1945. Mühldorf supplied slave workers for the Weingut I project.
By mid-March, Speer had accepted that Germany's economy would collapse within the next eight weeks. While he sought to frustrate directives to destroy industrial facilities in areas at risk of capture, so that they could be used after the war, he still supported the war's continuation. Speer provided Hitler with a memorandum on 15 March, which detailed Germany's dire economic situation and sought approval to cease demolitions of infrastructure. Three days later, he also proposed to Hitler that Germany's remaining military resources be concentrated along the Rhine and Vistula rivers in an attempt to prolong the fighting. This ignored military realities, as the German armed forces were unable to match the Allies' firepower and were facing total defeat. Hitler rejected Speer's proposal to cease demolitions. Instead, he issued the "Nero Decree" on 19 March, which called for the destruction of all infrastructure as the army retreated. Speer was appalled by this order, and persuaded several key military and political leaders to ignore it. During a meeting with Speer on 28/29 March, Hitler rescinded the decree and gave him authority over demolitions. Speer ended them, though the army continued to blow up bridges.
By April, little was left of the armaments industry, and Speer had few official duties. Speer visited the Führerbunker on 22 April for the last time. He met Hitler and toured the damaged Chancellery before leaving Berlin to return to Hamburg. Speer would later claim in his memoirs that during this visit he "confessed to Hitler [...] that he was disobeying his 'scorched-earth' policy", an assertion which has been described as "pure invention" by historian Richard J. Evans. On 29 April, the day before committing suicide, Hitler dictated a final political testament which dropped Speer from the successor government. Speer was to be replaced by his subordinate, Karl-Otto Saur. Speer was disappointed that Hitler had not selected him as his successor. After Hitler's death, Speer offered his services to Hitler's successor, Karl Dönitz. On 2 May, Dönitz asked Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk to form a new government, and discussions went on about the formation of the administration for the next few days. On May 5, Schwerin von Krosigk presented his cabinet (known as the Flensburg government) and Speer was named as Minister of Industry and Production. Speer provided information to the Allies, regarding the effects of the air war, and on a broad range of subjects, beginning on 10 May. On 23 May, two weeks after the surrender of German forces, British troops arrested the members of the Flensburg Government and brought Nazi Germany to a formal end. |
Albert Speer | Post-war | Post-war |
Albert Speer | Nuremberg trial | Nuremberg trial
thumb|Speer at the Nuremberg trial
Speer was taken to several internment centres for Nazi officials and interrogated. In September 1945, he was told that he would be tried for war crimes, and several days later, he was moved to Nuremberg and incarcerated there. Speer was indicted on four counts: participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; war crimes; and crimes against humanity.
The chief United States prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, of the U.S. Supreme Court said, "Speer joined in planning and executing the program to dragoon prisoners of war and foreign workers into German war industries, which waxed in output while the workers waned in starvation." Speer's attorney, Hans Flächsner, successfully contrasted Speer from other defendants and portrayed him as an artist thrust into political life who had always remained a non-ideologue.
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labor and forced labor. He was acquitted on the other two counts. He had claimed that he was unaware of Nazi extermination plans, and the Allies had no proof that he was aware. His claim was revealed to be false in a private correspondence written in 1971 and publicly disclosed in 2007. On 1 October 1946, he was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment. While three of the eight judges (two Soviet and American Francis Biddle) advocated the death penalty for Speer, the other judges did not, and a compromise sentence was reached after two days of discussions. |
Albert Speer | Imprisonment | Imprisonment
On 18 July 1947, Speer was transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin to serve his prison term. There he was known as Prisoner Number Five. Speer's parents died while he was incarcerated. His father, who died in 1947, despised the Nazis and was silent upon meeting Hitler. His mother died in 1952. As a Nazi Party member, she had greatly enjoyed dining with Hitler. Wolters and longtime Speer secretary Annemarie Kempf, while not permitted direct communication with Speer in Spandau, did what they could to help his family and carry out the requests Speer put in letters to his wife—the only written communication he was officially allowed. Beginning in 1948, Speer had the services of Toni Proost, a sympathetic Dutch orderly, to smuggle mail and his writings.
thumb|left|Speer spent most of his sentence at Spandau Prison.
In 1949, Wolters opened a bank account for Speer and began fundraising among those architects and industrialists who had benefited from Speer's activities during the war. Initially, the funds were used only to support Speer's family, but increasingly the money was used for other purposes. They paid for Toni Proost to go on holiday, and for bribes to those who might be able to secure Speer's release. Once Speer became aware of the existence of the fund, he sent detailed instructions about what to do with the money. Wolters raised a total of DM158,000 for Speer over the final seventeen years of his sentence.
The prisoners were forbidden to write memoirs. Speer was able to have his writings sent to Wolters, however, and they eventually amounted to 20,000 pages. He had completed his memoirs by November 1953, and they became the basis of Inside the Third Reich. In Spandau Diaries, Speer aimed to present himself as a tragic hero who had made a Faustian bargain for which he endured a harsh prison sentence.
Much of Speer's energy was dedicated to keeping fit, both physically and mentally, during his long confinement. Spandau had a large enclosed yard where inmates were allocated plots of land for gardening. Speer created an elaborate garden complete with lawns, flower beds, shrubbery, and fruit trees. To make his daily walks around the garden more engaging, Speer embarked on an imaginary trip around the globe. Speer started his “walk” from Berlin and went eastward across the entirety of Eurasia, crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and then traveled south down the west coast of North America. Carefully measuring distance travelled each day, he mapped distances to real-world geography. He had walked more than , ending his sentence near Guadalajara, Mexico. Speer also read, studied architectural journals, and brushed up on English and French. In his writings, Speer claimed to have finished five thousand books while in prison. His sentence of twenty years amounted to 7,305 days, which only allotted one and a half days per book.
Speer's supporters maintained calls for his release. Among those who pledged support for his sentence to be commuted were Charles de Gaulle and US diplomat George Wildman Ball. Willy Brandt was an advocate of his release, putting an end to the de-Nazification proceedings against him, which could have caused his property to be confiscated. Speer's efforts for an early release came to naught. The Soviet Union, having demanded a death sentence at trial, was unwilling to entertain a reduced sentence. Speer served a full term and was released at midnight on 1 October 1966. |
Albert Speer | Release and later life | Release and later life
Speer's release from prison was a worldwide media event. Reporters and photographers crowded both the street outside Spandau and the lobby of the Hotel Berlin where Speer spent the night. He said little, reserving most comments for a major interview published in Der Spiegel in November 1966. Although he stated he hoped to resume an architectural career, his sole project, a collaboration for a brewery, was unsuccessful. Instead, he revised his Spandau writings into two autobiographical books, Inside the Third Reich (in German, Erinnerungen, or Reminiscences) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. He later published a work about Himmler and the SS, which has been published in English as The Slave State: Heinrich Himmler's Masterplan for SS Supremacy or Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire (in German, Der Sklavenstaat - Meine Auseinandersetzung mit der SS). Speer was aided in shaping the works by Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler from the publishing house Ullstein. He found himself unable to re-establish a relationship with his children, even with his son Albert, who had also become an architect. According to Speer's daughter Hilde Schramm, "One by one, my sister and brothers gave up. There was no communication." He provided financial support for his brother Hermann after the war. However, his other brother Ernst died at the Battle of Stalingrad, despite repeated requests from his parents for Speer to repatriate him.
Following his release from Spandau, Speer donated the Chronicle, his personal diary, to the German Federal Archives. It had been edited by Wolters and made no mention of the Jews. David Irving discovered discrepancies between the deceptively edited Chronicle and independent documents. Speer asked Wolters to destroy the material he had omitted from his donation but Wolters refused and retained an original copy. Wolters' friendship with Speer deteriorated, and one year before Speer's death, Wolters gave Matthias Schmidt access to the unedited Chronicle. Schmidt authored the first book highly critical of Speer.
Speer's memoirs were a phenomenal success. The public was fascinated by an inside view of the Third Reich and a major war criminal became a popular figure almost overnight. Importantly, he provided an alibi to older Germans who had been Nazis. If Speer, who had been so close to Hitler, had not known the full extent of the crimes of the Nazi regime and had just been "following orders", then they could tell themselves and others they too had done the same. So great was the need to believe this "Speer myth" that Fest and Siedler were able to strengthen it—even in the face of mounting historical evidence to the contrary. |
Albert Speer | Death | Death
thumb|Speer's grave in Heidelberg
Speer made himself widely available to historians and other enquirers. In October 1973, he made his first trip to Britain, flying to London to be interviewed on the BBC Midweek programme. In the same year, he appeared on the television programme The World at War. Speer returned to London in 1981 to participate in the BBC Newsnight programme. He suffered a stroke and died in London on 1 September.
He had remained married to his wife, but he had formed a relationship with a German woman living in London and was with her at the time of his death. His daughter, Margret Nissen, wrote in her 2005 memoirs that after his release from Spandau he spent all of his time constructing the "Speer Myth". |
Albert Speer | The Speer myth | The Speer myth |
Albert Speer | The Good Nazi | The Good Nazi
After his release from Spandau, Speer portrayed himself as the "good Nazi". He was well-educated, middle class, and bourgeois, and could contrast himself with those who, in the popular mind, typified "Bad Nazis". In his memoirs and interviews, he had distorted the truth and made so many major omissions that his lies became known as "myths". Speer even invented his own birth's circumstances, stating falsely that he was born at midday amid crashes of thunder and bells of the nearby Christ Church, whereas it was between three and five o'clock, and the church was built only some years after. Speer took his myth-making to a mass media level and his "cunning apologies" were reproduced frequently in post-war Germany. Isabell Trommer writes in her biography of Speer that Fest and Siedler were co-authors of Speer's memoirs and co-creators of his myths. In return they were paid handsomely in royalties and other financial inducements. Speer, Siedler and Fest had constructed a masterpiece; the image of the "good Nazi" remained in place for decades, despite historical evidence indicating that it was false.
thumb|alt=Black and white photograph of a group of men wearing business suits raising their right arms in a Nazi salute|Speer during a visit to a munitions factory in May 1944
Speer had carefully constructed an image of himself as an apolitical technocrat who deeply regretted having failed to discover the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich. This construction was accepted almost at face value by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper when investigating the death of Adolf Hitler for British Intelligence and in writing The Last Days of Hitler. Trevor-Roper frequently refers to Speer as "a technocrat [who] nourished a technocrat's philosophy", one who cared only for his building projects or his ministerial duties, and who thought that politics was irrelevant, at least until Hitler's Nero Decree which Speer, according to his own telling, worked assiduously to counter. Trevor-Roper – who calls Speer an administrative genius whose basic instincts were peaceful and constructive – does take Speer to task, however, for his failure to recognize the immorality of Hitler and Nazism, calling him "the real criminal of Nazi Germany":
For ten years he sat at the very centre of political power; his keen intelligence diagnosed the nature and observed the mutations of Nazi government and policy; he saw and despised the personalities around him; he heard their outrageous orders and understood their fantastic ambitions; but he did nothing. Supposing politics to be irrelevant, he turned aside and built roads and bridges and factories, while the logical consequences of government by madmen emerged. Ultimately, when their emergence involved the ruin of all his work, Speer accepted the consequences and acted. Then it was too late; Germany had been destroyed.
After Speer's death, Matthias Schmidt published a book that demonstrated that Speer had ordered the eviction of Jews from their Berlin homes. By 1999, historians had amply demonstrated that Speer had lied extensively. Even so, public perceptions of Speer did not change substantially until Heinrich Breloer aired the biographical film Speer und Er on television in 2004. The film began a process of demystification and critical reappraisal of Speer. Adam Tooze in his book The Wages of Destruction said Speer had manoeuvred himself through the ranks of the regime skillfully and ruthlessly and that the idea he was a technocrat blindly carrying out orders was "absurd". Trommer said Speer was not an apolitical technocrat; instead, he was, in reality, one of the most powerful and unscrupulous leaders in the entire Nazi regime. Kitchen said Speer had deceived the Nuremberg Tribunal and post-war Germany. Brechtken said that if Speer's extensive involvement in the Holocaust had been known at the time of his trial he would have been sentenced to death.
The image of the "good Nazi" was supported by numerous Speer myths. In addition to the myth that he was an apolitical technocrat, he claimed he did not have full knowledge of the Holocaust or the persecution of the Jews. Another myth posits that Speer revolutionized the German war machine after his appointment as Minister of Armaments. He was credited with a dramatic increase in the shipment of arms that was widely reported as keeping Germany in the war. Another myth centered around a nonexistent plan to assassinate Hitler with poisonous gas. The idea for this myth came to him after he recalled the panic when car fumes came through an air ventilation system. He fabricated the additional details. Brechtken wrote that Speer's most brazen lie was fabricated during an interview with a French journalist in 1952. The journalist described an invented scenario in which Speer had refused Hitler's orders and Hitler had left with tears in his eyes. Speer liked the scenario so much that he included it in his memoirs. The journalist had unwittingly collaborated in creating one of his myths.
Speer also sought to portray himself as an opponent of Hitler's leadership. Despite his opposition to the 20 July plot, he falsely claimed in his memoirs to have been sympathetic to the plotters. He maintained Hitler was cool towards him for the remainder of his life after learning they had included him on a list of potential ministers. This formed a key element of the myths Speer encouraged. Speer also falsely claimed that he had realised the war was lost at an early stage, and thereafter worked to preserve the resources needed for the civilian population's survival. In reality, Speer had sought to prolong the war until further resistance was impossible, thus contributing to the large number of deaths and the extensive destruction Germany suffered during the final months of the war. |
Albert Speer | Denial of responsibility | Denial of responsibility
thumb|left|alt=A group several hundred naked men is crowded in an enclosed courtyard, with garage doors visible on three sides.|New prisoners awaiting disinfection in the garage yard of Mauthausen concentration camp
Speer maintained at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs that he had no direct knowledge of the Holocaust. He admitted only to being uncomfortable around Jews in the published version of the Spandau Diaries. In his final statement at Nuremberg, Speer gave the impression of apologizing, although he did not directly admit any personal guilt and the only victim he mentioned was the German people. Historian Martin Kitchen states that Speer was actually "fully aware of what had happened to the Jews" and was "intimately involved in the 'Final Solution. Brechtken said Speer only admitted to a generalized responsibility for the Holocaust to hide his direct and actual responsibility. Speer was photographed with slave laborers at Mauthausen concentration camp during a visit on 31 March 1943; he also visited Gusen concentration camp. Although survivor Francisco Boix testified at the Nuremberg trials about Speer's visit, Taylor writes that, had the photo been available, he would have been hanged. In 2005, The Daily Telegraph reported that documents had surfaced indicating that Speer had approved the allocation of materials for the expansion of Auschwitz concentration camp after two of his assistants inspected the facility on a day when almost a thousand Jews were massacred. Heinrich Breloer, discussing the construction of Auschwitz, said Speer was not just a cog in the work—he was the "terror itself".
Speer did not deny being present at the Posen speeches to Nazi leaders at a conference in Posen (Poznań) on 6 October 1943, but claimed to have left the auditorium before Himmler said during his speech: "The grave decision had to be taken to cause this people to vanish from the earth", and later, "The Jews must be exterminated". Speer is mentioned several times in the speech, and Himmler addresses him directly. In 2007, The Guardian reported that a letter from Speer dated 23 December 1971, had been found in a collection of his correspondence with Hélène Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance fighter. In the letter, Speer says, "There is no doubt—I was present as Himmler announced on October 6, 1943, that all Jews would be killed." |
Albert Speer | Armaments miracle | Armaments miracle
thumb|upright=1.4|right|The German city of Cologne in ruins at the end of the war
Speer was credited with an "armaments miracle". During the winter of 1941–42, in the light of Germany's disastrous defeat in the Battle of Moscow, the German leadership including Friedrich Fromm, Georg Thomas and Fritz Todt had come to the conclusion that the war could not be won. The rational position to adopt was to seek a political solution that would end the war without defeat. Speer in response used his propaganda expertise to display a new dynamism of the war economy. He produced spectacular statistics, claiming a sixfold increase in munitions production, a fourfold increase in artillery production, and he sent further propaganda to the newsreels of the country. He was able to curtail the discussion that the war should be ended.
The armaments "miracle" was a myth; Speer had used statistical manipulation to support his claims. The production of armaments did rise; however, this was due to the normal causes of reorganization before Speer came to office, the relentless mobilization of slave labor and a deliberate reduction in the quality of output to favor quantity. By July 1943 Speer's armaments propaganda became irrelevant because a catalogue of dramatic defeats on the battlefield meant the prospect of losing the war could no longer be hidden from the German public. |
Albert Speer | Architectural legacy | Architectural legacy
thumb|alt=Colour photograph of a cylindrical structure|Schwerbelastungskörper in 2011
Little remains of Speer's personal architectural works, other than the plans and photographs. No buildings designed by Speer during the Nazi era are extant in Berlin, other than the four entrance pavilions and underpasses leading to the Victory Column, or Siegessäule, and the Schwerbelastungskörper, a heavy load-bearing body built around 1941. The concrete cylinder, high, was used to measure ground subsidence as part of feasibility studies for a massive triumphal arch and other large structures planned within Hitler's post-war renewal project for the city of Berlin as the world capital Germania. The cylinder is now a protected landmark and is open to the public. The tribune of the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg, though partly demolished, can also be seen.
During the war, the Speer-designed New Reich Chancellery was largely destroyed by air raids and in the Battle of Berlin. The exterior walls survived, but they were eventually dismantled by the Soviets. Unsubstantiated rumors have claimed that the remains were used for other building projects such as the Humboldt University, Mohrenstraße metro station and Soviet war memorials in Berlin. |
Albert Speer | See also | See also
Speer Goes to Hollywood
Downfall, 2004 German film where he was portrayed by actor Heino Ferch
Legion Speer
Transportflotte Speer
Transportkorps Speer
Hermann Giesler |
Albert Speer | References | References
Informational notes
Citations
Bibliography
Printed sources
Online sources
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Albert Speer | Further reading | Further reading
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Albert Speer | External links | External links
Francisco Boix identifies Speer at Nuremberg
Albert Speer: Chief Architect of the Third Reich - warfarehistorynetwork.com
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Albert Speer | Table of Content | short description, Early years and personal life, Party architect and government functionary, Joining the Nazis (1931–1934), Nazi architect (1934–1937), Berlin's General Building Inspector (1937–1942), Minister of Armaments, Appointment and increasing power, Consolidation of arms production, Defeat of Nazi Germany, Post-war, Nuremberg trial, Imprisonment, Release and later life, Death, The Speer myth, The Good Nazi, Denial of responsibility, Armaments miracle, Architectural legacy, See also, References, Further reading, External links |
Apiaceae | short description | Apiaceae () or Umbelliferae is a family of mostly aromatic flowering plants named after the type genus Apium, and commonly known as the celery, carrot, or parsley family, or simply as umbellifers. It is the 16th-largest family of flowering plants, with more than 3,800 species in about 446 genera,Stevens, P.F. (2001 onwards). "APIACEAE Lindley, nom. cons." Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Retrieved 16 December 2022. including such well-known, and economically important plants as ajwain, angelica, anise, asafoetida, caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, lovage, cow parsley, parsley, parsnip and sea holly, as well as silphium, a plant whose exact identity is unclear and which may be extinct.
The family Apiaceae includes a significant number of phototoxic species, such as giant hogweed, and a smaller number of highly poisonous species, such as poison hemlock, water hemlock, spotted cowbane, fool's parsley, and various species of water dropwort. |
Apiaceae | Description | Description
Most Apiaceae are annual, biennial or perennial herbs (frequently with the leaves aggregated toward the base), though a minority are woody shrubs or small trees such as Bupleurum fruticosum. Their leaves are of variable size, and alternately arranged, or with the upper leaves becoming nearly opposite. The leaves may be petiolate or sessile. There are no stipules but the petioles are frequently sheathing, and the leaves may be perfoliate. The leaf blade is usually dissected, ternate, or pinnatifid, but simple, and entire in some genera, e.g. Bupleurum. Commonly, their leaves emit a marked smell when crushed, aromatic to fetid, but absent in some species.
The defining characteristic of this family is the inflorescence, the flowers nearly always aggregated in terminal umbels, that may be simple or more commonly compound, often umbelliform cymes. The flowers are usually perfect (hermaphroditic), and actinomorphic, but there may be zygomorphic flowers at the edge of the umbel, as in carrot (Daucus carota) and coriander, with petals of unequal size, the ones pointing outward from the umbel larger than the ones pointing inward. Some are andromonoecious, polygamomonoecious, or even dioecious (as in Acronema), with a distinct calyx, and corolla, but the calyx is often highly reduced, to the point of being undetectable in many species, while the corolla can be white, yellow, pink or purple. The flowers are nearly perfectly pentamerous, with five petals and five stamens.
There is often variation in the functionality of the stamens even within a single inflorescence. Some flowers are functionally staminate (where a pistil may be present but has no ovules capable of being fertilized) while others are functionally pistillate (where stamens are present but their anthers do not produce viable pollen). Pollination of one flower by the pollen of a different flower of the same plant (geitonogamy) is common. The gynoecium consists of two carpels fused into a single, bicarpellate pistil with an inferior ovary. Stylopodia support two styles, and secrete nectar, attracting pollinators like flies, mosquitoes, gnats, beetles, moths, and bees. The fruit is a schizocarp consisting of two fused carpels that separate at maturity into two mericarps, each containing a single seed. The fruits of many species are dispersed by wind but others such as those of Daucus spp., are covered in bristles, which may be hooked in sanicle Sanicula europaea and thus catch in the fur of animals. The seeds have an oily endospermWatson, L., Dallwitz, M.J. (1992 onwards) The families of flowering plants: descriptions, illustrations, identification, and information retrieval . Version: 4 March 2011. and often contain essential oils, containing aromatic compounds that are responsible for the flavour of commercially important umbelliferous seed such as anise, cumin and coriander. The shape and details of the ornamentation of the ripe fruits are important for identification to species level. |
Apiaceae | Taxonomy | Taxonomy
Apiaceae was first described by John Lindley in 1836.Lindley, J. (1836) An Introduction to the Natural System of Botany, 2nd Edition. Longman, London. The name is derived from the type genus Apium, which was originally used by Pliny the Elder circa 50 AD for a celery-like plant. The alternative name for the family, Umbelliferae, derives from the inflorescence being generally in the form of a compound umbel. The family was one of the first to be recognized as a distinct group in Jacques Daleschamps' 1586 Historia generalis plantarum. With Robert Morison's 1672 Plantarum umbelliferarum distribution nova it became the first group of plants for which a systematic study was published.
The family is solidly placed within the Apiales order in the APG III system. It is closely related to Araliaceae and the boundaries between these families remain unclear. Traditionally groups within the family have been delimited largely based on fruit morphology, and the results from this have not been congruent with the more recent molecular phylogenetic analyses. The subfamilial and tribal classification for the family is currently in a state of flux, with many of the groups being found to be grossly paraphyletic or polyphyletic. |
Apiaceae | Classification and phylogeny | Classification and phylogeny
Prior to molecular phylogenetic studies, the family was subdivided primarily based on fruit characteristics. Molecular phylogenetic analyses from the mid-1990s onwards have shown that fruit characters evolved in parallel many times, so that using them in classification resulted in units that were not monophyletic. In 2004, it was proposed that Apiaceae should be divided into four subfamilies:
Apioideae Seem.
Azorelloideae G.M.Plunkett & Lowry
Mackinlayoideae G.M.Plunkett & Lowry
Saniculoideae Burnett
Apioideae is by far the largest subfamily with about 90% of the genera. Most subsequent studies have supported this division, although leaving some genera unplaced. A 2021 study suggested the relationships shown in the following cladogram.
The Platysace clade and the genera Klotzschia and Hermas fell outside the four subfamilies. It was suggested that they could be accommodated in subfamilies of their own. Phlyctidocarpa was formerly placed in the subfamily Apioideae, but if kept there makes Apioideae paraphyletic. It could be placed in an enlarged Saniculoideae, or restored to Apioideae if the latter were expanded to include Saniculoideae.
The subfamilies can be further divided into tribes and clades, with many clades falling outside formally recognized tribes. |
Apiaceae | Genera | Genera
The number of genera accepted by sources varies. , Plants of the World Online (PoWO) accepted 444 genera, while GRIN Taxonomy accepted 462. The PoWO genera are not a subset of those in GRIN; for example, Haloselinum is accepted by PoWO but not by GRIN, while Halosciastrum is accepted by GRIN but not by PoWO, which treats it as a synonym of Angelica. The Angiosperm Phylogeny Website had an "approximate list" of 446 genera. |
Apiaceae | Ecology | Ecology
The black swallowtail butterfly, Papilio polyxenes, uses the family Apiaceae for food and host plants for oviposition.Hall, Donald W. 2011 "Featured Creatures - Eastern Black Swallowtail." Entomology and Nematology Department, University of Florida. http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/bfly/bfly2/eastern_black_swallowtail.htm#life The 22-spot ladybird is also commonly found eating mildew on these plants. |
Apiaceae | Uses | Uses
Many members of this family are cultivated for various purposes. Parsnip (Pastinaca sativa), carrot (Daucus carota) and Hamburg parsley (Petroselinum crispum) produce tap roots that are large enough to be useful as food. Many species produce essential oils in their leaves or fruits and as a result are flavourful aromatic herbs. Examples are parsley (Petroselinum crispum), coriander (Coriandrum sativum), culantro, and dill (Anethum graveolens). The seeds may be used in cuisine, as with coriander (Coriandrum sativum), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), cumin (Cuminum cyminum), and caraway (Carum carvi).
Other notable cultivated Apiaceae include chervil (Anthriscus cerefolium), angelica (Angelica spp.), celery (Apium graveolens), arracacha (Arracacia xanthorrhiza), sea holly (Eryngium spp.), asafoetida (Ferula asafoetida), galbanum (Ferula gummosa), cicely (Myrrhis odorata), anise (Pimpinella anisum), lovage (Levisticum officinale), and hacquetia (Sanicula epipactis). |
Apiaceae | Cultivation | Cultivation
Generally, all members of this family are best cultivated in the cool-season garden; they may not grow at all if the soils are too warm. Almost every widely cultivated plant of this group is a considered useful as a companion plant. One reason is that the tiny flowers, clustered into umbels, are well suited for ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and predatory flies, which drink nectar when not reproducing. They then prey upon insect pests on nearby plants. Some of the members of this family considered "herbs" produce scents that are believed to mask the odours of nearby plants, thus making them harder for insect pests to find. |
Apiaceae | Other uses | Other uses
The poisonous members of the Apiaceae have been used for a variety of purposes globally. The poisonous Oenanthe crocata has been used as an aid in suicides, and arrow poisons have been made from various other family species.
Daucus carota has been used as coloring for butter.
Dorema ammoniacum, Ferula galbaniflua, and Ferula moschata (sumbul) are sources of incense.
The woody Azorella compacta Phil. has been used in South America for fuel. |
Apiaceae | Toxicity | Toxicity
Many species in the family Apiaceae produce phototoxic substances (called furanocoumarins) that sensitize human skin to sunlight. Contact with plant parts that contain furanocoumarins, followed by exposure to sunlight, may cause phytophotodermatitis, a serious skin inflammation. Phototoxic species include Ammi majus, Notobubon galbanum, the parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) and numerous species of the genus Heracleum, especially the giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum). Of all the plant species that have been reported to induce phytophotodermatitis, approximately half belong to the family Apiaceae.
The family Apiaceae also includes a smaller number of poisonous species, including poison hemlock, water hemlock, spotted cowbane, fool's parsley, and various species of water dropwort.
Some members of the family Apiaceae, including carrot, celery, fennel, parsley and parsnip, contain polyynes, an unusual class of organic compounds that exhibit cytotoxic effects. |
Apiaceae | References | References |
Apiaceae | Further reading | Further reading
Constance, L. (1971). "History of the classification of Umbelliferae (Apiaceae)." in Heywood, V. H. [ed.], The biology and chemistry of the Umbelliferae, 1–11. Academic Press, London.
Cronquist, A. (1968). The Evolution and Classification of Flowering Plants. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
French, D. H. (1971). "Ethnobotany of the Umbelliferae." in Heywood, V. H. [ed.], The biology and chemistry of the Umbelliferae, 385–412. Academic Press, London.
Hegnauer, R. (1971) "Chemical Patterns and Relationships of Umbelliferae." in Heywood, V. H. [ed.], The biology and chemistry of the Umbelliferae, 267–277. Academic Press, London.
Heywood, V. H. (1971). "Systematic survey of Old World Umbelliferae." in Heywood, V. H. [ed.], The biology and chemistry of the Umbelliferae, 31–41. Academic Press, London.
Judd, W. S. et al. (1999). Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc.
Nieto Feliner, Gonzalo; Jury, Stephen Leonard & Herrero Nieto, Alberto (eds.) Flora iberica. Plantas vasculares de la Península Ibérica e Islas Baleares. Vol. X. "Araliaceae-Umbelliferae" (2003) Madrid: Real Jardín Botánico, CSIC (in Spanish).
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Apiaceae | External links | External links
Umbelliferae at The Families of Flowering Plants (DELTA)
Apiaceae at Discover Life
Umbellifer Resource Centre at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Umbellifer Information Server at Moscow State University
Category:Asterid families |
Apiaceae | Table of Content | short description, Description, Taxonomy, Classification and phylogeny, Genera, Ecology, Uses, Cultivation, Other uses, Toxicity, References, Further reading, External links |
Axon | Short description | An axon (from Greek ἄξων áxōn, axis) or nerve fiber (or nerve fibre: see spelling differences) is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, in vertebrates, that typically conducts electrical impulses known as action potentials away from the nerve cell body. The function of the axon is to transmit information to different neurons, muscles, and glands. In certain sensory neurons (pseudounipolar neurons), such as those for touch and warmth, the axons are called afferent nerve fibers and the electrical impulse travels along these from the periphery to the cell body and from the cell body to the spinal cord along another branch of the same axon. Axon dysfunction can be the cause of many inherited and acquired neurological disorders that affect both the peripheral and central neurons. Nerve fibers are classed into three typesgroup A nerve fibers, group B nerve fibers, and group C nerve fibers. Groups A and B are myelinated, and group C are unmyelinated. These groups include both sensory fibers and motor fibers. Another classification groups only the sensory fibers as Type I, Type II, Type III, and Type IV.
An axon is one of two types of cytoplasmic protrusions from the cell body of a neuron; the other type is a dendrite. Axons are distinguished from dendrites by several features, including shape (dendrites often taper while axons usually maintain a constant radius), length (dendrites are restricted to a small region around the cell body while axons can be much longer), and function (dendrites receive signals whereas axons transmit them). Some types of neurons have no axon and transmit signals from their dendrites. In some species, axons can emanate from dendrites known as axon-carrying dendrites. No neuron ever has more than one axon; however in invertebrates such as insects or leeches the axon sometimes consists of several regions that function more or less independently of each other.
Axons are covered by a membrane known as an axolemma; the cytoplasm within an axon is called axoplasm. Most axons branch, in some cases very profusely. The end branches of an axon are called telodendria. The swollen end of a telodendron is known as the axon terminal or end-foot which joins the dendrite or cell body of another neuron forming a synaptic connection. Axons usually make contact with other neurons at junctions called synapses but can also make contact with muscle or gland cells. In some circumstances, the axon of one neuron may form a synapse with the dendrites of the same neuron, resulting in an autapse. At a synapse, the membrane of the axon closely adjoins the membrane of the target cell, and special molecular structures serve to transmit electrical or electrochemical signals across the gap. Some synaptic junctions appear along the length of an axon as it extends; these are called en passant boutons ("in passing boutons") and can be in the hundreds or even the thousands along one axon. Other synapses appear as terminals at the ends of axonal branches.
A single axon, with all its branches taken together, can target multiple parts of the brain and generate thousands of synaptic terminals. A bundle of axons make a nerve tract in the central nervous system, and a fascicle in the peripheral nervous system. In placental mammals the largest white matter tract in the brain is the corpus callosum, formed of some 200 million axons in the human brain. |
Axon | Anatomy | Anatomy
thumb|upright=1.4|Structure of a typical neuron in the peripheral nervous system
thumb|A dissected human brain, showing grey matter and white matter
Axons are the primary transmission lines of the nervous system, and as bundles they form nerves in the peripheral nervous system, or nerve tracts in the central nervous system (CNS). Some axons can extend up to one meter or more while others extend as little as one millimeter. The longest axons in the human body are those of the sciatic nerve, which run from the base of the spinal cord to the big toe of each foot. The diameter of axons is also variable. Most individual axons are microscopic in diameter (typically about one micrometer (μm) across). The largest mammalian axons can reach a diameter of up to 20 μm. The squid giant axon, which is specialized to conduct signals very rapidly, is close to 1 millimeter in diameter, the size of a small pencil lead. The numbers of axonal telodendria (the branching structures at the end of the axon) can also differ from one nerve fiber to the next. Axons in the CNS typically show multiple telodendria, with many synaptic end points. In comparison, the cerebellar granule cell axon is characterized by a single T-shaped branch node from which two parallel fibers extend. Elaborate branching allows for the simultaneous transmission of messages to a large number of target neurons within a single region of the brain.
There are two types of axons in the nervous system: myelinated and unmyelinated axons. Myelin is a layer of a fatty insulating substance, which is formed by two types of glial cells: Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes. In the peripheral nervous system Schwann cells form the myelin sheath of a myelinated axon. Oligodendrocytes form the insulating myelin in the CNS. Along myelinated nerve fibers, gaps in the myelin sheath known as nodes of Ranvier occur at evenly spaced intervals. The myelination enables an especially rapid mode of electrical impulse propagation called saltatory conduction.
The myelinated axons from the cortical neurons form the bulk of the neural tissue called white matter in the brain. The myelin gives the white appearance to the tissue in contrast to the grey matter of the cerebral cortex which contains the neuronal cell bodies. A similar arrangement is seen in the cerebellum. Bundles of myelinated axons make up the nerve tracts in the CNS, and where they cross the midline of the brain to connect opposite regions they are called commissures. The largest of these is the corpus callosum that connects the two cerebral hemispheres, and this has around 20 million axons.
The structure of a neuron is seen to consist of two separate functional regions, or compartmentsthe cell body together with the dendrites as one region, and the axonal region as the other. |
Axon | Axonal region | Axonal region
The axonal region or compartment, includes the axon hillock, the initial segment, the rest of the axon, and the axon telodendria, and axon terminals. It also includes the myelin sheath. The Nissl bodies that produce the neuronal proteins are absent in the axonal region. Proteins needed for the growth of the axon, and the removal of waste materials, need a framework for transport. This axonal transport is provided for in the axoplasm by arrangements of microtubules and type IV intermediate filaments known as neurofilaments. |
Axon | Axon hillock | Axon hillock
thumb|right|upright=1.75|Detail showing microtubules at axon hillock and initial segment.
The axon hillock is the area formed from the cell body of the neuron as it extends to become the axon. It precedes the initial segment. The received action potentials that are summed in the neuron are transmitted to the axon hillock for the generation of an action potential from the initial segment. |
Axon | Axonal initial segment | Axonal initial segment
The axonal initial segment (AIS) is a structurally and functionally separate microdomain of the axon. One function of the initial segment is to separate the main part of an axon from the rest of the neuron; another function is to help initiate action potentials. Both of these functions support neuron cell polarity, in which dendrites (and, in some cases the soma) of a neuron receive input signals at the basal region, and at the apical region the neuron's axon provides output signals.
The axon initial segment is unmyelinated and contains a specialized complex of proteins. It is between approximately 20 and 60 μm in length and functions as the site of action potential initiation. Both the position on the axon and the length of the AIS can change showing a degree of plasticity that can fine-tune the neuronal output. A longer AIS is associated with a greater excitability. Plasticity is also seen in the ability of the AIS to change its distribution and to maintain the activity of neural circuitry at a constant level.
The AIS is highly specialized for the fast conduction of nerve impulses. This is achieved by a high concentration of voltage-gated sodium channels in the initial segment where the action potential is initiated. The ion channels are accompanied by a high number of cell adhesion molecules and scaffold proteins that anchor them to the cytoskeleton. Interactions with ankyrin-G are important as it is the major organizer in the AIS.
In other cases as seen in rat studies an axon originates from a dendrite; such axons are said to have "dendritic origin". Some axons with dendritic origin similarly have a "proximal" initial segment that starts directly at the axon origin, while others have a "distal" initial segment, discernibly separated from the axon origin. In many species some of the neurons have axons that emanate from the dendrite and not from the cell body, and these are known as axon-carrying dendrites. In many cases, an axon originates at an axon hillock on the soma; such axons are said to have "somatic origin". Some axons with somatic origin have a "proximal" initial segment adjacent the axon hillock, while others have a "distal" initial segment, separated from the soma by an extended axon hillock. |
Axon | Axonal transport | Axonal transport
The axoplasm is the equivalent of cytoplasm in the cell. Microtubules form in the axoplasm at the axon hillock. They are arranged along the length of the axon, in overlapping sections, and all point in the same directiontowards the axon terminals. This is noted by the positive endings of the microtubules. This overlapping arrangement provides the routes for the transport of different materials from the cell body. Studies on the axoplasm has shown the movement of numerous vesicles of all sizes to be seen along cytoskeletal filamentsthe microtubules, and neurofilaments, in both directions between the axon and its terminals and the cell body.
Outgoing anterograde transport from the cell body along the axon, carries mitochondria and membrane proteins needed for growth to the axon terminal. Ingoing retrograde transport carries cell waste materials from the axon terminal to the cell body. Outgoing and ingoing tracks use different sets of motor proteins. Outgoing transport is provided by kinesin, and ingoing return traffic is provided by dynein. Dynein is minus-end directed. There are many forms of kinesin and dynein motor proteins, and each is thought to carry a different cargo. The studies on transport in the axon led to the naming of kinesin. |
Axon | Myelination | Myelination
thumb|left|TEM of a myelinated axon in cross-section.
thumb|upright|Cross section of an axon: (1) Axon (2) Nucleus
(3) Schwann cell (4) Myelin sheath (5) Neurilemma
In the nervous system, axons may be myelinated, or unmyelinated. This is the provision of an insulating layer, called a myelin sheath. The myelin membrane is unique in its relatively high lipid to protein ratio.
In the peripheral nervous system axons are myelinated by glial cells known as Schwann cells. In the central nervous system the myelin sheath is provided by another type of glial cell, the oligodendrocyte. Schwann cells myelinate a single axon. An oligodendrocyte can myelinate up to 50 axons.
The composition of myelin is different in the two types. In the CNS the major myelin protein is proteolipid protein, and in the PNS it is myelin basic protein. |
Axon | Nodes of Ranvier | Nodes of Ranvier
Nodes of Ranvier (also known as myelin sheath gaps) are short unmyelinated segments of a myelinated axon, which are found periodically interspersed between segments of the myelin sheath. Therefore, at the point of the node of Ranvier, the axon is reduced in diameter. These nodes are areas where action potentials can be generated. In saltatory conduction, electrical currents produced at each node of Ranvier are conducted with little attenuation to the next node in line, where they remain strong enough to generate another action potential. Thus in a myelinated axon, action potentials effectively "jump" from node to node, bypassing the myelinated stretches in between, resulting in a propagation speed much faster than even the fastest unmyelinated axon can sustain. |
Axon | Axon terminals | Axon terminals
An axon can divide into many branches called telodendria (Greek for 'end of tree'). At the end of each telodendron is an axon terminal (also called a terminal bouton or synaptic bouton, or end-foot). Axon terminals contain synaptic vesicles that store the neurotransmitter for release at the synapse. This makes multiple synaptic connections with other neurons possible. Sometimes the axon of a neuron may synapse onto dendrites of the same neuron, when it is known as an autapse. Some synaptic junctions appear along the length of an axon as it extends; these are called en passant boutons ("in passing boutons") and can be in the hundreds or even the thousands along one axon. |
Axon | Axonal varicosities | Axonal varicosities
In the normally developed brain, along the shaft of some axons are located pre-synaptic boutons also known as axonal varicosities and these have been found in regions of the hippocampus that function in the release of neurotransmitters. However, axonal varicosities are also present in neurodegenerative diseases where they interfere with the conduction of an action potential. Axonal varicosities are also the hallmark of traumatic brain injuries. Axonal damage is usually to the axon cytoskeleton disrupting transport. As a consequence protein accumulations such as amyloid-beta precursor protein can build up in a swelling resulting in a number of varicosities along the axon. |
Axon | Action potentials | Action potentials
thumb|upright=1.2|Synaptic connections from an axon
thumb|260px|Neurotransmitter released from presynaptic axon terminal, and transported across synaptic cleft to receptors on postsynaptic neuron|alt=The pre- and post-synaptic axons are separated by a short distance known as the synaptic cleft. Neurotransmitter released by pre-synaptic axons diffuse through the synaptic cleft to bind to and open ion channels in post-synaptic axons.
Most axons carry signals in the form of action potentials, which are discrete electrochemical impulses that travel rapidly along an axon, starting at the cell body and terminating at points where the axon makes synaptic contact with target cells. The defining characteristic of an action potential is that it is "all-or-nothing"every action potential that an axon generates has essentially the same size and shape. This all-or-nothing characteristic allows action potentials to be transmitted from one end of a long axon to the other without any reduction in size. There are, however, some types of neurons with short axons that carry graded electrochemical signals, of variable amplitude.
When an action potential reaches a presynaptic terminal, it activates the synaptic transmission process. The first step is rapid opening of calcium ion channels in the membrane of the axon, allowing calcium ions to flow inward across the membrane. The resulting increase in intracellular calcium concentration causes synaptic vesicles (tiny containers enclosed by a lipid membrane) filled with a neurotransmitter chemical to fuse with the axon's membrane and empty their contents into the extracellular space. The neurotransmitter is released from the presynaptic nerve through exocytosis. The neurotransmitter chemical then diffuses across to receptors located on the membrane of the target cell. The neurotransmitter binds to these receptors and activates them. Depending on the type of receptors that are activated, the effect on the target cell can be to excite the target cell, inhibit it, or alter its metabolism in some way. This entire sequence of events often takes place in less than a thousandth of a second. Afterward, inside the presynaptic terminal, a new set of vesicles is moved into position next to the membrane, ready to be released when the next action potential arrives. The action potential is the final electrical step in the integration of synaptic messages at the scale of the neuron.
Extracellular recordings of action potential propagation in axons has been demonstrated in freely moving animals. While extracellular somatic action potentials have been used to study cellular activity in freely moving animals such as place cells, axonal activity in both white and gray matter can also be recorded. Extracellular recordings of axon action potential propagation is distinct from somatic action potentials in three ways: 1. The signal has a shorter peak-trough duration (~150μs) than of pyramidal cells (~500μs) or interneurons (~250μs). 2. The voltage change is triphasic. 3. Activity recorded on a tetrode is seen on only one of the four recording wires. In recordings from freely moving rats, axonal signals have been isolated in white matter tracts including the alveus and the corpus callosum as well hippocampal gray matter.
In fact, the generation of action potentials in vivo is sequential in nature, and these sequential spikes constitute the digital codes in the neurons. Although previous studies indicate an axonal origin of a single spike evoked by short-term pulses, physiological signals in vivo trigger the initiation of sequential spikes at the cell bodies of the neurons.Rongjing Ge, Hao Qian and Jin-Hui Wang* (2011) Molecular Brain 4(19), 1~11Rongjing Ge, Hao Qian, Na Chen and Jin-Hui Wang* (2014) Molecular Brain 7(26):1-16
In addition to propagating action potentials to axonal terminals, the axon is able to amplify the action potentials, which makes sure a secure propagation of sequential action potentials toward the axonal terminal. In terms of molecular mechanisms, voltage-gated sodium channels in the axons possess lower threshold and shorter refractory period in response to short-term pulses. |
Axon | Development and growth | Development and growth |
Axon | Development | Development
The development of the axon to its target, is one of the six major stages in the overall development of the nervous system. Studies done on cultured hippocampal neurons suggest that neurons initially produce multiple neurites that are equivalent, yet only one of these neurites is destined to become the axon. It is unclear whether axon specification precedes axon elongation or vice versa, although recent evidence points to the latter. If an axon that is not fully developed is cut, the polarity can change and other neurites can potentially become the axon. This alteration of polarity only occurs when the axon is cut at least 10 μm shorter than the other neurites. After the incision is made, the longest neurite will become the future axon and all the other neurites, including the original axon, will turn into dendrites. Imposing an external force on a neurite, causing it to elongate, will make it become an axon. Nonetheless, axonal development is achieved through a complex interplay between extracellular signaling, intracellular signaling and cytoskeletal dynamics. |
Axon | Extracellular signaling | Extracellular signaling
The extracellular signals that propagate through the extracellular matrix surrounding neurons play a prominent role in axonal development. These signaling molecules include proteins, neurotrophic factors, and extracellular matrix and adhesion molecules.
Netrin (also known as UNC-6) a secreted protein, functions in axon formation. When the UNC-5 netrin receptor is mutated, several neurites are irregularly projected out of neurons and finally a single axon is extended anteriorly.Neuroglia and pioneer neurons express UNC-6 to provide global and local netrin cues for guiding migrations in C. elegans The neurotrophic factorsnerve growth factor (NGF), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and neurotrophin-3 (NTF3) are also involved in axon development and bind to Trk receptors.
The ganglioside-converting enzyme plasma membrane ganglioside sialidase (PMGS), which is involved in the activation of TrkA at the tip of neutrites, is required for the elongation of axons. PMGS asymmetrically distributes to the tip of the neurite that is destined to become the future axon. |
Axon | Intracellular signaling | Intracellular signaling
During axonal development, the activity of PI3K is increased at the tip of destined axon. Disrupting the activity of PI3K inhibits axonal development. Activation of PI3K results in the production of phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-trisphosphate (PtdIns) which can cause significant elongation of a neurite, converting it into an axon. As such, the overexpression of phosphatases that dephosphorylate PtdIns leads into the failure of polarization. |
Axon | Cytoskeletal dynamics | Cytoskeletal dynamics
The neurite with the lowest actin filament content will become the axon. PGMS concentration and f-actin content are inversely correlated; when PGMS becomes enriched at the tip of a neurite, its f-actin content is substantially decreased. In addition, exposure to actin-depolimerizing drugs and toxin B (which inactivates Rho-signaling) causes the formation of multiple axons. Consequently, the interruption of the actin network in a growth cone will promote its neurite to become the axon. |
Axon | Growth | Growth
thumb|right|upright|Axon of nine-day-old mouse with growth cone visible
Growing axons move through their environment via the growth cone, which is at the tip of the axon. The growth cone has a broad sheet-like extension called a lamellipodium which contain protrusions called filopodia. The filopodia are the mechanism by which the entire process adheres to surfaces and explores the surrounding environment. Actin plays a major role in the mobility of this system. Environments with high levels of cell adhesion molecules (CAMs) create an ideal environment for axonal growth. This seems to provide a "sticky" surface for axons to grow along. Examples of CAMs specific to neural systems include N-CAM, TAG-1an axonal glycoproteinand MAG, all of which are part of the immunoglobulin superfamily. Another set of molecules called extracellular matrix-adhesion molecules also provide a sticky substrate for axons to grow along. Examples of these molecules include laminin, fibronectin, tenascin, and perlecan. Some of these are surface bound to cells and thus act as short range attractants or repellents. Others are difusible ligands and thus can have long range effects.
Cells called guidepost cells assist in the guidance of neuronal axon growth. These cells that help axon guidance, are typically other neurons that are sometimes immature. When the axon has completed its growth at its connection to the target, the diameter of the axon can increase by up to five times, depending on the speed of conduction required.
It has also been discovered through research that if the axons of a neuron were damaged, as long as the soma (the cell body of a neuron) is not damaged, the axons would regenerate and remake the synaptic connections with neurons with the help of guidepost cells. This is also referred to as neuroregeneration.
Nogo-A is a type of neurite outgrowth inhibitory component that is present in the central nervous system myelin membranes (found in an axon). It has a crucial role in restricting axonal regeneration in adult mammalian central nervous system. In recent studies, if Nogo-A is blocked and neutralized, it is possible to induce long-distance axonal regeneration which leads to enhancement of functional recovery in rats and mouse spinal cord. This has yet to be done on humans. A recent study has also found that macrophages activated through a specific inflammatory pathway activated by the Dectin-1 receptor are capable of promoting axon recovery, also however causing neurotoxicity in the neuron. |
Axon | Length regulation | Length regulation
Axons vary largely in length from a few micrometers up to meters in some animals. This emphasizes that there must be a cellular length regulation mechanism allowing the neurons both to sense the length of their axons and to control their growth accordingly. It was discovered that motor proteins play an important role in regulating the length of axons. Based on this observation, researchers developed an explicit model for axonal growth describing how motor proteins could affect the axon length on the molecular level. These studies suggest that motor proteins carry signaling molecules from the soma to the growth cone and vice versa whose concentration oscillates in time with a length-dependent frequency. |
Axon | Classification | Classification
The axons of neurons in the human peripheral nervous system can be classified based on their physical features and signal conduction properties. Axons were known to have different thicknesses (from 0.1 to 20 μm) and these differences were thought to relate to the speed at which an action potential could travel along the axonits conductance velocity. Erlanger and Gasser proved this hypothesis, and identified several types of nerve fiber, establishing a relationship between the diameter of an axon and its nerve conduction velocity. They published their findings in 1941 giving the first classification of axons.
Axons are classified in two systems. The first one introduced by Erlanger and Gasser, grouped the fibers into three main groups using the letters A, B, and C. These groups, group A, group B, and group C include both the sensory fibers (afferents) and the motor fibers (efferents). The first group A, was subdivided into alpha, beta, gamma, and delta fibersAα, Aβ, Aγ, and Aδ. The motor neurons of the different motor fibers, were the lower motor neuronsalpha motor neuron, beta motor neuron, and gamma motor neuron having the Aα, Aβ, and Aγ nerve fibers, respectively.
Later findings by other researchers identified two groups of Aa fibers that were sensory fibers. These were then introduced into a system (Lloyd classification) that only included sensory fibers (though some of these were mixed nerves and were also motor fibers). This system refers to the sensory groups as Types and uses Roman numerals: Type Ia, Type Ib, Type II, Type III, and Type IV. |
Axon | Motor | Motor
Lower motor neurons have two kind of fibers:
+Motor fiber types Type Erlanger-GasserClassification Diameter(μm) Myelin Conduction velocity(meters/second) Associated muscle fibers Alpha (α) motor neuron Aα 13–20 Yes 80–120 Extrafusal muscle fibers Beta (β) motor neuron Aβ Gamma (γ) motor neuron Aγ 5-8 Yes 4–24 Intrafusal muscle fibers |
Axon | {{Visible anchor |
Different sensory receptors are innervated by different types of nerve fibers. Proprioceptors are innervated by type Ia, Ib and II sensory fibers, mechanoreceptors by type II and III sensory fibers and nociceptors and thermoreceptors by type III and IV sensory fibers.
+Sensory fiber types Type Erlanger-GasserClassification Diameter(μm) Myelin Conductionvelocity (m/s) Associated sensory receptors Proprioceptors Mechanoceptors Nociceptors andthermoreceptors Ia Aα 13–20 Yes 80–120 Primary receptors of muscle spindle (annulospiral ending) ✔ Ib Aα 13–20 Yes 80–120 Golgi tendon organ II Aβ 6–12 Yes 33–75 Secondary receptors of muscle spindle (flower-spray ending).All cutaneous mechanoreceptors ✔ III Aδ 1–5 Thin 3–30 Free nerve endings of touch and pressureNociceptors of lateral spinothalamic tractCold thermoreceptors ✔ IV C 0.2–1.5 No 0.5–2.0 Nociceptors of anterior spinothalamic tractWarmth receptors |
Axon | Autonomic | Autonomic
The autonomic nervous system has two kinds of peripheral fibers:
+Fiber types Type Erlanger-GasserClassification Diameter(μm) Myelin Conductionvelocity (m/s) preganglionic fibers B 1–5 Yes 3–15 postganglionic fibers C 0.2–1.5 No 0.5–2.0 |
Axon | Clinical significance | Clinical significance
In order of degree of severity, injury to a nerve in the peripheral nervous system can be described as neurapraxia, axonotmesis, or neurotmesis.
Concussion is considered a mild form of diffuse axonal injury. Axonal injury can also cause central chromatolysis. The dysfunction of axons in the nervous system is one of the major causes of many inherited and acquired neurological disorders that affect both peripheral and central neurons.
When an axon is crushed, an active process of axonal degeneration takes place at the part of the axon furthest from the cell body. This degeneration takes place quickly following the injury, with the part of the axon being sealed off at the membranes and broken down by macrophages. This is known as Wallerian degeneration.Trauma and Wallerian Degeneration , University of California, San Francisco Dying back of an axon can also take place in many neurodegenerative diseases, particularly when axonal transport is impaired, this is known as Wallerian-like degeneration. Studies suggest that the degeneration happens as
a result of the axonal protein NMNAT2, being prevented from reaching all of the axon.
Demyelination of axons causes the multitude of neurological symptoms found in the disease multiple sclerosis.
Dysmyelination is the abnormal formation of the myelin sheath. This is implicated in several leukodystrophies, and also in schizophrenia.
A severe traumatic brain injury can result in widespread lesions to nerve tracts damaging the axons in a condition known as diffuse axonal injury. This can lead to a persistent vegetative state. It has been shown in studies on the rat that axonal damage from a single mild traumatic brain injury, can leave a susceptibility to further damage, after repeated mild traumatic brain injuries.
A nerve guidance conduit is an artificial means of guiding axon growth to enable neuroregeneration, and is one of the many treatments used for different kinds of nerve injury. |
Axon | Terminology | Terminology
Some general dictionaries define "nerve fiber" as any neuronal process, including both axons and dendrites. However, medical sources generally use "nerve fiber" to refer to the axon only. |
Axon | History | History
German anatomist Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters is generally credited with the discovery of the axon by distinguishing it from the dendrites. Swiss Rüdolf Albert von Kölliker and German Robert Remak were the first to identify and characterize the axon initial segment. Kölliker named the axon in 1896. Louis-Antoine Ranvier was the first to describe the gaps or nodes found on axons and for this contribution these axonal features are now commonly referred to as the nodes of Ranvier. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish anatomist, proposed that axons were the output components of neurons, describing their functionality. Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser earlier developed the classification system for peripheral nerve fibers, based on axonal conduction velocity, myelination, fiber size etc. Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley also employed the squid giant axon (1939) and by 1952 they had obtained a full quantitative description of the ionic basis of the action potential, leading to the formulation of the Hodgkin–Huxley model. Hodgkin and Huxley were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for this work in 1963. The formulae detailing axonal conductance were extended to vertebrates in the Frankenhaeuser–Huxley equations. The understanding of the biochemical basis for action potential propagation has advanced further, and includes many details about individual ion channels. |
Axon | Other animals | Other animals
The axons in invertebrates have been extensively studied. The longfin inshore squid, often used as a model organism has the longest known axon. The giant squid has the largest axon known. Its size ranges from 0.5 (typically) to 1 mm in diameter and is used in the control of its jet propulsion system. The fastest recorded conduction speed of 210 m/s, is found in the ensheathed axons of some pelagic Penaeid shrimps and the usual range is between 90 and 200 meters/s (cf 100–120 m/s for the fastest myelinated vertebrate axon.) |
Axon | Additional images | Additional images |
Axon | See also | See also
Electrophysiology
Ganglionic eminence
Giant axonal neuropathy
Neuronal tracing
Pioneer axon
Single-unit recording |
Axon | References | References |
Axon | External links | External links
"Slide 3 Spinal cord"
Category:Neurohistology |
Axon | Table of Content | Short description, Anatomy, Axonal region, Axon hillock, Axonal initial segment, Axonal transport, Myelination, Nodes of Ranvier, Axon terminals, Axonal varicosities, Action potentials, Development and growth, Development, Extracellular signaling, Intracellular signaling, Cytoskeletal dynamics, Growth, Length regulation, Classification, Motor, {{Visible anchor, Autonomic, Clinical significance, Terminology, History, Other animals, Additional images, See also, References, External links |
Aramaic alphabet | Short description | The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian peoples throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later — including among the Assyrians and Babylonians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, but not Samaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet, which they call "Square Script", even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew.
The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Writing systems, like the Aramaic, that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels other than by means of matres lectionis or added diacritical signs, have been called abjads by Peter T. Daniels to distinguish them from alphabets such as the Greek alphabet, that represent vowels more systematically. The term was coined to avoid the notion that a writing system that represents sounds must be either a syllabary or an alphabet, which would imply that a system like Aramaic must be either a syllabary, as argued by Ignace Gelb, or an incomplete or deficient alphabet, as most other writers had said before Daniels. Daniels put forward, this is a different type of writing system, intermediate between syllabaries and 'full' alphabets.
The Aramaic alphabet is historically significant since virtually all modern Middle Eastern writing systems can be traced back to it. That is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language after it was adopted as both a lingua franca and the official language of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and their successor, the Achaemenid Empire. Among the descendant scripts in modern use, the Jewish Hebrew alphabet bears the closest relation to the Imperial Aramaic script of the 5th century BC, with an identical letter inventory and, for the most part, nearly identical letter shapes. By contrast the Samaritan Hebrew script is directly descended from Proto-Hebrew/Phoenician script, which was the ancestor of the Aramaic alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet was also an ancestor to the Syriac alphabet and Mongolian script and Kharosthi and Brahmi, and Nabataean alphabet, which had the Arabic alphabet as a descendant. |
Aramaic alphabet | History | History
thumb|left|The Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription, a Greek and Aramaic inscription by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka at Kandahar, Afghanistan, 3rd century BC
The earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet.Inland Syria and the East-of-Jordan Region in the First Millennium BCE before the Assyrian Intrusions, Mark W. Chavalas, The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Lowell K. Handy, (Brill, 1997), 169. Over time, the alphabet developed into the Aramaic alphabet by the 8th century BC. It was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later.
These include the Assyrians and Babylonians, who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, but not Samaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew. |
Aramaic alphabet | Achaemenid Empire (The First Persian Empire) | Achaemenid Empire (The First Persian Empire)
thumb |upright|Aramaic inscription of Taxila, Pakistan probably by the emperor Ashoka around 260 BCE
Around 500 BC, following the Achaemenid conquest of Mesopotamia under Darius I, Old Aramaic was adopted by the Persians as the "vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast Persian empire with its different peoples and languages. The use of a single official language, which modern scholarship has dubbed as Official Aramaic, Imperial Aramaic or Achaemenid Aramaic, can be assumed to have greatly contributed to the astonishing success of the Achaemenid Persians in holding their far-flung empire together for as long as they did." p. 251
Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised. Its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. The Aramaic glyph forms of the period are often divided into two main styles, the "lapidary" form, usually inscribed on hard surfaces like stone monuments, and a cursive form whose lapidary form tended to be more conservative by remaining more visually similar to Phoenician and early Aramaic. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, which had largely disappeared by the 3rd century BC.
For centuries after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire in 331 BC, Imperial Aramaic, or something near enough to it to be recognisable, remained an influence on the various native Iranian languages. The Aramaic script survived as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system.
30 Aramaic documents from Bactria have been recently discovered, an analysis of which was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC, in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria and Sogdiana.
The widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been written using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. |
Aramaic alphabet | Aramaic-derived scripts | Aramaic-derived scripts
Since the evolution of the Aramaic alphabet out of the Phoenician one was a gradual process, the division of the world's alphabets into the ones derived from the Phoenician one directly, and the ones derived from Phoenician via Aramaic, is somewhat artificial. In general, the alphabets of the Mediterranean region (Anatolia, Greece, Italy) are classified as Phoenician-derived, adapted from around the 8th century BC. Those of the East (the Levant, Persia, Central Asia, and India) are considered Aramaic-derived, adapted from around the 6th century BC from the Imperial Aramaic script of the Achaemenid Empire.
After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, diversifying into a number of descendant cursives.
The Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) alleges that not only the old Nabataean writing was influenced by the "Syrian script" (i.e. Aramaic), but also the old Chaldean script.
A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD. It remained restricted to the status of a variant used alongside the noncursive. By contrast, the cursive developed out of the Nabataean alphabet in the same period soon became the standard for writing Arabic, evolving into the Arabic alphabet as it stood by the time of the early spread of Islam.
The development of cursive versions of Aramaic led to the creation of the Syriac, Palmyrene and Mandaic alphabets, which formed the basis of the historical scripts of Central Asia, such as the Sogdian and Mongolian alphabets.
The Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic,Babylonian beginnings: The origin of the cuneiform writing system in comparative perspective, Jerold S. Cooper, The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, ed. Stephen D. Houston, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58–59.Tristan James Mabry, Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 109. in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets,Turks, A. Samoylovitch, First Encyclopaedia of Islam: 1913–1936, Vol. VI, (Brill, 1993), 911.George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley, The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets, (Routledge, 2012), 40. as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Kharosthi (cf., Issyk inscription).
Brahmi script was also possibly derived or inspired by Aramaic. Brahmic family of scripts includes Devanagari. |
Aramaic alphabet | Languages using the alphabet | Languages using the alphabet
Today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the modern-Hebrew alphabet, distinguished from the Old Hebrew script. In classical Jewish literature, the name given to the modern-Hebrew script was "Ashurit", the ancient Assyrian script, (The Mishnah, p. 202 (note 20)). a script now known widely as the Aramaic script. It is believed that, during the period of Assyrian dominion, Aramaic script and language received official status.
Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are today written in the Syriac alphabet, which script has superseded the more ancient Assyrian script and now bears its name. Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identical nature of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be typeset mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. |
Aramaic alphabet | Maaloula | Maaloula
In Maaloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken, an Aramaic Language Institute was established in 2006 by Damascus University that teaches courses to keep the language alive.
Unlike Classical Syriac, which has a rich literary tradition in Syriac-Aramaic script, Western Neo-Aramaic was solely passed down orally for generations until 2006 and was not utilized in a written form.
Therefore, the Language Institute's chairman, George Rizkalla (Rezkallah), undertook the writing of a textbook in Western Neo-Aramaic. Being previously unwritten, Rizkalla opted for the Hebrew alphabet. In 2010, the institute's activities were halted due to concerns that the square Maalouli-Aramaic alphabet used in the program bore a resemblance to the square script of the Hebrew alphabet. As a result, all signs featuring the square Maalouli script were subsequently removed. The program stated that they would instead use the more distinct Syriac-Aramaic alphabet, although use of the Maalouli alphabet has continued to some degree. Al Jazeera Arabic also broadcast a program about Western Neo-Aramaic and the villages in which it is spoken with the square script still in use. |
Aramaic alphabet | Letters | Letters
Letter name Aramaic written using IPA Phoneme Equivalent letter in Imperial Aramaic Syriac script Hebrew Maalouli Nabataean Parthian Arabic South Arabian Geʽez Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Greek Latin Cyrillic Brahmi Kharosthi Turkic Image Text Image Text Ālaph 18px 26x26px ; , ʾ 20px| 70px 𐭀 𐩱 አ 20px Αα Aa Аа 18px𑀅, 18px𑀆 16px𐨀 𐰁 Bēth 18px 26x26px , b 25px| 42px 𐭁 𐩨 በ 20px Ββ Bb Бб, Вв 18px𑀩, 18px𑀪 20px𐨦 𐰉 𐰋 Gāmal 18px 26x26px , g 13px| 21px 𐭂 𐩴 ገ 20px Γγ Cc, Gg Гг, Ґґ 18px𑀕 19px𐨒 𐰲 𐰱 Dālath 18px 30x30px , d 20px| 19px 𐭃 𐩵 ደ 20px 20px Δδ Dd Дд 18px𑀤, 18px𑀥, 18px𑀟, 18px𑀠 21px𐨢 𐰓 Hē 18px 26x26px h 20px| 53px 𐭄 𐩠 ሀ 20px Εε Ee Ее, Ёё, Єє, Ээ 18px𑀳 18px𐨱 Waw 18px 26x26px ; , w 10px| 40px 𐭅 𐩥 ወ 20px (), Υυ Ff, Uu, Vv, Ww, Yy Ѵѵ, Уу, Ўў 18px𑀯, 18px𑀉, 18px𑀊, 18px𑀒, 18px𑀑 18px𐨬 𐰈 𐰆 Zayn 18px 26x26px z 10px| 13px 𐭆 𐩸 20px Ζζ Zz Зз 18px𑀚 18px𐨗 𐰕 Ḥēth 18px 26x26px ḥ 20px| 53px 𐭇 𐩢 ሐ 20px Ηη Hh Ии, Йй 18px𑀖 18px𐨓 Ṭēth 18px 26x26px ṭ 20px| 19px 𐭈 𐩷 ጠ20x20px|Proto-semiticTet-01 Θθ Ѳѳ 18px𑀣, 18px𑀝, 18px𑀞 17px𐨠 𐱃 Yodh 18px 26x26px ; , y 10px| 53px 𐭉 𐩺 የ 20x20px|Proto-semiticI-0120px Ιι Ιi, Jj Іі, Її, Јј 18px𑀬 15px𐨩 𐰘 𐰃 𐰖 Kāph 18px 26x26px , k 20px| 20px| 49px 𐭊 𐩫 ከ 20px Κκ Kk Кк 18px𑀓 17px𐨐 𐰚 𐰜 Lāmadh 18px 26x26px l 20px| 34px 𐭋 𐩡 ለ 20px Λλ Ll Лл 18px𑀮 21px𐨫 𐰞 𐰠 Mim 18px 26x26px m 18px| 18px| 38px 𐭌 𐩣 መ 20px Μμ Mm Мм 18px𑀫 20px𐨨 𐰢 Nun 18px 26x26px n 8px| 15px| 34px 𐭍 𐩬 ነ 20px Νν Nn Нн 18px𑀦 21px𐨣 𐰤 𐰣 Semkath 18px 26x26px s 20px| 21px 𐭎 𐩯20x20px|Proto-semiticX-0120x20px|Proto-semiticX-02 Ξξ Ѯѯ 18px𑀱 17px𐨭 𐰾 ʿAyn 18px 26x26px ʿ 17px| 15px 𐭏 𐩲 ዐ20x20px|Proto-semiticO-01 Οο, Ωω Oo Оо, Ѡѡ 18px𑀏, 18px𑀐, 18px𑀇, 18px𑀈 18px𐨀𐨅 𐰏 𐰍 Pē 18px 26x26px , p 20px| 20px| 43px 𐭐 𐩰 ፈ 20px Ππ Pp Пп 18px𑀧, 18px𑀨 18px𐨤 𐰯 Ṣādhē 18px, 18px 26x26px ṣ 15px| 16px| 47px 𐭑 𐩮 ጸ20x20px|Proto-semiticTsade-0120x20px|Proto-semiticTsade-02 () Цц, Чч, Џџ 18px𑀲 18px𐨯 𐰽 Qoph 18px 26x26px q 18px| 17px 𐭒 𐩤 ቀ 20px ( Qq Ҁҁ, Фф 18px𑀔 18px𐨑 𐰴 𐰸 Rēš 18px 26x26px r 20px| 13px 𐭓 𐩧 ረ 20px Ρρ Rr Рр 18px𑀭 17px𐨪 𐰺 𐰼 Šin 18px 26x26px š 21px| 17px 𐭔 𐩦 ሠ 20px Σσς SsСс, Шш, Щщ 18px𑀰 15px𐨮 𐱂 𐱁 Taw 18px 26x26px , t 20px| 47px 𐭕 𐩩 ተ 20px Ττ Tt Тт 18px𑀢 17px𐨟 𐱅 |
Aramaic alphabet | Unicode | Unicode
The Imperial Aramaic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009, with the release of version 5.2.
The Unicode block for Imperial Aramaic is U+10840–U+1085F:
The Syriac Aramaic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999, with the release of version 3.0.
The Syriac Abbreviation (a type of overline) can be represented with a special control character called the Syriac Abbreviation Mark (U+070F). The Unicode block for Syriac Aramaic is U+0700–U+074F: |
Aramaic alphabet | See also | See also
Syriac alphabet
Mandaic alphabet |
Aramaic alphabet | References | References |
Aramaic alphabet | Sources | Sources
Byrne, Ryan. "Middle Aramaic Scripts". Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier. (2006)
Daniels, Peter T., et al. eds. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford. (1996)
Coulmas, Florian. The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford. (1989)
Rudder, Joshua. Learn to Write Aramaic: A Step-by-Step Approach to the Historical & Modern Scripts. n.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. 220 pp. . Includes a wide variety of Aramaic scripts.
Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic on Coins, reading and transliterating Proto-Hebrew, online edition (Judaea Coin Archive). |
Aramaic alphabet | External links | External links
Comparison of Aramaic to related alphabets
Omniglot entry
Category:8th-century BC establishments
Category:Obsolete writing systems
Category:Persian scripts
Category:Right-to-left writing systems
Category:Abjad writing systems |
Aramaic alphabet | Table of Content | Short description, History, Achaemenid Empire (The First Persian Empire), Aramaic-derived scripts, Languages using the alphabet, Maaloula, Letters, Unicode, See also, References, Sources, External links |
American shot | Short description | thumb|An example of a "cowboy shot" in A Fistful of Dollars
An American shot or cowboy shot is a medium-long ("knee") film shot of a group of characters, who are arranged so that all are visible to the camera. It is a translation of a phrase from French film criticism, . The usual arrangement is for the actors to stand in an irregular line from one side of the screen to the other, with the actors at the end coming forward a little and standing more in profile than the others. The purpose of the composition is to allow complex dialogue scenes to be played out without changes in camera position. In some literature, this is simply referred to as a 3/4 shot.
One of the other main reasons why French critics called it "American shot" was its frequent use in the western genre. This was because a shot that started at knee level would reveal the weapon of a cowboy, usually holstered at their waist. It is the closest the camera can get to an actor while keeping both their face and their holstered gun in frame.
The French critics thought it was characteristic of American films of the 1930s or 1940s; however, it was mostly characteristic of cheaper American movies, such as Charlie Chan mysteries where people collected in front of a fireplace or at the foot of the stairs in order to explain what happened a few minutes ago.
Howard Hawks legitimized this style in his films, allowing characters to act, even when not talking, when most of the audience would not be paying attention. It became his trademark style. |
American shot | References | References
Category:Cinematography |
American shot | Table of Content | Short description, References |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | short description | Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM), or acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis, is a rare autoimmune disease marked by a sudden, widespread attack of inflammation in the brain and spinal cord. As well as causing the brain and spinal cord to become inflamed, ADEM also attacks the nerves of the central nervous system and damages their myelin insulation, which, as a result, destroys the white matter. The cause is often a trigger such as from viral infection or, in extraordinarily rare cases, vaccinations.
ADEM's symptoms resemble the symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), so the disease itself is sorted into the classification of the multiple sclerosis borderline diseases. However, ADEM has several features that distinguish it from MS. Unlike MS, ADEM occurs usually in children and is marked with rapid fever, although adolescents and adults can get the disease too. ADEM consists of a single flare-up whereas MS is marked with several flare-ups (or relapses), over a long period of time. Relapses following ADEM are reported in up to a quarter of patients, but the majority of these 'multiphasic' presentations following ADEM likely represent MS. ADEM is also distinguished by a loss of consciousness, coma and death, which is very rare in MS, except in severe cases.
It affects about 8 per 1,000,000 people per year. Although it occurs in all ages, most reported cases are in children and adolescents, with the average age around 5 to 8 years old. The disease affects males and females almost equally. ADEM shows seasonal variation with higher incidence in winter and spring months which may coincide with higher viral infections during these months. The mortality rate may be as high as 5%; however, full recovery is seen in 50 to 75% of cases with increase in survival rates up to 70 to 90% with figures including minor residual disability as well. The average time to recover from ADEM flare-ups is one to six months.
ADEM produces multiple inflammatory lesions in the brain and spinal cord, particularly in the white matter. Usually these are found in the subcortical and central white matter and cortical gray-white junction of both cerebral hemispheres, cerebellum, brainstem, and spinal cord, but periventricular white matter and gray matter of the cortex, thalami and basal ganglia may also be involved.
When a person has more than one demyelinating episode of ADEM, the disease is then called recurrent disseminated encephalomyelitis or multiphasic disseminated encephalomyelitis (MDEM). Also, a fulminant course in adults has been described. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Signs and symptoms | Signs and symptoms
ADEM has an abrupt onset and a monophasic course. Symptoms usually begin 1–3 weeks after infection. Major symptoms include fever, headache, nausea and vomiting, confusion, vision impairment, drowsiness, seizures and coma. Although initially the symptoms are usually mild, they worsen rapidly over the course of hours to days, with the average time to maximum severity being about four and a half days. Additional symptoms include hemiparesis, paraparesis, and cranial nerve palsies. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | ADEM in COVID-19 | ADEM in COVID-19
Neurological symptoms were the main presentation of COVID-19, which did not correlate with the severity of respiratory symptoms. The high incidence of ADEM with hemorrhage is striking. Brain inflammation is likely caused by an immune response to the disease rather than neurotropism. Cerebrospinal fluid analysis was not indicative of an infectious process, neurological impairment was not present in the acute phase of the infection, and neuroimaging findings were not typical of classical toxic and metabolic disorders. The finding of bilateral periventricular relatively asymmetrical lesions allied with deep white matter involvement, that may also be present in cortical gray-white matter junction, thalami, basal ganglia, cerebellum, and brainstem suggests an acute demyelination process. Additionally, hemorrhagic white matter lesions, clusters of macrophages related to axonal injury and ADEM-like appearance were also found in subcortical white matter. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Causes | Causes
Since the discovery of the anti-MOG specificity against multiple sclerosis diagnosis it is considered that ADEM is one of the possible clinical causes of anti-MOG associated encephalomyelitis.
There are several theories about how the anti-MOG antibodies appear in the patient's serum:
A preceding antigenic challenge can be identified in approximately two-thirds of people. Some viral infections thought to induce ADEM include influenza virus, dengue, enterovirus, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella zoster, Epstein–Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex virus, hepatitis A, coxsackievirus and COVID-19. Bacterial infections include Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Borrelia burgdorferi, Leptospira, and beta-hemolytic Streptococci.
Exposure to vaccines: The only vaccine proven related to ADEM is the Semple form of the rabies vaccine, but hepatitis B, pertussis, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, pneumococcus, varicella, influenza, Japanese encephalitis, and polio vaccines have all been associated with the condition. The majority of the studies that correlate vaccination with ADEM onset use only small samples or are case studies. Large-scale epidemiological studies (e.g., of MMR vaccine or smallpox vaccine) do not show increased risk of ADEM following vaccination. An upper bound for the risk of ADEM from measles vaccination, if it exists, can be estimated to be 10 per million, which is far lower than the risk of developing ADEM from an actual measles infection, which is about 1 per 1,000 cases. For a rubella infection, the risk is 1 per 5,000 cases. Some early vaccines, later shown to have been contaminated with host animal central nervous system tissue, had ADEM incidence rates as high as 1 in 600.
In rare cases, ADEM seems to follow from organ transplantation. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Diagnosis | Diagnosis
The term ADEM has been inconsistently used at different times. Currently, the commonly accepted international standard for the clinical case definition is the one published by the International Pediatric MS Study Group, revision 2007.
Given that the definition is clinical, it is currently unknown if all the cases of ADEM are positive for anti-MOG autoantibody; in any case, it appears to be strongly related to ADEM diagnosis. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Differential diagnosis | Differential diagnosis |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Multiple sclerosis | Multiple sclerosis
While ADEM and MS both involve autoimmune demyelination, they differ in many clinical, genetic, imaging, and histopathological aspects. Some authors consider MS and its borderline forms to constitute a spectrum, differing only in chronicity, severity, and clinical course, while others consider them discretely different diseases.
Typically, ADEM appears in children following an antigenic challenge and remains monophasic. Nevertheless, ADEM does occur in adults, and can also be clinically multiphasic.
Problems for differential diagnosis increase due to the lack of agreement for a definition of multiple sclerosis. If MS were defined only by the separation in time and space of the demyelinating lesions as McDonald did, it would not be enough to make a difference, as some cases of ADEM satisfy these conditions. Therefore, some authors propose to establish the dividing line as the shape of the lesions around the veins, being therefore "perivenous vs. confluent demyelination".
thumb|407x407px|Acute hemorrhagic Leukoencephalitis in a patient with Multiple sclerosis.
The pathology of ADEM is very similar to that of MS with some differences. The pathological hallmark of ADEM is perivenous inflammation with limited "sleeves of demyelination". Nevertheless, MS-like plaques (confluent demyelination) can appear
Plaques in the white matter in MS are sharply delineated, while the glial scar in ADEM is smooth. Axons are better preserved in ADEM lesions. Inflammation in ADEM is widely disseminated and ill-defined, and finally, lesions are strictly perivenous, while in MS they are disposed around veins, but not so sharply.
Nevertheless, the co-occurrence of perivenous and confluent demyelination in some individuals suggests pathogenic overlap between acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and multiple sclerosis and misclassification even with biopsy or even postmortem ADEM in adults can progress to MS |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Multiphasic disseminated encephalomyelitis | Multiphasic disseminated encephalomyelitis
When the person has more than one demyelinating episode of ADEM, the disease is then called recurrent disseminated encephalomyelitis or multiphasic disseminated encephalomyelitis (MDEM).
It has been found that anti-MOG auto-antibodies are related to this kind of ADEM
Another variant of ADEM in adults has been described, also related to anti-MOG auto-antibodies, has been named fulminant disseminated encephalomyelitis, and it has been reported to be clinically ADEM, but showing MS-like lesions on autopsy. It has been classified inside the anti-MOG associated inflammatory demyelinating diseases. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Acute hemorrhagic leukoencephalitis | Acute hemorrhagic leukoencephalitis
Acute hemorrhagic leukoencephalitis (AHL, or AHLE), acute hemorrhagic encephalomyelitis (AHEM), acute necrotizing hemorrhagic leukoencephalitis (ANHLE), Weston-Hurst syndrome, or Hurst's disease, is a hyperacute and frequently fatal form of ADEM. AHL is relatively rare (less than 100 cases have been reported in the medical literature ), it is seen in about 2% of ADEM cases, and is characterized by necrotizing vasculitis of venules and hemorrhage, and edema. Death is common in the first week and overall mortality is about 70%, but increasing evidence points to favorable outcomes after aggressive treatment with corticosteroids, immunoglobulins, cyclophosphamide, and plasma exchange. About 70% of survivors show residual neurological deficits, but some survivors have shown surprisingly little deficit considering the extent of the white matter affected.
This disease has been occasionally associated with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, malaria, sepsis associated with immune complex deposition, methanol poisoning, and other underlying conditions. Also anecdotal association with MS has been reported
Laboratory studies that support diagnosis of AHL are: peripheral leukocytosis, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pleocytosis associated with normal glucose and increased protein. On magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), lesions of AHL typically show extensive T2-weighted and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) white matter hyperintensities with areas of hemorrhages, significant edema, and mass effect. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Treatment | Treatment
No controlled clinical trials have been conducted on ADEM treatment, but aggressive treatment aimed at rapidly reducing inflammation of the CNS is standard. The widely accepted first-line treatment is high doses of intravenous corticosteroids, such as methylprednisolone or dexamethasone, followed by 3–6 weeks of gradually lower oral doses of prednisolone. Patients treated with methylprednisolone have shown better outcomes than those treated with dexamethasone. Oral tapers of less than three weeks duration show a higher chance of relapsing, and tend to show poorer outcomes. Other anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive therapies have been reported to show beneficial effect, such as plasmapheresis, high doses of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg), mitoxantrone and cyclophosphamide. These are considered alternative therapies, used when corticosteroids cannot be used or fail to show an effect.
There is some evidence to suggest that patients may respond to a combination of methylprednisolone and immunoglobulins if they fail to respond to either separately
In a study of 16 children with ADEM, 10 recovered completely after high-dose methylprednisolone, one severe case that failed to respond to steroids recovered completely after IV Ig; the five most severe cases – with ADAM and severe peripheral neuropathy – were treated with combined high-dose methylprednisolone and immunoglobulin, two remained paraplegic, one had motor and cognitive handicaps, and two recovered. A recent review of IVIg treatment of ADEM (of which the previous study formed the bulk of the cases) found that 70% of children showed complete recovery after treatment with IVIg, or IVIg plus corticosteroids. A study of IVIg treatment in adults with ADEM showed that IVIg seems more effective in treating sensory and motor disturbances, while steroids seem more effective in treating impairments of cognition, consciousness and rigor. This same study found one subject, a 71-year-old man who had not responded to steroids, that responded to an IVIg treatment 58 days after disease onset. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Prognosis | Prognosis
Full recovery is seen in 50 to 70% of cases, ranging to 70 to 90% recovery with some minor residual disability (typically assessed using measures such as mRS or EDSS), average time to recover is one to six months. The mortality rate may be as high as 5–10%. Poorer outcomes are associated with unresponsiveness to steroid therapy, unusually severe neurological symptoms, or sudden onset. Children tend to have more favorable outcomes than adults, and cases presenting without fevers tend to have poorer outcomes. The latter effect may be due to either protective effects of fever, or that diagnosis and treatment is sought more rapidly when fever is present.
ADEM can progress to MS. It will be considered MS if some lesions appear in different times and brain areas |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Motor deficits | Motor deficits
Residual motor deficits are estimated to remain in about 8 to 30% of cases, the range in severity from mild clumsiness to ataxia and hemiparesis. |
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis | Neurocognitive | Neurocognitive
Patients with demyelinating illnesses, such as MS, have shown cognitive deficits even when there is minimal physical disability. Research suggests that similar effects are seen after ADEM, but that the deficits are less severe than those seen in MS. A study of six children with ADEM (mean age at presentation 7.7 years) were tested for a range of neurocognitive tests after an average of 3.5 years of recovery. All six children performed in the normal range on most tests, including verbal IQ and performance IQ, but performed at least one standard deviation below age norms in at least one cognitive domain, such as complex attention (one child), short-term memory (one child) and internalizing behaviour/affect (two children). Group means for each cognitive domain were all within one standard deviation of age norms, demonstrating that, as a group, they were normal. These deficits were less severe than those seen in similar aged children with a diagnosis of MS.
Another study compared nineteen children with a history of ADEM, of which 10 were five years of age or younger at the time (average age 3.8 years old, tested an average of 3.9 years later) and nine were older (mean age 7.7y at time of ADEM, tested an average of 2.2 years later) to nineteen matched controls. Scores on IQ tests and educational achievement were lower for the young onset ADEM group (average IQ 90) compared to the late onset (average IQ 100) and control groups (average IQ 106), while the late onset ADEM children scored lower on verbal processing speed. Again, all groups means were within one standard deviation of the controls, meaning that while effects were statistically reliable, the children were as a whole, still within the normal range. There were also more behavioural problems in the early onset group, although there is some suggestion that this may be due, at least in part, to the stress of hospitalization at a young age. |
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