Germany

Calvin and Kenneth Bayne stood silently among Army officers, watching their brother's remains transferred from a plane to a waiting hearse. Kenneth kept his hand on his heart. Calvin saluted and then walked directly to the flag-draped casket and kissed it. The somber ceremony on a tarmac at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport offered the two men the first tangible contact with their older brother in more than 66 years. Pfc. Robert B. Bayne went missing in action in 1945 as he fought along the Rhine River near Mannheim, Germany.

Arthur Diamand, who owned the Linda Lynn dress shops and was a World War II veteran, died of circulatory disease April 20 at Gilchrist Hospice Care. He was 96 and had homes in Florida and Pikesville. Born in Munich, Germany, he was the son of Markus and Paula Diamand, who owned and operated a haberdashery. Mr. Diamand fled Nazi persecution by traveling to France and sailing to the U.S. from Cherbourg. He was able to enter the country through the sponsorship of his brother-in-law, a U.S. citizen who lived in New Jersey.

George W. Holdefer, a retired civil engineer who during World War II flew Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, became a prisoner of war after his plane was damaged over Germany and recorded his experiences in a diary, died March 10 of multiple organ failure at the Edenwald retirement community. The former Campus Hills and Mays Chapel resident was 87. Mr. Holdefer, the son of an American Can Co. engineer and a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised near Patterson Park. After graduating from Polytechnic Institute in 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and was trained as a B-17 pilot at an airbase in Bradenton, Fla. He joined the 8th Air Force 486th Heavy Bomb Group based at Sudbury, England, northeast of London.

December 1960 was a memorable month for disasters. On Dec. 16, United Airlines Flight 826 from Chicago was headed for Idlewild Airport, now John F. Kennedy International, when it collided over New York City with Trans World Airways Flight 266, which had originated in Dayton, Ohio, and was preparing to land at LaGuardia. The spectacular daytime collision, which occurred while it was raining, sleeting and slightly foggy, sent debris and death into Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood.

Saul Sitzer, who owned a popular Parkville restaurant and was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew numerous combat missions over Germany in World War II, died of stroke complications Sunday at the Loch Raven Veterans Affairs Hospital. He was 86 and lived in Perry Hall. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised in the Canarsie section, he was the son of a Polish-born grocer. He was a 1942 graduate of Samuel J. Tilden High School. He attended Brooklyn College and enlisted in what was then the Army Air Corps.

Donald Myron "Donny" Cohen, a World War II P-51 fighter pilot who flew on the last combat mission over Europe and later became a chemical engineer at Aberdeen Proving Ground, died Nov. 5 at his Fallston home of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 86. In the early hours of May 8, 1945, Mr. Cohen was sitting in the cockpit of the Lady Ellen, the P-51 fighter that he named after his wife, and waiting to take off from Ansbach Airfield, a captured former Luftwaffe base in northern Bavaria.

Two countries — Germany and China — quickly recovered from the recession, while we continue to be mired in high unemployment, with an unsustainable internal debt and a massive foreign exchange deficit coupled to the prospects of a war over exchange rates. Top administration economic officials Christina Romer and Larry Summers are on their way back to academia, and former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has left the scene, leaving the economy in a shambles. It would be propitious to take a step back and find out why other nations are succeeding and we are failing.