• Just to prove my versatility as a blogger I have decided to do a blog on fashion accessories. Had you there for a moment, I have absolutely no clue about fashion.But in this day where there are more and more accounts of sexual harassment I discovered that in the late 19th,early 20th century women had…

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  • On November 12, 1938, the Nazi regime issued the Decree on the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life, marking another chilling step in its systematic campaign of persecution against Jewish people. This Decree sought to segregate Jews entirely from the German economy, forbidding them from owning businesses, selling goods and services, or engaging in trade.…

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  • The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was one of the most significant judicial efforts to hold individuals accountable for crimes committed during war. Established in the aftermath of World War II, the tribunal sought to prosecute the leading figures of Imperial Japan for crimes…

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  • The picture is of Dutch SS volunteer Berend Johan Westerveld, nicknamed ‘The Bicycle Repairman’ or ‘The Knight of the Bicycle Pedal’, presumably taken after his arrest.Berend Johan Westerveld was born on August 23, 1905 in Zutphen. His career was characterized by a series of failures. Just before the war he became a bicycle repairer and…

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  • Operation Frankton was a British WWII commando raid on shipping in the German occupied French port of Bordeaux in southwest France. The plan was for six kayaks  to be taken to the area of the Gironde estuary by submarine. The twelve men would then paddle by night to Bordeaux. The operation was carried out between…

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  • And the guns fell silent.

    November 11, 1918. 10:59 am, one last volley of machine gun fire, one last soldier to die.Henry Nicholas John Gunther took one last charge with his bayonet. The enemy warned him , but he wanted to proof himself. He wanted to show his demotion from Sergeant to Private had been unjustified. One last hoorah, one…

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  • Where’s the orchestra?

    Some people might recognize the title of this piece as the title of a Billy Joel song, and you would be right. It is a beautiful song which has a sad intonation, in a way it is a haunting piece of music, a story of something that is no longer there. Billy Joel’s grandfather Karl…

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  • A Stolpersteinplural Stolpersteine; literally means “stumbling stone”, metaphorically a “stumbling stone” is a sett-size, ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Created by the artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, Stolpersteine is brass-topped cobblestones embedded in the pavement outside a…

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  • The USS Mounthood disaster

    USS Mount Hood (AE-11) was the lead ship of her class of ammunition ships for the United States Navy in World War II. She was the first ship named after Mount Hood, a volcano in the Cascade Range in Oregon. On 10 November 1944, shortly after 18 men had departed for shore leave, the rest…

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  • When you see a photograph of a Wehrmacht officer in the context of the Holocaust, it’s natural to assume he was complicit in the atrocities of that time. Yet, in the case of Lieutenant Albert Battel, that assumption couldn’t be more wrong. Battel defied expectations and risked his life to oppose Nazi crimes—revealing an extraordinary…

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