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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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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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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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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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On the night of November 9–10, 1938, a wave of orchestrated violence swept across Germany and Austria. Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were burned and looted; families were beaten and humiliated; and tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps. The shattered glass that littered the streets the next morning gave the pogrom its haunting…
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The one thing I always fear when I do these blogs about World War II and the Holocaust is what I will discover about my family. Thus far, there is no indication that any of them collaborated with the Nazis, but I have a big family, and even now, in 2026, there is still new…
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On November 8, 1937, one of the most notorious antisemitic propaganda exhibitions of Nazi Germany opened its doors at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Entitled Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), the exhibition was designed to do far more than present the Nazi regime’s distorted interpretation of Jewish history. It was an elaborate exercise in…
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I love the Netherlands. I was born and raised there and proud to call myself a Dutchman. Like all other countries in this world, it has pages in history that are not so glorious. I believe that the best way for any country to deal with the darker days of its history is not to…
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