June 2021

  • Originally posted on History of Sorts: I had planned to do a blog on the horrors of Babi Yar, but I decided against it. Firstly because there is not one word I could write which best describes the depravities committed by the Nazis,both German and Ukrainian. (Notice dated September 28, 1941 in Russian, Ukrainian with…

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  • Dear Anne, today you would have turned 93, but we all know the history why that didn’t happen. Some of that history is written in the diary you received on your 13th birthday, June 12 1942.So many people have read that diary, your private thoughts laid bare for the world to see. But I am

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  • Originally posted on History of Sorts: Ironically Camp Westerbork had been set up in 1939 to house Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Nazis took over the camp and turned it into a deportation camp. From this camp, 101,000 Dutch Jews and about 5,000…

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  • The case of Walter Seifert is a disturbing one. It is also an indication on something that I have argued for a long time, the Denazification program after World War 2 did not work. It was merely a political bit of veneer. For you who don’t know what the Denazification program was;Denazification (German: Entnazifizierung) was

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  • The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed

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  • Growing up in the Netherlands there was a tradition on Good Friday. Every year on Good Friday the Dutch radio would play the ‘Top 100 of all time’, basically the greatest songs ever recorded. The majority would be rock songs. The top 4 would always be ‘Child in Time’ by Deep Purple; ‘Stairway to Heaven’

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  • Originally posted on History of Sorts: So many involved in the Nazi atrocities did get off so lightly or escaped punishment altogether. How the judges in the war crimes trials came to some of the sentences or lack thereof has always been a puzzle to me. Additionally there were also many how fled to countries…

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  • No first kiss

    Originally posted on History of Sorts: All of us will have grown up experiencing first special occasions in our lives, like a first kiss for example. But because of the warped ideology of some evil men, these experiences were denied to so many. The picture above is of Henriette van der Sluijs murdered in Auschwitz on…

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