October 2025
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October 6, 1944 — deep in the tropical waters of the Java Sea, two submarines hunted beneath the same sun. One flew the flag of the Royal Netherlands Navy, the other bore the iron cross of Nazi Germany.By the end of the day, only one would remain afloat. A Dutch Submarine Far From Home The…
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Most of us will have seen the picture of the Nazi rally where one ‘Nazi’ refused to salute. This man was August Landmesser and he defied the Nazi regime in one more than one way. Adopted by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, Hitler’s infamous ‘sieg heil’ (meaning ‘hail victory’) salute was mandatory for all German…
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Bridget Dowling was born on 3 July 1891 in Dublin. She grew up at Flemings Place, near Mespil Road. She was still in her teens when she attended the 1909 RDS Dublin Horse Show and met Adolf Hitler’s half-brother, Alois Hitler, Jr. Alois had pretended to be a wealthy hotelier who was touring Europe, but…
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On October, 1 1944, the first of two sets of medical experiments involving castration were performed on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. Buchenwald was one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1937, it was a complement to camps north (Sachsenhausen) and south (Dachau), and was…
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This day 225 years ago the last Queen of France was executed. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, Marie Antoinette married the future French king Louis XVI when she was just 15 years old. The young couple soon came to symbolize all of the excesses of the reviled French monarchy, and Marie Antoinette herself became…
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There is no denying that the Dutch should have done more to protect their Jewish neighbours during World War II. But I am looking at this from a retrospective point of view; hindsight always comes with 20/20 vision. That’s why I can’t judge; I really don’t know what I would or wouldn’t have done. However,…
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