dirkdeklein

  • Barbed Wire Sunday (Stacheldrahtsonntag) refers to 13 August 1961, the day the East German government sealed the border between East and West Berlin, marking the beginning of what would become the Berlin Wall. Overnight, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) deployed thousands of soldiers, police officers, and construction workers to tear up streets, erect barricades, and…

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  • It is nearly impossible to quantify the number of people being killed during the Holocaust, I personally think the estimated number of 1.5 million children is too low. The one thing that can be quantified accurately is the value put on life. For a family of 5 it would be 37.50 guilders ,or the 2022…

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  • The Paralympic Games, a major international multi-sport event involving athletes with a range of disabilities, have a rich and inspiring history rooted in the aftermath of World War II. The origin of the Paralympics can be traced back to the efforts of Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, a neurologist at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England. Early…

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  • You’re Beautiful

    On this day 21 years ago, I escorted my wife to the maternity hospital in Limerick. Our beautiful baby girl was born that day. Although I did not like James Blunt’s song “You’re Beautiful” prior to that moment, when it played on the radio in the maternity hospital room at the exact second she was…

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  • WWII- A Mickey Mouse war

    It was January 7,1942, just about a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Fearing imminent chemical attack on American soil, the government issued thousands of gas mask to civilians. But the smallest citizens couldn’t fit into the regulation-sized masks. They were too heavy and too big. Plus, aren’t those things scary? The production of…

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  • Love’s gone, the sky went blackThe hate that started long ago is backI hear the silence in the airSpeak up no one dares Like shattered hearts that won’t repairWe count the names, we say the prayersThe world moved on, or so it seemsNow we’re caught inside the hateful screams Wake me up when October ends…

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  • The Thing-not the movie.

    The Thing, also known as The Great Seal Bug, was a passive covert listening device, developed in the Soviet Union and planted in the study of the US Ambassador in Moscow, hidden inside a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States. It is called a passive device as it does not have its own power source.…

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  • Walk a mile in your shoes.

    As the title might suggest I was trying to find some poetic sentences to describe this picture. But I couldn’t,because the more I looked at the picture the less sense it made. In fact it made no sense to me at all. What is the sense of keeping all these shoes? Were they meant as…

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  • Jan Ruschkewitz

    Jan Ruschkewitz, just a name of a young boy. A young bot born in the Hague in the Netherlands. 23 years after the international peace palace was established. A palace that was suppose to safeguard your peace. In the picture you are about 2 or 3, but your peace would soon be destroyed. Jan Ruschkewitz,…

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  • The Flensburg Government refers to a short-lived, provisional government of Nazi Germany that existed in the final days of World War II, from May 2 to May 23, 1945. Named after the town of Flensburg in northern Germany, near the Danish border, where it was headquartered, this government represented the last vestiges of the Third…

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