dirkdeklein
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When I visited Dachau in June,2023, I decided I would not take pictures inside of the gas chamber. To me, it felt wrong. However, I don’t judge people who have taken photographs in the past, like the one above. The gas chamber in Dachau was not used for mass murder. According to one eye witness…
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In the Middle Ages, animals who ‘committed crimes’ were subject to the same legal proceedings as humans. Famously, in 1457, seven pigs in Savigny, France were tried for the murder of a five-year-old boy. The proceedings were complete with a defense attorney for the pigs and a judge, who ultimately ruled that because people witnessed…
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“When you look into the eyes of this man, you look into the eyes of a killer” is a line from Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia. The movie is not about Oskar Dirlewanger, but that line surely applies to him. Oskar Dirlewanger, born on September 26, 1895, in Würzburg, Germany, is one of the most notorious and…
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On 28 August 1939, Europe stood on the edge of catastrophe. Adolf Hitler had already dismantled the post-WWI peace: Austria was annexed, Czechoslovakia was broken, and Poland sat squarely in Germany’s sights. Governments knew war was looming, but knowing war was possible was vastly different from knowing the German war machine was poised to strike.…
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(First published September 2, 2018) The position of Ireland during World War II was a bit of a tricky one. A lot of people actually were pro-German, not so much because they agreed with the German policies but more because they were at war with Britain, and there was still this feeling that Britain’s enemy…
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It is seldom that 3 random words can send shivers down your spine but the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ do. Just three ordinary words used many times in daily life and yet they also mean total horror. The literal translation is Work makes free, I know they are often translated as works set you free,…
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Many of my friends know that I have a passion for music. And you can’t have a passion for music if you don’t love the Blues. I interviewed Author and Blues aficionado ,Bob Cremer, about his book “Secret Language of the Blues: What the Lyrics Really Mean.” Don’t just listen to blues lyrics, understand them!…
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I have written about Westerbork before, but today I want to address the paradox and the misconception of the camp. Camp Westerbork was a Nazi transit camp in Drenthe province, northeastern Netherlands, during World War II. It was used as a staging location for sending Jews to concentration camps elsewhere, mainly Auschwitz and Sobibor. The…
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Queen Wilhelmina was Queen of the Netherlands from 1890 until her abdication in 1948. She reigned for nearly 58 years, longer than any other Dutch monarch. Her reign saw both World War I, although the Netherlands was neutral during World War I and World War II, as well as the Dutch economic crisis of 1933.…
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On the morning of 31 August 1888, a woman’s body was discovered in Buck’s Row, a dark and relatively quiet street in Whitechapel, London. She was lying on the pavement, her clothing disarranged and her throat brutally cut. Within hours, her name was known: Mary Ann Nichols, usually called Polly. She was forty-three years old.…
