Germany

  • Remembering Josef Strauss

    This is not the famous composer Joseph Strauss as a young man. This is actually another young man called Josef Strauss. Technically he never became a man because he was murdered in Auschwitz on August 17,1942. He was aged 17. Unlike his famous name bearer there is very little known about Josef, yet from the…

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  • Late in the morning of 4 August 1944, Dutch police entered the Secret Annexe and arrested the Frank family, the van Pels family, Fritz Pfeffer, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler (who worked at Opetka). Otto Frank was the managing director of Opetka, and they had helped to hide the residents. On 8 August 1944, after several days…

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  • I could have done a piece on any of the millions of victims of the Holocaust. The reason why I picked Kurt Jozef Rudolf Rosenthal, is because he was murdered today 80 years ago. His story is still important today because he was a refugee, trying to find a better future but he found death…

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  • The plan of the Nazis was to eradicate anyone who they deemed not worthy. This didn’t mean only killing but also ensuring that not one person, who the Nazis considered subhuman, would be born. On July 14,1933 the Nazi regime fulfilled the long-held dreams of eugenics proponents by enacting the Law for the Prevention of…

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  • Regardless if you are a fan of the man or not, anyone who watched that match last night must have had an awful shock. Shortly before half time during the UEFA Euro 2020, group stage match between Denmark and Finland, the Danish midfielder and star player, Christian Eriksen collapsed. He was taken of the pitch…

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  • Although many German film makers left Germany in the 1930s, because of the rise of the Nazism, propaganda minister Göbbels still had quite a pool of film makers to help him produce a great number of propaganda movies. The most famous and probably prolific was Leni Riefenstahl. But a close second was Veit Harlan. After…

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  • Martha Gellhorn was a pioneering female journalist who often reported from the front lines during World War II. Her father was Jewish, and her mother was a protestant. She was married to Ernest Hemingway from 1940–1945. She was the only woman to land in Normandy, France, on 6 June 1944—D-Day. She was also one of…

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  • Buchenwald

    ++++CONTAINS SOME GRAPHIC IMAGES+++++++++ I could do a blog on any of the 44,000 Nazi concentration camps. Yes you are reading that right, there were about 44,000 concentration camps. Some were extermination camps, some were labour camps and there were transit camps. Regardless what their designation was, the ultimate aim was the annihilation of those…

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  • “Reached the age of 9 years” may seem like a very matter of fact and brutal title , but the brutal honesty is many of the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust did not even reach that age. Reached the age of 9 years should never be said of any child as the age…

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  • There are a few amazing things about the death march from Dachau which had started on April 24,1945 and was headed to the Austrian border. Firstly it was a cold late April and early May because it was still snowing . Secondly there were still a few thousand victims alive but the most interesting thing…

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