History
General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2
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Pip: History of Sorts is the kind of site that looks at a photograph of a selection ramp and refuses to let you scroll past — dirkdeklein has been doing that work, post after post, this week. Mara: The posts cover a lot of ground: the machinery of the camps themselves, the perpetrators and collaborators…
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The photograph above is of a selection in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It looks horrendous enough when you look at it, but if you analyze it, the horrors become so real. Firstly, it is clear that the line on the left will not see the end of that day. They are doomed to go into the gas chambers.…
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On 17 July 2014, all 298 passengers of flight MH17 were killed. 12 years on, and still no one is brought to justice. The contrary is true, some of those responsible, and this includes those who are complacent and are vetoing part of the investigation, and of course, the war in Ukraine. Each passing day…
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A diary is like a chronicle, a chronological summary of someone’s life, or at least part of it. Nowadays people use social media to document their daily life. Unlike social media, diaries are meant to be secret. That’s why the words from Holocaust diaries which were published after World War II, should be treated with…
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In 1972, Jerry Lewis directed, wrote and starred in the movie, “The Day the Clown Cried.” The storyline:“Helmut Doork, a once great and famous clown, is fired from the circus. Getting drunk at a local bar, he pokes fun at Hitler in front of some Gestapo agents, who arrest and send him to a prison…
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a landmark 1900 children’s fantasy novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. The first installment in the Oz series, the novel follows Dorothy Gale, a young farm girl from Kansas who is swept away by a cyclone along with her dog, Toto, and transported…
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I had a chat a few days ago with a friend. We were talking about the Holocaust, and we both agreed that the Germans, specifically the German Nazis, were the main instigators and culprits of the world’s biggest crime. Without them, there may not have been a Holocaust or at least not on the scale.…
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Starting in May 1942, wearing a yellow fabric star in the Netherlands, called the “Star of David,” was made compulsory by the Nazis. This measure made it easy to identify Jewish people and was designed to stigmatize and dehumanize them. This was not a new idea; since medieval times many other societies had forced their…
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The Izbica ghetto was a Jewish ghetto established by Nazi Germany in the town of Izbica, in Poland, during the Second World War. It functioned primarily as a transit ghetto, serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to the extermination camps at Bełżec and Sobibór. Although…
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The story of the first McDonald’s restaurant is more than a tale about hamburgers and milkshakes. It is a story about innovation, efficiency, postwar American culture, and the transformation of eating habits across the world. What began as a modest roadside hamburger stand in Southern California eventually became one of the most recognizable business enterprises…
History of Sorts 