History

General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2

  • The Venlo Incident

    I always considered myself to be a bit of a World War II buff, but it was only when I started this website I realized how little I knew about World War II. This case is a good example. Venlo is a town in the province of Limburg in the Netherlands, in the Southeast of

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  • The Children of WWII

    “A child is born with no state of mind,blind to the ways of mankind” I would never have imagined I would  use the words of a 1980’s hip hop song in a blog relating to WWII. The words are from the 1982 Hip Hop hit “the Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But

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  • JFK at War

    While the world is remembering the 62nd Anniversary of the Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I want to focus on a different aspect of JFK, his time during World War II. Specifically, his time on PT 109. “The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the NAVY and MARINE CORPS MEDAL to/ LIEUTENANT

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  • Remaining strong

    I am a parent and my job like any other parent’s job on the globe is to keep my children safe from harm or at least reduce the risk of harm in whatever way possible. That is an extremely difficult job in normal circumstances.During the Holocaust this was often impossible. I can understand that parents

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  • The Banality of Evil

    The mistake that is often made in describing the Nazis, who were responsible for millions of deaths, is that they are called ‘monsters’ The scary thing is they weren’t monsters, they were human beings,extremely evil ones  but human beings nonetheless.By calling them monsters, you provide an excuse for the crimes they committed, for what else

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  • Heinrich Himmler must have been without a shadow of a doubt one of the craziest of the Nazis. He had a bizarre fascination for the occult. Karl Maria Wiligut had been one of Himmler’s closest influancers relating to the occult of the Aryan and Germanic race. Karl Maria Wiligut (alias Weisthor, Jarl Widar, Lobesam) (10

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  • Operation Silbertanne (silver fir) was the codename of a series of murders taking place between September 1943 and September 1944 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. The assassinations were carried out by a death squad composed of Dutch members of the SS and Dutch veterans of the Eastern Front. The objective of the operation was

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  • The 1930s were a period of profound upheaval in Europe. The rise of fascism and Nazism was altering the political landscape, and many countries were drawn into the vortex of ideologies that would define much of the 20th century. While much of the world’s attention was focused on the German threat under Adolf Hitler, the

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  • Awful atrocities were carried out at the Janowska concentration camp and surrounding Lvov (aka Lwow and Lviv) by the Nazis, Soviet troops and Ukrainian nationalists. In September 1941, the Germans set up a factory on Janowska Street in the northwestern suburbs of Lvov, in southeastern Poland(today Lviv in Ukraine). This factory became part of a

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  • Goebbels Declaration of Hate

    Goebbels was more than a Nazi. He was pure evil, and he dedicated all his life and, indeed, death to Adolf Hitler. As minister of propaganda, he was probably the most powerful of Hitler’s henchmen; with the propaganda tools at his disposal, he was able to brainwash and persuade the general population. On 16 November

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