History

  • I am just being a bit cheeky here but sometimes you see pictures of European leaders and you wonder “How friendly were they really?” Above and below are pictures of Kohl and Mitterand,holding hands  in Verdun, 1984 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev embraces Erich Honecker, hardline communist and general secretary of the Communist Party (SED) as members of…

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  • Eugen Weidmann (February 5, 1908 – June 17, 1939) was a German criminal who was executed by guillotine in France, the last public execution in that country On June 17, 1939, Weidmann was beheaded outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. The “hysterical behaviour” by spectators was so scandalous that French president Albert Lebrun immediately banned…

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  • Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was cheerful and without a care when he first met photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. In a close-up image the Third Reich politician was caught off guard smiling at the League of Nations meeting in Geneva in September 1933. Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995), the man behind some of the most memorable pictures of…

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  • Chanson d’Automne (Autumn Song) is a poem by Paul Verlaine, one of the best-known in the French language. It is included in Verlaine’s first collection, Poèmes saturniens, published in 1866 (see 1866 in poetry). The poem forms part of the paysages tristes (sad landscapes) section of the collection. In World War II lines from the…

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  • +++++Contains distressing images++++++++ Chased by youth armed with clubs, this woman is fleeing from a “death dealer” whose left leg can be seen at the left-hand edge of the photograph. The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive massacres of Jews living in the city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists from 30 June…

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  • Ferenc Szálasi was the leader and all-powerful head of the fascist Arrow Cross movement, the regime that came to power in Hungary with the armed assistance of the Nazi Germany on October 15-16, 1944. After that date, the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews was in his hands. During his brief rule, Szálasi’s men…

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  • Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American soldier and statesman who served as the seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837 and was the founder of the Democratic Party. Before being elected to the presidency, Jackson served in Congress and gained fame as a general in the United…

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  • As the Red Army and the Western Allies pressed closer and closer to Berlin suicides grew. Thousands of Germans committed suicide in the spring of 1945, rather than face occupation and the expected abuse by their victors. 3,881 people were recorded as committing suicide during April in the Battle of Berlin, although the figure is…

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  • An estimated seven or eight thousand people were killed in a single morning on May 29, 1945 in what is now known as the Great Yokohama Air Raid, when B-29s firebombed the city and in just one hour and nine minutes reduced 42% of it to rubble. High-altitude, daylight attack on Yokohama urban area. 517…

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