History
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(originally published September 21 2023) The last two nights, I watched the documentary Ordinary Men—The Forgotten Holocaust (now streaming on Netflix). It is a German documentary film by director Manfred Oldenburg and producer Leopold Hoesch from 2022. The documentary examines how and why thousands of ordinary Germans participated in mass atrocities as members of Nazi…
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World War II officially started on 3 September 1939. The Nazis wasted very little time in committing their first mass murder during the war. It was only hours after the war was declared. The S.S. Athenia was commanded by Captain James Cook. He left Glasgow for Montreal via Liverpool and Belfast. She carried 1,103 passengers,…
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On September 15, 1971, NBC aired the first official episode of Columbo: Murder by the Book. What could have been just another detective drama instead became a genre-defining moment. With Peter Falk stepping fully into the role of Lieutenant Columbo, a script by legendary writer Steven Bochco, and direction by a then-unknown Steven Spielberg, the…
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Someone asked me recently when I will stop telling Holocaust stories? I replied “there were 11 million victims, once all of their stories are told I’ll stop.” I won’t be able to tell all 11 million personal accounts but this is one of them. Thomas Pfeffer was born on November 22, 1936 in Amsterdam, the…
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I do consider myself to be a “word artist” but the images that Cassini send back to this little blue planet. the 3rd rock from the sun. have left me speechless. Although in the media it is called Cassini the actual name of the spacecraft is ,’Cassini-Huygens’, named after astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens. It was a collaboration between NASA,…
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From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the…
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You all have to forgive me for the cheeky title of this blog, but I just couldn’t resist the pun.Fact is though that Emma Nutt was a pioneer and she probably didn’t realize it herself. The first telephones were hard enough to use without the added harassment of the teenage boys who worked as the earliest switchboard…
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On September 2, 1945, representatives from the Japanese government and Allied forces assembled aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, which effectively ended World War II. The document was prepared by the U.S. War Department and approved by President Harry S. Truman. Eight short paragraphs formalized the “unconditional surrender to…
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You don’t have to be a history buff to know that 1 September 1939 was the date when the Germans invaded their neighbour, Poland. What often is forgotten is that it wasn’t only the Germans who invaded Poland on that day. The Germans got a helping hand from the newly formed Republic of Slovakia. And…
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The athlete Meryll Frost is credited with the phrase, “Behind every great man there’s a great woman,” but that is not what he actually said. What he really said was, “They say behind every great man there’s a woman. While I’m not a great man, there’s a great woman behind me.” In this blog, I…
History of Sorts 
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