History

General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2

  • The Kreisau Circle

    Many people assume there was no resistance in Germany against the Nazi regime, and to be honest, there wasn’t much. Nevertheless, some were relentless in trying to end that regime. There were dozens of assassination attempts on the life of Hitler. The most famous was the 20 July plot. Some of those involved in that

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  • Holocaust in Colour

    Generally, I don’t care for colourized photographs, especially not those from the Holocaust. However, I did come across a few striking depictions of that dark era. A former prisoner holds a human bone from a large pile of other bones from the Buchenwald concentration camp’s crematory. 1945. An emaciated 18-year-old female Russian prisoner stares into

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  • Adolf Hitler often displayed toddler-like behaviour. If he didn’t get his way or if someone did something he didn’t like, he would throw a tantrum. In 1935, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky(pictured above). He was a German pacifist. He was awarded the prize for something which happened before Hitler came

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  • Lynn is a psychotherapist and clinical social worker. She is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. In the interview, we discuss the mental impact her parents’ ordeal had on her and also how that translated into her work as a psychotherapist. She was voted The Best Therapist of 2008 by the Main Line Times newspaper in Pennsylvania,

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  • On May 30, 1943, Dr. Joseph Mengele began his “work” at Auschwitz. Unlike other camp physicians, who were assigned to prisoner selections according to a rotating schedule, Mengele actively sought this duty. He was the only doctor to volunteer for selections when new transports arrived by train and would sometimes ask to take over another

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  • The death of Dirk.

    It’s not every day one gets a chance to do a blog about one’s own death, and especially not before breakfast, but hey history is history. But before you start sending flowers and cards etc, the Dirk in the title is not me of course , but Count Dirk III of Holland, or West Friesland

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  • A bit of forgotten Movie history on the 122nd birthday of one of Hollywood’s greatest Cary Grant. Cary Grant’s near-casting as James Bond is one of the most revealing “what-ifs” in film history, because it shows how the Bond franchise defined itself by not choosing the most obvious star. By the late 1950s, Ian Fleming’s

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  • Nazi Railways

    We have all seen the pictures of the cattle wagons used to transport the Jews and other ‘Undesirables’ to the concentration camps and ghettos. Without a shadow of a doubt the Nazi Railways network played a pivotal role in the ‘Final Solution’ .Ironically(for the lack of a better word) though the same network also potentially

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  • Hitler and Wagner

    I have to be honest, the title and the 2 pictures above are a bit misleading. Yes this blog is about the relationship between Hitler and Wagner but with Winifred Wagner , the daughter in law of Richard, the wife of Siegfried Wagner,  the son of the composer. Winifred Wagner (born Winifred Marjorie Williams; 23

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  • It is a popular misconception that the concentration camps were a Nazi invention, but in fact the British had already established concentration camps in South Africa during the 2nd Boer war. It could be argued that the Indian reservations in the US were also concentration camps. But of course the sort of camps which were

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