World War 2

  • I don’t know why but ever since I moved to Ireland I have found myself explaining my name quite a bit. I have been called Derek,Declan,Kirk and other variations.Nowadays I usually say “Dirk like Dirk Bogarde” it mostly takes another few minutes for people to get my last name right. Most people will have heard…

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  • Heinz Rühmann-Hero or Villain? The honest answer is I don’t know but I expect the answer is somewhere in the middle, he was neither a hero or a villain ,he was a bit of both. For anyone living in an English speaking country or who grew up outside of Europe, the name Heinz Rühmann will…

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  • If someone told you that you could kill an innocent man and there would be no repercussions or any form of punishment, would you do it? Any normal person would answer “no” of course.But not Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, he decided to kill a man simply for the reason that he could. Berndt was a German journalist,…

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  • Sigmund Rascher’s end

    Sigmund Rascher was without a shadow if a doubt one of the most evil men of the Nazi regime. He was an SS Doctor in service of the Luftwaffe and was one of Himmler’s favourites. Rascher’s wife the actress ,Karoline “Nini” Diehl, was a friend of Himmler, rumours had it that she was Himmler’s mistress…

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  • I had not heard of Tina Strobos before although I have read so much about WWII and the Holocaust, but for some reason her name escaped me. She was born Tineke Buchter. She was a  was a Dutch physician and psychiatrist from Amsterdam and during WWII she was involved in the Dutch resistance.Together with her…

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  • Do you dream of me at night?

    Yesterday it would have been my 80th Birthday. Henny Sophia Frank, born on February 23,1939 in Amsterdam. My name is Henny Sophia but people call me Henneke. But alas I was not allowed to celebrate my 80th birthday. Nor was I allowed to celebrate my 70th or 60th, in fact I wasn’t even allowed to…

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  • On February 22nd, 1944 the people of the Dutch  town of Nijmegen were subjected to an attack which killed more than 750 civilians. One would assume that this awful attack was carried out by the German occupiers , but that was not the case. The attack was carried out by B-24 bombers of the 446th…

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  • Funding Evil

    For the NSDAP to become as powerful as it did, it had to receive financial backing, They could not only rely on donations of party members, because in the early 1930s many of them were not that wealthy, one of the reasons they had joined the party was to get themselves in a financial better…

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  • Being a parent is one of the hardest jobs in the world. The sleepless nights, the dirty diapers, the countless times being peed on. Also, the worries when your baby has a bit of a temperature, the millions of scenarios of what could go wrong with your child. But all of that is forgotten the…

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  • The shoe of a child

    There are so many horrific images of the Holocaust, Films and pictures of corpses on carts. Photographs of women and children being executed. There is a disturbing photograph of a Jewish lady with ripped clothes being chased by young children. All of these images are very powerful but I have decided to limit those images…

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