World War 2
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I could have gone with any of 168 stories of the members of this club, but I decided to go with the highest ranking officer. The KLB Club (initials for Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) was formed on 12 October 1944, and included the 168 allied airmen who were held prisoner at Buchenwald concentration camp between 20 August and 19 October 1944.166 airmen survived Buchenwald, while two…
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Although many people know that Leon Trotsky had been assassinated I am not sure that they know it happened in Mexico. Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wass fatally wounded by an ice-ax-wielding assassin on 2 August 1940 at his compound outside Mexico City. The killer–Ramón Mercader–was a Spanish communist and probable agent of Soviet leader…
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Many people have this misconception about the resistance of the Jews against the Nazi regime, many think they just gave up without a fight. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. There were many Jewish partisan groups and resistance fighters across Europe. In this blog I will put the focus on the French Armée Juive,…
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Captain Roy Wooldridge, who was in the Royal Engineers, was taken prisoner during a covert night-time mission to examine submerged mines along the French beaches weeks before the D-Day landings. Mr Wooldridge, who was twice awarded the Military Cross, was sent a telegram ordering him to report to his unit just three days after…
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SS Navemar was a cargo steamship that was built in England in 1921, was Norwegian-owned until 1927 and then Spanish-owned for the rest of her career. An Italian submarine sank her in the Strait of Gibraltar in 1942. Navemar is notable for a voyage in 1941 in which she carried about 1,120 European Jewish refugees to the United States in overcrowded and insanitary conditions. In 1941, the American Jewish Joint…
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Waalsdorpervlakte, in the dunes by the Dutch seaside village of Scheveningen, was one of the most notorious spots during the Second World War in the Netherlands. On this desolate sand plain more than 250 people were killed by the Germans. Most were members of the Dutch Resistance who risked their lives in the struggle against…
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The Jewel Voice Broadcast was the radio broadcast in which Japanese Emperor Hirohito read out the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War (, announcing to the Japanese people that the Japanese Government had accepted the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military at the end of World War II. This speech was broadcast at noon Japan Standard Time on August 15, 1945, after the Battle of Okinawa, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and…
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Dutch hero Marion Pritchard-Van Binsbergen died at the age of 96 in Washington on December 11th, 2016. Marion Pritchard, (née van Binsbergen; was a Dutch-American social worker and psychoanalyst, who distinguished herself as a savior of Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Pritchard helped save approximately 150 Dutch Jews, most of them children, throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands.In…
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There is a saying ” Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” But what if in saving one life you inadvertently plunged the world into the most catastrophic horror of all time? What if you saved the life of Adolf Hitler just as he was taking his first baby steps to becoming the most…
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Everyone knows Joseph Stalin, but most aren’t familiar with his familial life, particularly his eldest son, Yakov. The tumultuous relationship between father and son created a story that spanned a difficult youth, the German invasion of the Soviet Union and a Nazi concentration camp. Yakov was born to Stalin’s first wife, in 1907. He was…
History of Sorts 
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