World War 2
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Mary Berg lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, but her situation was very unusual. Though she was born in Poland, her mother was an American, so her ultimate fate was different from most of her neighbors. Jews with American citizenship could possibly be exchanged for German prisoners of war, so they had a unique value to…
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On July 22, 1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto began, as thousands were rounded up daily and transported to a newly constructed concentration/extermination camp at Treblinka, in Poland. On July 17, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, arrived at Auschwitz, the concentration camp in eastern Poland, in time to watch…
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I stumbled upon this story by accident. I was actually doing research on a Jerry Lewis movie called “The Day the Clown Cried “The film was met with controversy regarding its premise and content, which features a circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Lewis has repeatedly insisted that The Day the Clown Cried would never be…
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Anton Schmid (January 9, 1900 in Vienna, Austria – April 13, 1942 in Vilnius, Lithuania) was an Austrian conscript to the Wehrmacht in World War II who, as a sergeant (feldwebel) in Vilnius, Lithuania, was executed by his superiors for helping 250 Jewish men, women, and children escape from extermination by the Nazi SS ] He did this by hiding them and supplying them with false ID papers. Anton Schmid was born in Vienna in 1900. He owned a…
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“Aidan MacCarthy was one of a handful of people who survived the two events that mark the beginning and end of the Second World War,” said Jackson, a lecturer in creative media at the Institute of Technology, Tralee. Air Commodore Joseph Aidan MacCarthy OBE, GM (1914–1995) was an Irish doctor of the Royal Air Force who showed great courage, resourcefulness and…
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The Dunkirk evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo, also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, was the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, between 26 May and 4 June 1940, during World War II. The operation was decided upon when large numbers of British, French, Belgian, and Canadian troops were cut off and surrounded by the German army during the Battle of France.…
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The St. Stephen’s College massacre involved a series of acts of extreme cruelty committed by the Imperial Japanese Army on 25 December 1941 during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong at St. Stephen’s College. Several hours before the British surrendered on Christmas day at the end of the Battle of Hong Kong, Japanese soldiers entered St. Stephen’s College, which was being used as a hospital…
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On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Aside from the fact that they were deciding how best to eradicate the Jews,what maybe even…
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During the night of 17 September 1940, a gale tore loose several British barrage balloons, sweeping them across the North Sea to Scandinavia. The balloons’ trailing steel cables caught up in power lines, shorting them out. They also brought down the antenna for the Swedish International radio station. When complaints about the incident reached London,…
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Between 1941 and 1943, an exceedingly peculiar series of transmissions reached radio sets in Germany. The broadcaster called himself Der Chef, or the chief, and his Berliner accent and prodigious knowledge of military affairs suggested he was a high-ranking German of the old guard, probably an army officer. A patriot and Hitler loyalist, Der Chef bemoaned…
History of Sorts 
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