World War 2
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In the wider perception of European history, the late 1930s is remembered as the time when Nazi Germany began to cast its shadow over Europe leading ultimately to the most destructive conflict in history – World War II. At the same time however, old grievances were bubbling to the surface once more in Ireland and…
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Thousands of personal items snatched from those murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz have at last been returned to the memorial after an exhaustive search. Items including thermometers, empty bottles of medicines, jewellery, cutlery, watches, brushes, tobacco pipes, lighters and keys are among a huge number of items finally tracked down by researchers from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial…
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Hitler and the Nazi leadership’s had an obsession with magic and the occult,supernatural beliefs and practices penetrated the highest circles of the Nazi machine. Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was an avid reader of Nostradamus and was delighted to be able to tell Hitler, having read some of the Frenchman’s prophecies, that the British were on…
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These were once the toys, clothing and medicine of Hugo Steenmeijer, the child of a Dutch father and an Indonesian mother. When Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies in 1942, his father was sent to work as a forced labourer on the Burma Railway. The Japanese imprisoned Europeans in internment camps. The 150,000 people native…
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Hessy Levinsons Taft (born May 17, 1934) is a woman, born to Jewish parents in Berlin, best known for having been featured prominently as an infant in Nazi propaganda after her photo was surreptitiously entered in, and then selected as the winner of, a contest to find the most beautiful Aryan baby. Taft’s image became one of the most subversive of the…
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Walter Kutschmann (24 July 1914 – 30 August 1986) was a German SS-Untersturmführer and Gestapo officer, a member of an Einsatzkommando, based first in Lwów, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine), and later in Drohobycz. He was culpable for the massacre of 1,500 Polish Jews in Lwów, Poland, in the years 1941–42. At the start of the Second World War, he moved to Leipzig,…
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Manzanar is most widely known as the site of one of ten American concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from December 1942 to 1945. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada in California’s Owens Valley between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, it is approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar (which means “apple orchard”…
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In October 1941 Auschwitz construction chief Karl Bischoff and SS architect Fritz Ertl were developing plans for a camp to be built about a mile and a half away from Auschwitz, on a site the Germans called Birkenau. The original occupancy figure of 550 was crossed out and replaced with 744. The new camp was…
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Marine Sergeant Lena Basilone was the wife of Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone,one of the famous Marines every Marine Corps recruit learns about at boot camp. He is often discussed in Marine Corps history classes but no one ever mentions that his wife was a Marine too. John Basilone (November 4, 1916 – February…
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Henoch’s religious Jewish parents married in 1937. His father, Moishe Kornfeld, and his mother, Liba Saleschutz, had settled in Kolbuszowa, where Henoch’s mother was raised. There, Liba’s father bought the newlyweds a home and started his new son-in-law in the wholesale textile business. Henoch was born in late 1938, and was raised among many aunts,…
History of Sorts 
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