World War 2

  • Gottschalk, the son of a physician, was born in the small town of Calau, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, on April 10 1904. He attended the Gymnasium high school in Cottbus and from 1924 worked for four years on seagoing vessels. He later began an theatrical education in Cottbus and Berlin. During an engagement…

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  • This is a Friday the 13th story with a positive twist, on top of that it is one of those rare positive Holocaust events. On Friday, the 13th of April, 1945. A few miles northwest of Magdeburg there was a railroad siding in wooded ravine not far from the Elbe River. Major Clarence L. Benjamin in…

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  • On March 4, 1942, two Kawanishi H8K “Emily” flying boats embarked on Operation K, flying the longest distance ever undertaken by a two-plane bombing mission to that point. The planes refueled at an atoll 500 miles from Hawaii and then launched to drop their bombs on Pearl Harbor. Due to extensive cloud cover and confusion…

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  • Café de Paris is a London nightclub, located in the West End, beside Leicester Square on Coventry Street, Piccadilly. It opened in 1924 and subsequently featured such performers as Dorothy Dandridge, Marlene Dietrich, Harry Gold, Harry Roy, Ken Snakehips Johnson and Maxine Cooper Gomberg.Louise Brooks made history when she worked there in December 1924, introducing…

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  • The Nitimei Maru, a Japanese troop ship with around 1,000 Dutch prisoners of war and 1562 Japanese soldiers aboard, departed from Singapore on 29 December 1942. The prisoners of war were being taken to work on the Burma Railway. The Nitimei Maru was just one of many ‘hell ships’, given this name because of the deplorable conditions…

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  • Dr Klaus Schilling

    Klaus Karl Schilling (born 5 July 1871 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany; died 28 May 1946 in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, West Germany),  was a German tropical medicine specialist, particularly remembered for his infamous participation in the Nazi human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. Though never a member of the Nazi…

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  • Operation Tabarin

    During the Second World War the British Government mounted a secret mission, code-named Operation Tabarin, to establish a permanent presence in Antarctica to assert its territorial claims. This involved the building of the first permanent British bases in Antarctica, and formed the foundations of Britain’s continued involvement in Antarctica for the last seventy + years.…

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  • The below pictures are from the Ringelblum archive at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Named after Emanuel Ringelblum who was executed on the 7th of March 1944 at the Pawiak Prison in Warsaw. I will not say too much about these paintings, I will let them do the talking. Other pieces of art 1942. Esther Lurie used…

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  • Most people outside of Europe probably won’t even know this tiny nation exists,and even some Europeans will never have heard of this small Alpine country with a population of 37,000(only about 11,000 during WWII)     Like it’s bigger neighbor,Switzerland, Liechtenstein stayed neutral during WWII. But like the other neutral nations, the neutrality was relative…

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  • Federal elections in Germany were on 5 March 1933. The 1933 poll was conducted after the Nazi rise to power and the Reichstag fire, just six days prior to the election. Nazi stormtroopers had unleashed a campaign of violence against the Communist Party (KPD), left-wingers, trade unionists, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and the centre-right Catholic…

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