France
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Although its official name is Gurs Internment Camp, let’s call it what it really was, a concentration camp. It is also probably one, if not the only time, the Nazis sent Jews westward. At first, it served as a camp for Spanish Republicans and German refugees who fled from Nazism. The Gurs Camp was among…
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A few days before Christmas, 2024,Dennis Donovan, the last surviving member of the wartime 48 Royal Marine Commando, passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by his family, at the remarkable age of 100. In recent years, he has made several pilgrimages back to Normandy, with his final visit in June 2024 to commemorate the 80th…
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The above photograph is a rail track I pass over nearly every day. Yesterday, when I passed it, I had to think of all those who went on train journeys and never returned. The trains that travel over this rail track are comfortable, They have soft seats you can sit on, and some even have…
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Viewing images of the death and destruction wrought by the Holocaust can be deeply gut-wrenching. While it’s often said that a photograph speaks a thousand words, it’s equally valid that it can never tell the whole story. A photo captures only a single moment in time. This is one of the reasons I rarely share…
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I know what you are thinking—another forgotten atrocity committed by the Nazi regime though you would be wrong. This massacre was carried out by the ‘good’ guys. It is an often-neglected fact that the majority of General De Gaulle’s Free French Forces were not white Frenchmen but were predominantly troops from its colonies in Africa…
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November 11, 1918. 10:59 am, one last volley of machine gun fire, one last soldier to die.Henry Nicholas John Gunther took one last charge with his bayonet. The enemy warned him , but he wanted to proof himself. He wanted to show his demotion from Sergeant to Private had been unjustified. One last hoorah, one…
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Roger Godfrin is the only survivor of a massacre during which Nazi troops locked 643 citizens (including 500 women and children) inside a church and set fire to it on 10 June 1944 in Oradour sur Glane, France. About 20 people decided to make themselves scarce when the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich arrived.…
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Alois Brunner was one of the most feared and ruthless Nazi war criminals during the Holocaust. As a senior SS officer and a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, Brunner played a pivotal role in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Known for his cold-blooded efficiency and unrelenting cruelty,…
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This day 225 years ago the last Queen of France was executed. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, Marie Antoinette married the future French king Louis XVI when she was just 15 years old. The young couple soon came to symbolize all of the excesses of the reviled French monarchy, and Marie Antoinette herself became…
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The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup), known in French as “Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv,” was a mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police under the orders of the Nazi German authorities during World War II. This event took place on July 16 and 17, 1942, and is one of the…
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