History
General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2
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I know it is easy to call people like Rudolf Höss and others who worked in Auschwitz monsters, and to en extent I can understand that, I have done so in the past. However when you call them monsters you take the risk of given them an excuse for their acts, because we only expect…
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I am always amazed by the fact that there are still people who desperately want to deny the Holocaust. Although there is so much evident and a lot of it very graphic, they still say it never happened and that the photographic evidence are staged pictures, produced by the allies. The one thing they do…
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There are no photographs of the two babies—just death certificates. Elisabeth Jeanne Petzal was born with her twin brother Robert Harry on 10 August 1943 in Camp Westerbork. They were children of Werner Petzal and Fanny Betsy Oppenheim. Both were murdered in Auschwitz on 18 October 1944. They were just a year old when they…
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On 9 August 1945, a B-29 named Bock’s Car lifted off from Tinian and headed toward the primary target: Kokura Arsenal, a massive collection of war industries adjacent to the city of Kokura. The primary target was the city of Kokura, where the Kokura Arsenal was located, and the secondary target was Nagasaki, where two…
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A truly remarkable story of love and survival. In the late 1930s, Anka Bergman was a lively law student living in the Czechoslovakian capital, Prague. “I wanted company and boyfriends and to enjoy myself. I didn’t know that Hitler was coming, but I filled my time with only cinemas and theatres and concerts and parties,”…
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Coffee: it’s the drink we rely on for energy, the beverage that brings people together, and a ritual embedded in cultures worldwide. But coffee’s story is as rich and deep as the flavors we savor in each cup. Let’s take a journey through the history of coffee—from the ancient hills of Ethiopia to the bustling…
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The title of this blog could be from any fictitious novel. A children’s book or even a fairy tale, but it actually describes a bizarre reality which caused so much destruction. The story of Hitler’s naturalization process resembles something of a farce. On April 7 1925 he had given up his Austrian citizenship, it was…
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War brings out the best and the worst out of people, that is just a fact. It is easy to acknowledge the good but there is often a struggle acknowledging the bad, even to the extent of trying to completely erase it from history. When it comes to the Holocaust there is no question about…
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It should be no surprise that I cherish beauty, and to me, none compares to the timeless grace of a woman’s bare form. This is a tribute to the women who carry the earth’s stories in their eyes and the strength of generations in their spirit. Their beauty is not bound by trends or fleeting…
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The contemporary landscape of the British Isles, characterized by rolling green hills, temperate woodlands, and dense urban centers, offers little immediate hint of a wilder, more megafaunal past. Yet, for hundreds of thousands of years during the Pleistocene epoch—commonly known as the Ice Age—what is now Great Britain was home to some of the largest…
History of Sorts 