History

General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2

  • I hear a lot of fear mongering in relation to vaccines. One argument given by some people for not taking a vaccine is that one of the side effect is death. Usually these arguments are given with the back up of a meme, but never with actual facts. It is true that one of the…

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  • So you are young musician. You have had some success thus far ,but you are still struggling to get that all important first number one hit, that first megahit. You want to put your stamp on Rock and Roll, You just saw Elvis performing and you know he is the guy to beat when it…

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  • I would be lying if I would say that all Dutch opposed the Nazi occupiers because many were happy enough to follow the rules of the new lords of the land. However, many opposed the evil regime and especially opposed the way they treated their Jewish friends and neighbours. Organisations like Het Derde Front (The…

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  • Father’s Day

    This blog is about my Dad because it is Father’s Day. There is so much I could say about my Dad, and yet there is so little. For a long time, he had not been a part of my life—18 years, to be precise. Especially in the last years of those 18, I started to…

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  • Marijke Godschalk was born in Assen, the Netherlands, on June 18 1941. Less then 2 years later she would be dead. Not because she was ill or had been involved in an accident. She died because of someone’s idea of her. Although she looked like any other Dutch or even German girl, I would even…

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  • Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson on the 16th of June in Ulverston, Lancashire in England, 1890. His father was a vaudeville performer and this led Stan to being a stage performer too. He didn’t get much schooling and this resulted to the joining of Fred Karno’s Troupe where Stan understudied the future star,…

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  • Regardless if you are a fan of the man or not, anyone who watched that match last night must have had an awful shock. Shortly before half time during the UEFA Euro 2020, group stage match between Denmark and Finland, the Danish midfielder and star player, Christian Eriksen collapsed. He was taken of the pitch…

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  • Dear Anne, today you would have turned 93, but we all know the history why that didn’t happen. Some of that history is written in the diary you received on your 13th birthday, June 12 1942.So many people have read that diary, your private thoughts laid bare for the world to see. But I am…

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  • The case of Walter Seifert is a disturbing one. It is also an indication on something that I have argued for a long time, the Denazification program after World War 2 did not work. It was merely a political bit of veneer. For you who don’t know what the Denazification program was;Denazification (German: Entnazifizierung) was…

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  • Growing up in the Netherlands there was a tradition on Good Friday. Every year on Good Friday the Dutch radio would play the ‘Top 100 of all time’, basically the greatest songs ever recorded. The majority would be rock songs. The top 4 would always be ‘Child in Time’ by Deep Purple; ‘Stairway to Heaven’…

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