History

  • There were numerous deaths at the Berlin Wall, which stood as a barrier between West Berlin and East Germany from 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989. Before the rise of the Berlin Wall in 1961, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West…

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  • Ernst Cahn, a German-Jewish refugee,son of Salomon Cahn and Rosa Katzenstein. He married in 1914 and had two children who survived the war. He lived with his family from 1924-1928 in Amsterdam. In 1936 he returned to the Netherlands, to Huizen, from Germany because of the persecution of the Jews. Ernst Cahn co-owned ice-cream parlour…

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  • Full military honors were granted by the Luftwaffe at the funerals of RAF sergeants Butlin and Holden who were shot down over Jersey, Channel Islands. It is thought this was to try to pacify the local population. The Luftwaffe behaved much differently than the SS or Wehrmacht. Much more chivalry. RAF Sergeants Butlin took off…

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  • Hitler maintained three residences during the Third Reich: the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his Munich apartment, and Haus Wachenfeld (later the Berghof), his mountain home on the Obersalzberg. Hitler asked his neighbor Karl Schuster, the owner of the Türken Inn, to sell him a piece of his adjacent property. Schuster refused on the grounds of…

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  • Many people think that the problems in the middle east are relatively new. But places like Iraq have been a troublesome areas  which have been in conflict for many decades. Führer Directive No. 30 (German: Weisung Nr. 30) was a directive issued by German dictator Adolf Hitler during World War II. It ordered German support…

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  • The Battle of Heiligerlee (Heiligerlee, Groningen, 23 May 1568) was fought between Dutch rebels and the Spanish army of Friesland. This was the first Dutch victory during the Eighty Years’ War. The Groningen province of the Spanish Netherlands was invaded by an army consisting of 3,900 infantry led by Louis of Nassau and 200 cavalry led…

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  • Bloody Sunday was a series of killings of members of the German minority that took place at the beginning of World War II. On September 3, 1939, two days after the beginning of the German invasion of Poland, highly controversial killings occurred in and around Bydgoszcz (German: Bromberg), a Polish city with a sizable German…

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  • Music plays an important role in my life, it always have and it always will. It is not only listening to music, playing it also often played a therapeutic role, especially during my teenage years. My weapon of choice,Guitar. Below a picture of my very 1st guitar. Many more were to follow.   It was…

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  • On this day in 1631 the city of Magdeburg in Germany is seized by forces of the Holy Roman Empire and most of its inhabitants massacred, in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Thirty Years’ War. In November 1630, King Gustavus sent his colonel Dietrich von Falkenberg to direct Magdeburg’s military affairs and promised…

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  • The miracle of Saipan

    In a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944. The child was the only person found alive among hundreds of corpses in one cave. The battle…

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