Poland
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Born to a Russian peasant family in 1895, as a young man he quickly earned a reputation for “chernaya rabota”, or “black work”, while serving in the Tsarist army during World War I- gaining recognition from Stalin himself for his covert assassinations, torture, and executions. Blokhin quickly rose through the ranks of Russia’s secret police…
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During World War II, the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the 2nd Polish Corps had an unusual soldier among its ranks, a 440-pound Syrian bear named Wojtek. Wojtek first came to the company as a cub, but throughout of the war, he matured and was given the rank of corporal in the Polish army. .Amid…
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Most people will have heard of Claus von Stauffenberg, one of the main conspirators of the 20th of July assassination plot. Many books have been written about him and several movies were made about him, one of the most recent ones is Valkyrie with Tom Cruise in the title role. But there was another von…
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To say that Chelmno is a forgotten extermination camp would be an overstatement,however there are many people who have never heard of this camp. Many think there were only a few concentration camps but in fact there were hundreds. Chelmno was the first Nazi camp where gassing was used to murder Jews on a large…
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Mary Berg lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, but her situation was very unusual. Though she was born in Poland, her mother was an American, so her ultimate fate was different from most of her neighbors. Jews with American citizenship could possibly be exchanged for German prisoners of war, so they had a unique value to…
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On July 22, 1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto began, as thousands were rounded up daily and transported to a newly constructed concentration/extermination camp at Treblinka, in Poland. On July 17, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, arrived at Auschwitz, the concentration camp in eastern Poland, in time to watch…
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Walter Kutschmann (24 July 1914 – 30 August 1986) was a German SS-Untersturmführer and Gestapo officer, a member of an Einsatzkommando, based first in Lwów, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine), and later in Drohobycz. He was culpable for the massacre of 1,500 Polish Jews in Lwów, Poland, in the years 1941–42. At the start of the Second World War, he moved to Leipzig,…
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Four Poles, Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster, Józef Lempart, and Eugeniusz Bendera, escaped on June 20, 1942 after breaking into an SS storeroom and stealing uniforms and weapons. In disguise, they drove away in a vehicle that they stole from the SS motor pool, and reached the General Government. Jaster carried a report that Witold…
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Before Germany invaded Poland, more than a million people lived in Warsaw. When the city was liberated in January of 1945 – just four months after the Nazis crushed the city during the Warsaw Uprising – only 153,000 starving citizens had survived. Wladyslaw Szpilman was one of them. The pianist, whose hands would once more…
History of Sorts 
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