Pre WWII
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From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the…
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(First published September 2, 2018, and updated March 23, 2024) The position of Ireland during World War II was a bit of a tricky one. A lot of people actually were pro-German, not so much because they agreed with the German policies but more because they were at war with Britain, and there was still…
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On the night of August 31, 1939, a German radio station in the small town of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland) became the stage for one of the most infamous false-flag operations in modern history. Known as the Gleiwitz incident, this orchestrated event was part of a broader Nazi propaganda effort to fabricate a justification for…
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It is Sunday evening—you turn on the radio and the news breaks that planet Earth is invaded by Mars. So what do you do? You panic, of course. Well, that was the case for many when they switched on the radio on 30 October 1938. By the end of October 1938, Welles’s Mercury Theatre on…
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A Spontaneous Act of Impulse On August 15, 1936, during the Summer Olympics in Berlin, officials, athletes, and spectators witnessed an unusual and unforgettable moment. At the men’s 1500-metre freestyle swimming final, a 43-year-old American tourist named Carla de Vries from Norwalk, California, made her way close to Hitler’s box. Clad in a red hat,…
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I know that in recent months I have done several sexually themed blogs. But they were all in a historical context, as this one will be. The blog will contain a depiction of the female genitalia. As the title suggests, a part of this blog will relate to medical science during the Third Reich. Thus…
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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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Nearly every time I write a post about a ”forgotten hero,” I get comments like, ”I didn’t forget about her!” or ”How dare you imply she has been forgotten.” These people, unfortunately, miss the point of the post. For some reason, they feel it was a personal attack on them. The heroes I write about…
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Alois Hitler was born on June 7, 1837, in the small village of Strones, in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, near the Bohemian border. His mother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, was unmarried at the time of his birth, which led to uncertainty surrounding his paternity. For the first several years of his life, Alois bore…
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Oskar Speck (1907–1995) was a German canoeist who paddled by folding kayak from Germany to Australia over the period 1932-1939. A Hamburg electrical contractor made unemployed during the Weimar-period Depression, he left Germany to seek work in the Cypriot copper mines, departing from Ulm and travelling south via the Danube. En route, he changed plans…
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