War Crimes
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Operation Silbertanne (silver fir) was the codename of a series of murders taking place between September 1943 and September 1944 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. The assassinations were carried out by a death squad composed of Dutch members of the SS and Dutch veterans of the Eastern Front. The objective of the operation was…
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Below is a rare picture of Hitler briefing his top brass. For years they claimed to know nothing about the Holocaust. But extraordinary secret recordings – made by the British – explode that myth. Between 1942 and 1945, MI-19, a division of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, created a number of Combined Services Detailed…
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I know what you are thinking—another forgotten atrocity committed by the Nazi regime though you would be wrong. This massacre was carried out by the ‘good’ guys. It is an often-neglected fact that the majority of General De Gaulle’s Free French Forces were not white Frenchmen but were predominantly troops from its colonies in Africa…
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Max Ehrlich (1892-1944) was one of the most celebrated actors and directors on the German comedy and cabaret scene of the 1930s. But his brilliant career was brutally interrupted by the rise of Nazism and his resulting deportation in 1942 to Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands. Amazingly, there behind the walls and barbed wire,…
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“When you look into the eyes of this man, you look into the eyes of a killer” is a line from Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia. The movie is not about Oskar Dirlewanger, but that line surely applies to him. Oskar Dirlewanger, born on September 26, 1895, in Würzburg, Germany, is one of the most notorious and…
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These are testimonies of two men, one a low-ranking SS Infantry soldier, the other a member of the Hlinka Guard. The most disturbing aspect of the testimonies is not the description of the crimes committed, but the casual way of describing them. Hans Friedrich was a member of the 1st Infantry Brigade. He claimed not…
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The title of this blog is also the title of a book written by Willy Peter Reese. He was born on born January 22, 1921 in Duisburg. It is not clear when he died but it estimated he more then likely died between June 22 and 27, 1944 near Wizebsk in the Soviet Union. Willy…
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Stefan Baretzki was an Auschwitz guard of Bukovina-German origin. He was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and stationed at Auschwitz from 1942 until 1945. Baretzki was sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years in August 1965 at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Because he only finished primary education, the court described him as a “simpleton” and “less…
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The picture is of clothes that once belonged to prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp, it was taken shortly after the camp was liberated. When you look a it it looks like a launderette has dumped its load in a courtyard. But this picture tells so much more. Each of those pieces of material and…
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Most of the SS guards working in Auschwitz and indeed other camps had not been hardened soldiers before the war. They had been ‘ordinary’ people. And that is still a mystery to me, how could these men become so involved in these unspeakable evil acts, Some were more willingly than others , but each one…
History of Sorts 
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