World War 2
-
This is Rachel Soesan—her face is filled with so much life and joy, and why wouldn’t it be when she was 4. Her whole life lay before her. Yet there were some who perceived her as a threat to society. She was born on December 20, 1938 in Amsterdam. She would have been 85 today.…
-
On 12 December 1941, five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Adolf Hitler made a revealing speech in Berlin to Nazi leaders. “Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden.…
-
Just 10 words, but with such significance. A hurried dispatch from the ranking United States naval officer in Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, to all major navy commands and fleet units provided the first official word of the attack at the ill-prepared Pearl Harbor base.…
-
I am actually happy that I could not find any images of Anton de Rosa because I don’t think I could take that. When I say 10 months of life, that is literally what it was. He only lived for 10 months. The picture above is of his birthplace, Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp. Where was…
-
“On March 22, 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich Chancellor, a concentration camp for political prisoners was set up in Dachau. This camp served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a “school of violence” for the SS men under whose command it stood. In the twelve…
-
One of the definitions of hygiene is conditions or practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease—specifically through cleanliness. The lack of hygiene was one of the hidden killers during World War II, and indeed any other war, because it wasn’t always possible to keep a minimal level of hygiene. This post has a few…
-
Although I have literally written hundreds of posts on World War II and the Holocaust, I hadn’t heard about the great bank robbery. The bank robbery at Almelo 1944, is a bank robbery was committed by the Dutch resistance on November 15, in which 46.1 million guilders (value in 2023: €354 million) was taken. It…
-
The fact that so many were murdered during the Holocaust is hard to fathom, and it is often compounded by personal stories. None so sad as that of Heinz Felix Geiringer. It is not clear if he died just before the end of the war in Europe or shortly after the end. Several databases list…
-
Before I go into the main story about the holocaust in Limber, I have to explain the geographical situation of Limburg. There are two provinces called Limburg. One is in Belgium, the other in the Netherlands. The Dutch Limburg is the most Southern province of the Netherlands. To the West, it borders Belgium, and to…
-
On the morning of 7 November, a young Jewish man, Herschel Grynszpan, wrote a farewell postcard to his parents and put it in his pocket. Grynszpan went to a gun shop in the Rue du Faubourg St Martin, where he bought a 6.35mm revolver and a box of 25 bullets for 235 francs. They went…
History of Sorts 