World War 2
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Karl Berg was originally the third man in the chain of command at Camp Amersfoort and in 1943 he was appointed camp commandant. He had a reputation for being cruel and merciless. Berg was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of prisoners. A group of 101 Russian prisoners who had arrived at the camp in…
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I know this is going to be a controversial blog, even though there should not be any controversy about it. It is based on facts, but unfortunately, there are quite a few people who don’t want to accept the facts. Today, July 10, marks the 85th anniversary of the Jedwabne pogrom, a horrific event in…
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On 9th July 1942, nine members of the resistance group De Oranjewacht, [The Orange Guard], (Orange is the national colour of the Netherlands and the name of the Royal family) were shot in the Fort near Rijnauwen, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Two trials were conducted against the resistance group, and nine members were sentenced to death.…
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I know that most people will know what the Holocaust is, but for some groups, it had a different name. In this blog, I try to explain some of the complexities. The Holocaust stands as one of the most horrific and systematic genocides in human history. Occurring during World War II, from 1933 to 1945,…
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I don’t want to tell your story, but I have to. It is my duty as a father and as a human being to ensure that no child will ever get treated, they way you were. My heart breaks each time when I see a photograph of innocence—knowing the war destroyed that innocence. What makes…
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I can’t think of any place on Earth that was more evil than Auschwitz—although other camps had perhaps more cruelty, it is the scale of the cruelty, torture and murder that makes Auschwitz pure evil, a literal hell on Earth. The photograph above is of Yisrael and Zelig Jacob, the younger brothers of Lili Jacob.…
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Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is not a particularly famous place, although it is where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals, “PinkPop.” It is also where…
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When we think of Nazi concentration camps, our minds often conjure images of mass extermination, terror, and starvation. The haunting images of piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen and the crematoriums of Auschwitz are etched into our collective memory. However, in the final years of the Third Reich’s vast concentration-camp system, the Nazis introduced a disturbing…
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Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball second baseman who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era.Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers, by signing Robinson, heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to…
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On 6 July 1942, Otto Frank took his family into hiding in the now-so-well-known secret annex where Anne wrote her diary. Otto and Edith Frank planned to go into hiding with the children on 16 July 1942. However, Margot received a call-up notice from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) on 5 July,…
History of Sorts 