World War 2

  • It’s May 17 1942, you country is occupied by a hostile foreign nation. Fellow country man are dying on battlefields or being executed for being members of the resistance and other fellow country men are being deported to death camps. What do you do? Well watch a football match of course. Since the champions league…

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  • I often like to play with words for example when you take Warsaw and switch some parts of the name you get an accurate description of what the city went through during WWII . Saw War and Was raw. Warsaw saw the war in its rawest  and most brutal form. It is also one of…

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  • Cat in the hat;How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and It’s a Wonderful Life are not stories you would associate with WWII or propaganda, and yet they have a distinct ,albeit indirect link to WWII propaganda movies. The name Theodor Seuss Geisel will mean little to many people,although there is a hint in his name which gives…

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  • Regardless how talented you were, or how much value you could add to the German culture, if you didn’t comply to the Nazi ideology or dared to criticize it, you stood a good chance of getting executed. Karlrobert Kreiten born 26 June 1916,  in Bonn, Germany) was a Dutch-German pianist,  holding Dutch citizenship his short life…

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  • Despite all the horrors of World War II—there was still room for humour, satire, and a healthy dose of sarcasm. Although, sometimes the price to pay for a joke could be extremely high. In this blog, these are just a few examples of some WWII jokes, the consequences for some of them, and the way…

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  • Nazis and Cinema

    Ever since its inception , the media of  film has been a perfect tool to inform the masses be it in an entertaining way or in a more sinister manner. It was and still is the perfect way to distribute propaganda material en mass, although in more recent  years social media has taken over that…

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  • May 10 1940 must have been one of the busiest and chaotic days in WWII.I won’t go to deep into the details because most of the events are well documented, however not everyone might know that these events happened on the same day. The invasion of the Benelux(Belgium,Netherlands, Luxembourg) On the 10th May, 1940, the…

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  • As I sat doing research on the days before the Germans invaded the Netherlands, I came across a newspaper article about the murder of Gretha Melaard. Gretha Melaard was a 26-year-old student nurse who was killed on Friday, May 3rd, 1940. She had left Rotterdam that day at 8:30 pm to go to work in…

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  • The word ‘Hero’ is branded way too easily nowadays, Recently I heard someone on a current affairs program saying he saw the Kardashians as his role models and heroes, that actually scared me. If people whose only contribution to society is self indulgence and self promotion are seen as heroes, then real heroes like Father Józef…

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  • Theresienstadt was a 1944 Nazi propaganda film depicting  Theresienstadt concentration camp as a sort of idyllic rest stop, in an attempt to convince world opinion that there was no such thing as Nazi death camps.  The film intended to be viewed in “neutral” nations  showing how “humane” conditions were at Theresienstadt. Nor only was it enough…

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