Berlin

Waffen SS General Felix Steiner’s WWII Legacy

“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” Read more

Berlin

Hitler’s Death in the Führerbunker

By Flint Whitlock

His world was literally crashing down in flames around him.    Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which he had created out of nothing but his own will—an empire that he had once boasted would last for a millennium—was on fire and being torn apart by shot and shell, besieged on all sides. Read more

Berlin

Dutch Debacle

By John W. Osborn, Jr.

When world war engulfed Europe for the second time in a generation, the Netherlands placed its faith in the diplomatic delusion that it could remain neutral like it had during World War I. Read more

Berlin

The Scholarly Spies

Early in June 1940, refugees from northern France and the low Countries who had flooded Paris in May fled with the residents of the city as the German advance neared. Read more

Berlin

B-29 Production

When Maj. Gen. Curtis Lemay, the hard-driving commander of the Twentieth U.S. Air Force based in Guam, decided to change tactics in early 1945 to boost the effectiveness of the B-29 Superfortress, it was the Bell Aircraft plant in Marietta, Georgia, that ultimately provided him with the stripped-down bombers that played such a key role in ending the war in the Pacific. Read more

Berlin

Rampage on the Riviera: Operation Dragoon

Early in 1944, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the defeated hero of North Africa and now head of Army Group B in France, was tasked with strengthening the Atlantic Wall defenses against Allied invasion. Read more

Berlin

Smashing Hitler’s Atlantic Wall

After overrunning France and other Western European countries in 1940, Adolf Hitler was certain that the Allies would one day attempt to invade the European continent and attack through the occupied countries to destroy his regime. Read more

Berlin

Liberating the Camps

BACKSTORY: The final months of World War II in the European Theater were a harrowing and desperate time for the soldiers who fought there. Read more

Berlin

The Bombing of Berlin by Doolittle’s Eighth Air Force

He was widely regarded as America’s best pilot, he was already a recipient of the Medal of Honor, he was commander of the Eighth Air Force caught up in 1,000-plane bombing missions deep into the Third Reich, and he was mad as hell. Read more

Berlin

The Volkssturm: Last-Ditch Militia of the Third Reich

On October 18, 1944—the 131st anniversary of the Battle of the Nations’ victory over Napoleon in 1813—Reichsführer-SS (National Leader) Heinrich Himmler stepped up to a microphone to make a national radio address announcing the formation of the Nazi Party-controlled Volkssturm, or People’s Militia. Read more

Berlin

Wretched Misconduct of the Red Army

The vast Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park commemorates 5,000 Red Army soldiers who fell in battle in the city in April and May 1945. Read more

Berlin

P-47 Thunderbolts at the Battle of the Bulge

The captured German pilot was cocky and boastful. He had just parachuted into the American airfield, now lit up by the fires of burning Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, a sprinkling of bright torches amid the gray January gloom and the dirty white snow. Read more