Thick sulphurous smoke pours from the flaming wreckage of a B-17 bomber in a French field.

Concentration Camps

The Hidden Freedom Trail

by Adam Lynch

A few moments after his stricken Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber tore apart, co-pilot Ralph Patton hurriedly put his bail-out plan into action. Read more

Concentration Camps

Third Reich Women at War

By Paul Garson

During the 12 years of the highly militarized society of the Third Reich, some 20 million Germans—men and women as well as children—donned a uniform of one kind or another.  Read more

Concentration Camps

Monty Crosses the Rhine

By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery is best known for defeating Germany’s famed commander, Erwin Rommel, at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. Read more

Concentration Camps

Japanese Internment: Behind the Barbed Wire in America

By Richard Higgins

“We were stunned when we entered the camp,” Yoshio “Yosh” Nakamura said, remembering the day when he and his family, from El Monte, California, were herded through the main gate at the Gila River Relocation Center—a Japanese American internment camp 30 miles southeast of Phoenix, Arizona—carrying only suitcases into which their worldly possessions had been crammed. Read more

In August 1944, the Allies followed up the massive Normandy Invasion with another in southern France known as Operation Dragoon.

Concentration Camps

Rampage on the Riviera: Operation Dragoon

By Glenn Barnette and André Bernole

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

Concentration Camps

Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?

By Brent Douglas Dyck

Former German President Horst Koehler once said that Auschwitz, the largest Nazi extermination camp, was home to the “worst crime in human history.” Read more

Concentration Camps

Liberating the Camps

By Christopher Miskimon

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

Concentration Camps

Bombing Buchenwald

By Flint Whitlock

In early 1945, the 50,000 starved and brutalized prisoners incarcerated at KL Buchenwald—the infamous concentration camp located atop a hill known as the Ettersberg, just to the northwest of Germany’s cultural capital of Weimar—were growing desperate. Read more

Concentration Camps

The Dachau Memorial

By Mark D. Van Ells

The Nazi regime in Germany has become synonymous with inhuman cruelty. Hitler incarcerated millions in his concentration camps and inflicted on his victims the harshest forms of torture and deprivation imaginable. Read more

Concentration Camps

Last Stand at Völkerschlachtdenkmal: The Battle of Leipzig, 1945

By Michael E. Haskew

In October 1813, the combined allied armies of Russia, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, Saxony, and Württemberg met and defeated the French Grand Armee under Napoleon Bonaparte at the German city of Leipzig, forcing him to retreat and hastening his eventual abdication and exile to the island of Elba. Read more