Adolf Hitler

Hanna Reitsch, the Reichenberg Project & Germany’s Kamikazes

By early 1944, the Luftwaffe was only a shadow of what it had been at the beginning of the war. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Commando Paddy Mayne: Ireland’s Wolf of the Desert

The night of December 14, 1941, was bitterly cold in the North African desert. Midway between El Agheila and Tripoli, Libya, was the German and Italian air base outside the town of Tamet. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Fliegen und Siegen: Photographs from the Luftwaffe

Sixty-five years ago, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe showcased its aerial triumphs in a 1942 commemorative book of photographs entitled Fliegen und Siegen (“Flying and Victory”). Read more

Adolf Hitler

The Invasion of Crete: Descent Into The Inferno

By May 1941, the German Luftwaffe’s fortunes had risen to great heights and plummeted to equally startling depths in the course of a single year of blitzkrieg warfare in Western Europe. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Steve Stupak: Surviving the German Death March

By 1945, the war in Europe was nearing its conclusion. Having suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler’s seemingly indestructible Third Reich was quickly crumbling under the Allied juggernaut. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Duel in the Desert: Operation Crusader’s Battle of Bardia

The desert sky lit up like a summer lightning storm on the night of December 31, 1941. The distant thunder of hundreds of guns rolled across the sandy, stony ground. Read more

Adolf Hitler

WWII Concentration Camps: The Horrific Discovery at Buchenwald

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, the world changed forever.

Not only was Hitler determined to pay back Germany’s enemies for his country’s defeat during the Great War, but he was also determined to rid Germany and the rest of Europe of persons whom his twisted Aryan ideology believed were “inferior” or “subhuman.” Read more

Adolf Hitler

Johann Georg Elser’s Treasonous Plot to Prevent World War II

At exactly 8 PM on November 8, 1939, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler strode briskly into Munich’s Burgerbraukeller beer hall at the head of his glowering entourage, brushing past a forest of hands raised in the Nazi salute. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Hitler’s Experience in the Trenches of the Great War

In the months before the outbreak of World War I, 25-year-old Adolf Hitler was living the starving artist’s life in the Bavarian city of Munich, selling his paintings door-to-door and in the city’s numerous beer halls. Read more

Adolf Hitler

The Fairey Swordfish Torpedo Bomber

Radar, atomic bombs, jet engines and early cruise missiles were among the numerous technological advances of World War II. Read more

Adolf Hitler

WWII: German Rations and Feeding the Troops of the Third Reich

It was Napoleon Bonaparte who purportedly said, “An army travels on its stomach.” Toward the goal of feeding his particular army’s stomach more efficiently, in 1795 the French general came up with an interesting solution to the problem. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Evolution of the Submarine

The concept of a ship that could submerge beneath the water and then resurface dates back as far as the late 1400s, when Italian Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci claimed to have found a method for a ship to remain submerged for a protracted period of time. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Alvan Gillem’s Invasion of Germany

The United States had not yet entered World War II when Time magazine noted that the Army had created two new armored divisions. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Was Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive Brilliant or Delusional?

By Patrick J. Chaisson

The chief shuffled to his seat in the underground conference room. He sat down heavily, eyes unfocused and dreamy, while a litany of woes was read to him. Read more

Adolf Hitler

The Blue Division and the Spaniards Who Fought Against Stalin

By Blaine Taylor

The Russian winter of 1941­-1942 hit with terrible ferocity. Battling the deadly, numbing cold as well as the massive numbers of Red Army troops were soldiers from sunny Spain. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Rudolf Hess—a Life (and Death) Shrouded in Mystery

In October 1939, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill famously described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Read more

Adolf Hitler

The Nazi Invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler’s First Gamble in the East

By Christopher Miskimon

Historians often compare Adolf Hitler to a gambler. He kept making risky bets that paid off time and again—until they didn’t. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Hitler’s Waffen-SS and the Last Battle in Berlin

In the predawn hours of April 24, 1945, SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg received orders from Army Group Vistula defending Berlin to immediately lead the remnants of the 57th Battalion of the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne from its staging area at the SS training camp at Neustrelitz to the German capital. Read more

Adolf Hitler

Panzer Lehr Division’s Assault on Bastogne

On December 10, 1944, Generalleutnant (equivalent to major general in the U.S. Army during World War II) Fritz Bayerlein was called to a meeting at Kyllburg (Eifel) to participate in a map exercise involving an advance to the Meuse River. Read more

Adolf Hitler

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