Concentration Camps
For Nazi Party Führer (Leader) and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, July 20th, 1944 dawned as a routine working day at his principal wartime military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Fort Wolf) in the East Prussian forest of Rastenburg, some three hundred air miles from Berlin, in what is today Poland. Read more
Concentration Camps
Q: Could you give us a little personal background before we talk about your war experiences?
SIMS: I was born on April 29, 1925, at Sheffield in Yorkshire. Read more
Concentration Camps
War produces casualties … and captives. Much “war art” concerns itself with the heroics and clash of battle, the sway of forces, and the turns of history. Read more
Concentration Camps
“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” Read more
Concentration Camps
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
Adolf Hitler loved children. Before the war consumed all his energies he entertained children at his holiday home on the “mountain” all the time. Read more
Concentration Camps
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
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
BACKSTORY: Dan Dougherty graduated from Central High School in Austin, Minnesota in June 1943 and was immediately activated from the Army Reserve. Read more
Concentration Camps
With war comes untold stories of unbroken spirits. These are universal stories without bounds and sides, some of which remain buried deep in psyches. Read more
Concentration Camps
By Steven Karras
Prologue:Once they escaped from Nazi-dominated Europe, hundreds of German and Austrian Jews joined the American and British military to help bring an end to the Nazis’ reign of terror. Read more
Concentration Camps
The 83rd U.S. Infantry Division had been mobilized for World War I in September 1917. Its unit patch was a downward-pointing black triangle with the letters O-H-I-O stitched as an abstract gold monogram in the center. Read more
Concentration Camps
In 1933, before the Waffen-SS, there was a portion of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS), armed and trained along military lines and served as an armed force. Read more
Concentration Camps
“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
Concentration Camps
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
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
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
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
“She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her body was perfect in every line, her face clear and angelic, and her blue eyes the gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine. Read more
Concentration Camps
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
