Concentration Camps
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
Concentration Camps
On the evening of May 23, 1945, in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, five men in a British Army jeep were driving down a dark road. Read more
Concentration Camps
Down in the basement of my father’s medical office a Nazi helmet stood guard. It sat on top of the pea-green Army trunk, CAPT R LEVINSON stenciled in white letters under a beaten-up leather handle. Read more
Concentration Camps
The 1937 Paris International Exposition once again centered world attention on the French capital that had previously been the stage for five world’s fairs, including the famous 1889 Paris Exhibition and the raison d’être for the construction of the Eiffel Tower, at 984 feet then the tallest structure in the world. Read more
Concentration Camps
In German it was called Operation Rösselsprung, which translates to “Long Jump.” Its goal was to kill or kidnap the Allies’ “Big Three” leaders––Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston S. Read more
Concentration Camps
Following the occupation of a defeated Nazi Germany, the victorious Allies initiated a prearranged plan for prosecuting captured Axis officials for war crimes. Read more
Concentration Camps
“This mission is suicidal,” thought Bogdan Mieczkowski. In the autumn of 1944, the 19-year-old Polish resistance fighter battled in the Warsaw Uprising. Read more
Concentration Camps
In the 1940s, war disrupted the lives of millions of people around the globe: fuel rationing, food rationing, shortages of all kinds, and, of course, the death and destruction that was visited on cities, nations, and whole populations. Read more
Concentration Camps
Stanislaw Sosabowski started his military career in the anti-Hapsburg Polish underground movement in 1907, served in the Austrian Army in World War I, and rose to the command of the Polish Parachute Brigade in World War II. Read more
Concentration Camps
In the summer of 1943, Malgorzata Twardecki, a single mother living in Nazi-occupied Poland, received an ominous order to bring her five-year-old son to the local town council office by 6 the following morning. Read more
Concentration Camps
Captured by the Red Army during World War II, diaries written by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, lay forgotten in the vast, byzantine collections of the Russian Military Archive. Read more
Concentration Camps
At 10 am on Wednesday April 16, 1947, the former commandant of Auschwitz extermination camp, SS Oberstürm bannführer (lieutenant colonel) Rudolph Hoess, briskly walked under armed escort toward the small wooden gallows specifically built for him inside the camp grounds. Read more
Concentration Camps
By the spring of 1945, Hitler’s thousand year Reich had come crashing down in flames. The Allied armies that had landed at Normandy almost one year earlier had penetrated deep inside Germany. Read more
Concentration Camps
One of the most enduring questions emerging from World War II is the reaction of the West, and particularly the United States, to the plight of the Jews as they faced Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Read more
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
