Josef Goebbels

Germany’s Deadly V-2 Rockets

By David Alan Johnson

Sixty-four-year-old Robert Stubbs slowly walked across the playing field of the Staveley Road School in the West London suburb of Chiswick. Read more

Josef Goebbels

The Soviet Secret Police & the Katyn Forest Massacre

By Richard Rule

On September 17, 1939, in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the Soviet Red Army crossed the Polish frontier from the east. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Luftwaffe Raids: St. Paul’s Stands Proud

By David Alan Johnson

At St. Paul’s Cathedral, the rooftop lookout telephoned the cathedral control center at 6 pm to report that air raid sirens were sounding off to the southwest. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: Foe or Ally?

By Sherman Gengler

Throughout the reign of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler’s inner circle comprised a diverse group of men from many walks of life. Read more

Josef Goebbels

WWII Secrets: The Mysterious Inga Arvad

By Peter Kross

Shortly before Pearl Harbor, an attractive Danish journalist arrived in the United States to pursue a writing career. Read more

Josef Goebbels

The Soviet Winter Offensive: From the Vistula to the Oder

By Henrik Lunde The Situation in the East, Summer 1944

The area between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains had been relatively quiet since the end of Operation Bagration late in the summer of 1944. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Sinking the Bismarck Myth

By Mark Carlson

In 1960 Twentieth Century Fox released the film Sink the Bismarck! Based on C.S. Forrester’s bestselling book The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck, the documentary-style film tells a gripping and reasonably factual account of the most famous sea chase in history. Read more

Josef Goebbels

The Volkssturm: Last-Ditch Militia of the Third Reich

By Blaine Taylor

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

Josef Goebbels

Leslie Howard: The Actor’s Mysterious Fate on BOAC Flight 777

By Blaine Taylor

By June 1, 1943, British actor Leslie Howard, 50, was one of the most famous actors in the world, one of the leading male stars of one the greatest box-office draw movies of all time, the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Heinrich Himmler: The Rise and Fall of Hitler’s Third Reichsführer-SS

By Blaine Taylor

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

Josef Goebbels

Albert Speer: Chief Architect of the Third Reich

By Blaine Taylor

On October 6, 1943, Dr. Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich, gave a 50-minute address to the assembled top officials of Nazi Germany at Posen Castle in occupied Poland’s Reich Gau (Region) of Wartheland on the critical state of World War II at that point. Read more

Josef Goebbels

King Boris III of Bulgaria

By Blaine Taylor

It was the high summer of 1943 in Eastern Europe, and World War II was going decidedly against the Third Reich, which had just suffered massive twin defeats on the Russian Front at the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, which many historians now believe turned the tide of war irrevocably against Nazi Germany. Read more

Josef Goebbels

The First Day of World War II

By Michael D. Hull

Just after midnight on September 3, 1939, a stylish young former socialite from Boston, Massachusetts, made her way toward London aboard the Harwich boat train after crossing the English Channel. Read more

Josef Goebbels

“Do You Recognize My Voice?”: The Question That Ended Operation Valkyrie

By Blaine Taylor

At 12:40 PM on a hot, sultry July 20, 1944, German Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, 55, was seated on a wicker stool in a conference hut at his principal Eastern Front headquarters at Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, East Prussia, for the mid-day wartime map meeting. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Operation Willi: The Nazi Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor

By Eric Niderost

It was around noon, June 19, 1940, when a small caravan of cars set out from Antibes in southern France en route to the Spanish border. Read more

Josef Goebbels

The Hossbach Memorandum

By Blaine Taylor

On June 24, 1937, German Minister of War Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg issued a directive marked Top Secret with only four copies to be made, the first for himself and the other three for the heads of the armed forces of the Third Reich. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Adolf Hitler: Rhetoric’s Overlord of Darkness

By John Perry

When Nazi architect Albert Speer surrendered in 1945, he made a strange remark: “So now the end has come. Read more

Josef Goebbels

The Odyssey of the Australian Destroyer HMAS Vendetta

By Glenn Barnett

On October 20, 1941, the Australian destroyer Vendetta weighed anchor in the port of Alexandria, Egypt. After spending nearly two years supporting the Royal Navy in the fight for control of the Mediterranean Sea, the aging engines of the busy warship could no longer give her the speed needed to escort convoys, screen the fleet, or dodge dive- bombers. Read more

Josef Goebbels

Subhas Chandra Bose: Champion of Indian Nationalism

By Blaine Taylor

When British diplomat Lord Halifax arrived at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps on November 19, 1937, he mistook German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler for a footman and was about to hand him his coat and hat when Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath hissed, “The Führer! Read more

Josef Goebbels

Panzers at the Gates of Moscow

By Jonathan Jordan

The war map gave Adolf Hitler every reason to be confident. Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union begun on June 22, 1941, had succeeded spectacularly on nearly every front. Read more