Nazi Germany Archives

The Nazis attempted to detain the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for propaganda purposes.

Nazi Germany

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

Grand Admiral Erich Raeder of the German Navy (left), Reich Minister of War Werner von Blomberg (center), and Army Chief Werner von Fritsch confer informally days before the secret meeting that reportedly spawned the Hossbach Memorandum.

Nazi Germany

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

Nazi Germany

The PTRS 41 and Other and Russian Anti-Tank Rifles

By Robert Cashner

Ever since the tank appeared on the battlefield during World War I, armies the world over have sought to field man-portable infantry antitank weapons to give the infantryman a viable defense against the metal monsters. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Proximity Fuse: The Gunner’s Dream Finally Became Realized

By Kevin Allen

Early on the morning of December 16, 1944, the commander of the U.S. 406th Artillery Group, Colonel George Axelson, had a difficult decision to make. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Russo-Finnish War: Why Stalin Tried to Invade Finland

By Arnold Blumberg

Prior to the Russo-Finnish War, problems were already setting in for Russia and Germany. The hugely cynical German-Soviet nonaggression pact, concluded in August 1939, assigned the Baltic region of eastern Europe to the exclusive sphere of influence of Communist Russia. Read more

Soldiers roll a 37mm antitank gun from a landing craft during a training exercise. By many standards, the 37mm gun was obsolete at the beginning of World War II; however, the weapon remained in widespread use throughout the conflict.

Nazi Germany

WWII Weapons: M3 37mm Antitank Gun

By Christopher Miskimon

The men of Lieutenant Edwin K. Smith’s antitank platoon, 2nd Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division peered over the gun shields of their 37mm cannon at the column of Vichy French armored cars approaching their roadblock. Read more

Nazi Germany

Baghdad’s 1941 Regime

By John W. Osborn, Jr.

A dangerous outlaw regime sits in power in Baghdad; the leader of one of the world’s superpowers decides it has to be removed at all costs; an army marches across the desert to topple it. Read more

Nazi Germany

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

Nazi Germany

Operation Spring Awakening: Adolf Hitler’s Last WWII Offensive

By Major General Michael Reynolds

In January 12, 1945, Adolf Hitler received the news he had been dreading—the Soviet Red Army had launched its winter offensive. Read more

The Glider Regiment took part in some of the most hazardous operations of World War II.

Nazi Germany

Off to War in a Plywood Box: Glidermen of WWII

By Robert Barr Smith

On June 22, 1940, the British prime minister, the formidable Winston Churchill, directed that an airborne force of at least 5,000 men was to be formed. Read more

Nazi Germany

Romania’s Disaster at Stalingrad

By Tom W. Murrey, Jr.

World War II involved some of the most complex alliance systems in the history of warfare. Read more

During the “Great Escape” a group of Allied prisoners from Stalag Luft III paid a terrible price.

Nazi Germany

The Real “Great Escape”

By Jeffrey A. Denman

In early 1942, the air war over Germany was taking its toll on the Royal Air Force. Read more

Nazi Germany

Grand Mufti al-Husseini: Britain’s Deadliest Enemy?

By Blaine Taylor

Like all Palestinians and most Arabs, Haj Amin al-Hussaini not only looked forward to an Axis Pact victory in World War II but also saw it as a means of defeating what he believed was a joint British-Jewish conspiracy to foist an Israelite homeland on the Middle East that would be to the detriment of his own people. Read more

Nazi Germany

Leclerc and Liberation

By Michael D. Hull

After the humiliating fall of France in June 1940, two impassioned patriots—a general and an infantry captain—refused to accept defeat and determined, against all odds, to exact retribution from the German invaders. Read more

Nazi Germany

“Is Paris Burning?” Liberating the City of Light

By Kelly Bell

By the late summer of 1944, the Third Reich was almost surrounded. Two years earlier Adolf Hitler had ground 10 European countries under his heel along with vast expanses of North Africa and Soviet Russia. Read more

Nazi Germany

Airborne Close Encounter

By Chris Blenheim

At midnight, the jumpers of 2nd Battalion, 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team, as well as the 596th Parachute Combat Engineer Company, still dripping from the paint-spray line, shuffled across Ombrone Airfield to the waiting C-47s of Serial 6 and climbed aboard. Read more

Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz in May 1944. Healthy young people were sent to work in the factory, while the aged, sick, and children went to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Nazi Germany

The Wannsee Conference & Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’

By Blaine Taylor

It is, perhaps, not as well known as other prewar and wartime gatherings of the World War II era, but the quietly held meeting of top Nazi bureaucrats at a secluded villa on Lake Wannsee in the Berlin suburbs on January 20, 1942, was just as much a landmark event as others with higher profiles. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Me 262 and the Beginning of the Jet Fighter Age

By Phil Zimmer

The Germans knew the bombers were coming, and they prepared even as the U.S. 457th Bomber Group first assembled in the early morning sunlight over faraway London. Read more