Nazi Party

Locating the Altmark: An RAF Rescue Mission Beyond Compare

On the morning of February 16, 1940, two Royal Air Force Lockheed Hudson aircraft lifted off from Thornaby Airfield in northern England. Read more

Nazi Party

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

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

Nazi Party

The Assassination Of Reinhard Heydrich, The Butcher Of Prague

The morning sun caressed the hills of the Czech capital of Prague, coaxing a slight haze from the ancient city. Read more

Nazi Party

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

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

Nazi Party

Big Three in Tehran

World War II made a disparate trio of allies —British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Marshal Josef Stalin, and American President Franklin D. Read more

Nazi Party

The Waffen-SS: Evolution of Armed Evil

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

Nazi Party

The Madman of the Mountain: Adolf Hitler’s Personal Life

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

Nazi Party

Hans Scholl

For anyone in Germany who openly opposed Adolf Hitler or the policies of the Nazi party there were three likely outcomes—prison, concentration camp, or execution. Read more

Nazi Party

Operation Overlord’s Colonel Alexis von Roenne

During the early part of 1944, an event took place that would change the outcome of World War II. Read more

Nazi Party

Hermann Göring and His Final Judgment at Nuremberg

The Allied indictment against Hermann Wilhelm Göring (1893-1946) at Nuremberg as issued by the International Military Tribunal in 1945 reads as follows:

“The defendant Göring between 1932-45 was: member of the Nazi Party, Supreme Leader of the SA (Brownshirts), General in the SS, a member and President of the Reichstag, Minister of the Interior of Prussia, Chief of the Prussian Police and Prussian Secret Police, Chief of the Prussian State Council, Trustee of the Four Year Plan; “Reich Minister for Air, Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, President of the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, head of the Hermann Göring Industrial Combine, and Successor Designate to Hitler. Read more

Nazi Party

V-E Day: Victory at Last for World War II’s Allies

Within his reinforced concrete bunker, 50 feet below the garden of the New Reichs Chancellery on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, German dictator Adolf Hitler, his soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, and several hundred friends, SS guards, and staff members could feel the concussion and hear the unending drumroll of thousands of Soviet artillery shells reducing the already-battered capital city of the Third Reich to unrecognizable rubble. Read more

Nazi Party

Reich Marshal Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trials

Stripped of the regalia and high position of Reich Marshal in the Nazi regime and tried as a war criminal, the former Luftwaffe chief was by far the most colorful and outspoken defendant during the postwar proceedings. Read more

Nazi Party

The German 11th Panzer Division: Giving Up the Ghost

It was an impressive sight. Upon the reviewing stand as honored guest was General Dwight D. Read more

Nazi Party

The Spanish Blue Division Along WWII’s Eastern Front

To their Russian enemies they were the “Spanish mercenaries of Hitler’s Fascist lackey, Franco.” To Hitler himself, “One can’t imagine more fearless fellows. Read more

Nazi Party

Cold War Spies: General Reinhard Gehlen

By 1944, many top generals in Adolf Hitler’s army understood the war was lost and that they had better make arrangements to ensure their safety. Read more

Nazi Party

German Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Franz Canaris

In most popular spy thrillers, secret agents are tall, handsome, virile, and irresistible to women. Whether their name is Dirk Pitt, Jack Ryan, or James Bond, all are hard-drinking, well-tailored ladies’ men. Read more

Nazi Party

Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: Foe or Ally?

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

Nazi Party

Wekusta: Weathermen of the Wehrmacht

The fundamental pillars of war—strategy and tactics— inevitably depend on an imponderable and uncontrollable factor: the weather. With the increasing sophistication of weather data gathering, analysis, and forecasting in the early 20th century, predicting the weather became an integral part of World War II. Read more

Nazi Party

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

Nazi Party

To Conquer a Fortress

The storming of Fortress Königsberg in April 1945 was the finale of a two-month Soviet siege. The city, one of the few triumphs of Hitler’s fortress strategy, had been encircled by late January and lay hundreds of kilometers behind the main front line by the time the Soviets launched their final assault toward the Nazi capital of Berlin. Read more