Zombie Borders. Spitfire down: The WWII camp where Allies and Germans mixed. 28 June 2011Last updated at 03:50 An attempt to recover a Spitfire from a peat bog in Donegal will highlight the peculiar story of the men - both British and German - who spent much of World War II in relative comfort in neighbouring camps in Dublin, writes historian Dan Snow. In Northern Ireland in 1941, a routine Sunday afternoon sortie by a pilot flying one of Britain's Spitfire fighters runs into difficulties. Returning to base after flying "top-cover" for maritime convoys off the coast of Donegal, the Rolls Royce Merlin engine overheats and fails. The pilot yells into his radio "I'm going over the side", slides back the bubble canopy, releases his seat straps and launches himself into the air.
Continue reading the main story Curragh internment camp 140 Germans, mainly Luftwaffe and U-boat crew 100 Allied servicemen from Poland, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and sole American Bud Wolfe There were also 400 IRA internees in the camp Bud Wolfe was very keen to get back into action. World War II: The Holocaust - Alan Taylor - In Focus. One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright: Lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life". The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the "racially inferior," or "sexually deviant," as well as to "enemies of the state" both internal and external. From very early in the war, part of Nazi policy was to murder civilians en masse, especially targeting Jews.
Later in the war, this policy grew into Hitler's "final solution", the complete extermination of the Jews. It began with Einsatzgruppen death squads in the East, which killed some 1,000,000 people in numerous massacres, and continued in concentration camps where prisoners were actively denied proper food and health care. It culminated in the construction of extermination camps -- government facilities whose entire purpose was the systematic murder and disposal of massive numbers of people. Lt. A PRIEST BEARS WITNESS. Father Patrick Desbois is on a mission to uncover the mass graves of nearly two million Jews. Sixty years after the Holocaust, time is running out. by Sarah Breger Father Patrick Desbois seldom smiles. Sitting across from me in the deserted dining room of a Foggy Bottom hotel in Washington, DC, the austere French Catholic priest unflinchingly chronicles the mass execution of Jews during World War II.
“The shootings took place in public, it was like a show,” says Desbois. Our waiter looks uncomfortable as he places a Sprite on the table—most likely he is unaccustomed to hearing his customers discuss genocide over drinks. The diminutive 56-year-old has spent the last eight years on what some have called a “holy mission,” traveling across Eastern Europe—mostly in Ukraine—to identify the unmarked and sometimes previously unknown graves of the more than 1.5 million Jews murdered there during World War II.
Desbois was born in a farmhouse in peaceful Burgundy, France in 1955, after the war. Adam Kirsch Reviews Vasily Grossman's "Life And Fate" WRITING THE STORY of the Holocaust is a futile ambition—not because the events of 1939 to 1945 are too horrible to be told, but because they are too various to be compressed into one definitive or representative story. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis came from every part of Europe, from every social class and profession and age group, from every point on the spectrum of Jewish life between militant atheism and traditional piety.
All these stories had a similar ending—but then, so do all human stories, and the monotony of death does not annul the immense multiplicity of life. Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. All of these are truths about the Holocaust, but they are not the only truths. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Concentration Camp - Magazine. In Germany the words 'protective custody' have a double meaning. Originally the term meant the incarceration of people who were threatened by others and who were guarded for their own safety so that they might be protected from their enemies. Now, however, men in protective custody are mostly those who are brought, for the 'protection of the people and the State,' into a concentration camp without hearing, without court sentence, without the possibility of redress, and for an indefinite time. Frequently people sentenced by a court are taken into protective custody by the Gestapo after serving their prison sentence, often directly from the prison gate. Such, for example, was the fate of Pastor Niemöller, who, after being released from prison, was taken into the camp Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg, the camp with which we shall be concerned here.
He is in solitary confinement there, and I never saw him. I do not understand, however, the attitude of Hitler and his followers in this matter. Setting the record straight about Jewish mathematicians in Nazi Germany. Mengele’s Skull. The “era of testimony” began, by most accounts, with the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the first major war crimes trial since Nuremberg and Tokyo and the crucible of all the great debates about international criminal justice and accounting for atrocities since.2 In the two chapters of The Juridical Unconscious devoted to Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the new political agency of survivors as witnesses established at the trial was acquired not in spite of the fact that the stories they told were hard to tell, hear, or sometimes even to believe, not in spite of the fact that they were unreliable, but, paradoxically, precisely because of these flaws. The case of Mengele, though—the path not taken and the trial that never happened—provides an instructive alternative to the story that seems to begin with Eichmann.
The break in the Mengele case came shortly after that. The skeleton that emerged became the center of a major media event. But its status was soon contested. Reinhard Heydrich Biography: The First In-depth Look at a Nazi 'God of Death' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. NEVER SURRENDER: THE LONELY WAR OF HIROO ONODA. His home was a dense area of rainforest and he lived on the wild coconuts that grew in abundance. His principal enemy was the army of mosquitoes that arrived with each new shower of rain. But for Hiroo Onoda there was another enemy - one that remained elusive. Unaware that the Second World War had ended 29 years earlier, he was still fighting a lonely guerrilla war in the jungles of Lubang Island in the Philippines. His story is one of courage, farce and loyalty gone mad.
Hiroo Onoda was born to be a soldier. He had enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army at the age of 20, receiving training in intelligence and guerrilla warfare. Their mission was to destroy the island’s little airstrip and port facilities. ‘You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand…’ read Onoda’s military order. Onoda was unable to destroy Lubang’s landing facilities, enabling US and Philippine forces to capture the island in February, 1945. Lubang Island was small: 16 miles long and just six miles wide. Coco Chanel: Nazi agent? She was one of the most remarkable women of the 20th Century, but Coco Chanel's reputation is again under scrutiny over allegations that she was a Nazi agent in World War II France.
To millions of people around the globe Chanel stands for style, opulence and understated elegance, from haute couture worn by the few to ready-to-wear treasured by the masses. Her achievements are undeniable. Chanel's instantly recognisable suits have been sported by stylistas from the Duchess of Windsor to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Jackie Kennedy was wearing a pink version when JFK was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. And, the "little black dress", that byword for elegant simplicity as worn by Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, has regularly topped polls for the most iconic of all items of clothing. But there is another side to the story of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, and it concerns her actions in occupied France during World War II. "Chanel was a consummate opportunist. "He wasn't. Murky motives. Hans Litten: The man who annoyed Adolf Hitler. 19 August 2011Last updated at 11:19 By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine A new drama tells the story of a Jewish lawyer who confronted Hitler 80 years ago - earning the dictator's life-long hatred.
So who was Hans Litten? In the Berlin courtroom, Adolf Hitler's face burned a deep, furious red. The future dictator was not accustomed to this kind of scrutiny. But here he was, being interrogated about the violence of his paramilitary thugs by a young man who represented everything he despised - a radical, principled, fiercely intelligent Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten.
The Nazi leader was floundering in the witness stand. "That is a statement that can be proved by nothing! " Litten's demolition of Hitler's argument that the Nazis were a peaceful, democratic movement earned the lawyer years of brutal persecution. He was among the first of the fuehrer's political opponents to be rounded up after the Nazis assumed power. Litten was, long before he confronted the dictator, a staunch anti-Nazi. Germania: Hitler's Dream Capital. Ian Kershaw on the Last Days of the Third Reich: 'Hitler's Influence Was Fatal' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Why did Japan surrender? For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan’s surrender. By the middle of 1945, the war in Europe was over, and it was clear that the Japanese could hold no reasonable hope of victory. After years of grueling battle, fighting island to island across the Pacific, Japan’s Navy and Air Force were all but destroyed.
The production of materiel was faltering, completely overmatched by American industry, and the Japanese people were starving. A full-scale invasion of Japan itself would mean hundreds of thousands of dead GIs, and, still, the Japanese leadership refused to surrender. But in early August 66 years ago, America unveiled a terrifying new weapon, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a matter of days, the Japanese submitted, bringing the fighting, finally, to a close. On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy.
“This seems to touch a nerve,” observes Hasegawa. The forgotten history of Pearl Harbor | James Woudhuysen. In a straight line between the US and Japan, Hawaii is the first piece of land due west of San Francisco. In 1941 its shallow-water port, Pearl Harbor, provided the best place to anchor in the whole Pacific. There, at 7.49am (local time) on 7 December of that year, a first wave of torpedo bombers began to destroy the US Pacific Fleet.
The Second World War revolved around not just Europe and the Atlantic, nor even the Pacific, but the whole of Asia. Japan occupied Korea from 1905 to 1945, and in 1931 it used Korean troops when invading Manchuria, a vast territory of China north-east of Beijing. By 1937, in the then capital of China, Nanjing, Japan had killed 300,000 inhabitants in six weeks. Fifty minutes before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese troops began a bombardment of Kota Bharu, on the north-east coast of Malaya, soon overrunning British and Indian forces gathered there. Of course, Asia and America have changed a lot in 70 years. America had its scale, and Japan its weaknesses. Unmasking Horror -- A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity. By NICHOLAS D.
KRISTOFPublished: March 17, 1995 He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic. "The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down," recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II. "But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming.
"I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. Finally the old man, who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. That research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II: a vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.
Ten days before Christmas, the German Interior Ministry acquitted itself of an embarrassing duty. It published a list of all former members of the German government with a Nazi past. The Left Party's parliamentary group had forced the government to come clean about Germany's past by submitting a parliamentary inquiry. Bundestag document 17/8134 officially announced, for the first time, something which had been treated as a taboo in the halls of government for decades: A total of 25 cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany -- as postwar Germany is officially known -- had been members of Nazi organizations. The document revealed that Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who governed Germany from 1966 to 1969, had been a member of the Nazi Party ever since Adolf Hitler seized power.
The list names ministers of all political stripes and from a wide range of social backgrounds. Stalin & Hitler: Mass Murder by Starvation by Timothy Snyder. Wielki Terror: operacja polska 1937–1938 [The Great Terror: The Polish Operation, 1937–1938] edited by Jerzy Bednarek and others Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 1,984 pp., zł 97.84 Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 [German Occupation Policies in Lithuania, 1941–1944] by Christoph Dieckmann Göttingen: Wallstein, Volume 1, 2,439 pp., $79.00 Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944 by Anna Reid Walker, 492 pp., $30.00 The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman, edited by Robert Chandler, translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler, Robert Chandler, and Olga Mukovnikova New York Review Books, 373 pp., $15.95 (paper) In 1932 and 1933 a few starving Ukrainians made their way to Leningrad, where they had family connections. In the decade between 1932 and 1942 some eleven million people in the Soviet Union starved to death, first as a result of Soviet policy, then as a result of German policy.
Poker Lessons From Richelieu. Armand-Jean du Plessis, better known to history as Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), spent most of his career contending for and then exercising control over a deeply divided, indebted, and dysfunctional superpower. His country’s politics were vicious, and its government paralyzingly complex. In short, if he were dropped into Washington today, he might feel right at home. French historians have long hailed Richelieu as the architect of the absolute monarchy that dominated Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Henry Kissinger, in Diplomacy, dubbed him “the father of the modern European state system.” Even critics, such as Alexandre Dumas, who made him the villain of The Three Musketeers, often cannot help admiring Richelieu’s icy savoir-faire, which is captured in the famous portrait by Philippe de Champaigne that adorns the cover of Jean-Vincent Blanchard’s new biography. Richelieu was indeed a model statesman, but not for the reasons usually given. Register. The Aftermath of Mountain Meadows | Past Imperfect. 1911, The Other Revolution | Online Only. China 1911: The Birth of China's Tragedy. The Most Terrible Polar Exploration Ever: Douglas Mawson's Antarctic Journey | Past Imperfect. Amelia Earhart: New evidence tells of her last days on a Pacific atoll. Edison vs. Westinghouse: A Shocking Rivalry | Past Imperfect. Agent Orange, by Lam Yik Fei. News Desk: A Reporter’s Lawyer. The FBI and Martin Luther King - Magazine.
Hendrik Hertzberg: King Day (I): Quote Unquote. “The Drum Major Instinct"** Civil Rights and Black Identity. The Media Made Malcolm X. The Gorbachev Files: Secret Papers Reveal Truth Behind Soviet Collapse - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. What did we know -- and when did we know it? | Michael Dobbs. A question for the genocide deniers | Michael Dobbs. Genocide without corpses | Michael Dobbs. Mladic and the piano player | Michael Dobbs. Murder in Tibet's High Places | Past Imperfect.