did you know 3
* Adolf Hitler had four brothers and they all died very young, Gustav(2), Ida(1), Otto(1) and Edmund(5). His mother Klara died of breast cancer, age 47 and father Alois died of a heart attack age 65. (see Hitler parents)
* In the last ten months of the war , July 1944 to Mai 1945, 2.600.000 German soldiers were killed, as much as in the five years bedore, about an average of 350.000 every month???
* The first killed German General, Friedrich Kussin, during Operation Market Garden, in Oosterbeek, near Arnhem, was killed in his staff car, pulled out and scalped by the English Airborne’s.
* Hitler designed the Nazi flag. Red stood for the social idea of Nazism, white for nationalism, and the black swastika for the struggle of the Aryan man.
* Because the Norway leader Vidkun Quisling (see Quisling) (1887-1945) actively collaborated with Germany after its occupation, his name has entered the Norwegian language as word for “traitor.
* The Russians were the first to have paratroopers, which they exhibited in 1935. They had to crawl on the wing and slip down. The Allies did not catch up until 1940, when the Central Landing School opened near Manchester. The 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions were raised.
* WWII casualties totaled between 50 and 70 million people. More than 80% of this total came from four countries: Russia, China, Germany, and Poland. More than half of these casualties were civilians, most of whom were women and children.
* G.I. RAPIST HANGED
The first Allied soldier to be hanged after D-Day was Private Clarence Whitfield, 
a black US soldier of the 494th Port Battalion. He was convicted of the brutal rape of Aniela Skrzyniarz, a Polish farm girl working on a farm at Vierville Sur Mer, just behind Omaha Beach, on June 14, 1944. On August 14, Private Whitfield was hanged on a gallows that was erected in the garden of the Chateau at Canisy, five kilometres south of Saint Lo.
* Goerings VERMEER.
In 1944, Hermann Göring (see Hermann Goering) paid £165,000 for the painting 'Woman Taken in Adultery' by the rarest of all Dutch painters, Vermeer. The painting was found in Emma Göring's home in Austria. It was later proved to be a forgery by Hans Van Meegeren.
In 1945, Van Meegeren was arrested by Dutch authorities and sentenced to one year in jail. He died just nineteen days after his jail sentence began. Today, Göring's fake Vermeer is hidden away in the strong room of the Dutch State Collection in the Hague, never to be shown to the public or sold.
* INACCURATE BOMBING
December 6, 1942. Operation 'Oyster' The RAF daylight bombing raid on the Philips Radio Works at Eindhoven, Holland, now under Nazi control. Fourteen planes were lost but sadly 148 Dutch civilians lost their lives.
March 13, 1944. In a raid onLe Mans, France, by RAF Bomber Command, some of the bombs were dropped short of the mark, killing some 100 civilians. Fifteen locomotives and around 800 railway freight cars were destroyed. The killing of innocent civilians during raids on specific targets became an increasingly severe problem for bomber crews.
April 9/10, 1944. The attack by 186 RAF bombers on the rail yards at Lille-Deliverance, France, killed 456 civilians and destroyed over a thousand homes. At the rail yards around 2,000 freight cars were destroyed.
April 10/11, 1944. One hundred and twenty-two Royal Canadian Air force Halifax's dropped 600 tons of bombs on the Merelbeke-Melle rail yards at Ghent, Belgium. Unfortunately, the rail yards being located in a built-up area, 438 Belgian civilians were killed.
April 19/20, 1944. Around 200 bombers, mostly Canadian Halifaxes from 46 Group, attacked the rail yards at Noisy-le-sec near Paris. Many bombs fell on a built-up area of the town destroying over 700 houses and killing 464 civilians. Some 370 were injured.
March 3, 1945. Over 500 inhabitants of the suburb of Bezuidenhout, a suburb of The Hague, Holland, were killed when Allied bombers missed their intended target, the V-2 launching sites in the Hague Forest and dropped their bombs on Bezuidenhout.
* Iwo Jima was the only U.S. Marine battle where the American overall casualties exceeded the Japanese, although Japanese combat deaths numbered 3 times that of Americans. Of the more than 18,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner. The rest were killed or missing and assumed dead.
* Heinrich Himmler and the former chicken farmer could'nt see blood ?
* The Goebbels (see Joseph Goebbels) couple worshiped Adolf Hitler so much that all their children had a name with H, Helga, Hilde, Hellmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide. Magda's first child was Harald Quandt (see Harald) and (Günther Quandt). When the end of the Nazis neared they killed all the children with poisened candy.
* The dummy of the airborne paratrooper John Steele is hanging on the wrong tower of the church in St Mère Eglise.
* The two resistance brothers of my godmother Annie Looymans, Leo, 19 and Martin, 25, were killed by, the SS, coming back from a action, they blow up a railway near their village, on September 3th 1944, just two weeks before Operation Market Garden started and the village was liberated.
* The last commander of the bridge of Remagen, Major Hans Scheller, is sentanced by a Flying Court and executed, age 22, one hundred miles behind the bridge, in Birnbach.
* My wife and me, searching for graves, sometimes drove hundreds of miles without result and lost seven sun glasses.
* Herman Goering exchanged his pistol with his American guard Herbert Stivers for a poisson pill and committed suicide before they could could hang him, in Nuremberg. The metalworker Stivers died age 78, in California.
* The highest commander of the Wehrmacht (Wilhelm Keitel) was such a nodding donkey that they called him Lakeitel, "Footman".
* Hitler had a strange relation with the daughter of his half sister Angela, ( see Geli Raubal) and Adolf Hitler was madly jealous and gave her no privacy or freedom, but while he was away so often, Geli still managed to spend nights with men, including Hitler's driver Emil Maurice. Hitler was zo possessory and dominant that she, age 23, shot herself throught the head with Hitler's pistol, in his appartement in Berlin. Nobody was allowed to enter that room for years.
* Winifred Wagner the hostess of the Wagnerspielen in Bayreuth and pro Nazi was after the war not allowed to say the the name of Adolf, unrepentant of her relationship with Hitler and when she talked about him she called him USA, "Unser Saliger Adolf"---"Our Blessed Adolf"
* The boxing legend Joe Louis's funeral was paid for in part by former competitor and friend, German paratrooper and boxing champ Max Schmeling, who also acted as a pallbearer.
* The Sullivan brothers were five siblings who were all killed in one action during or shortly after the sinking of the light cruiser Uss Junau, the vessel on which they all served, on 13-11-1942.
George Thomas age 27, Francis "Frank" Henry age 26, Joseph "Joe" Eugene age 24, Madison "Matt" Abel age 23 and Albert "Al" Leo Sullivan age 19.
_0405201.jpg)
* General Erwin Rommel was in his staff car on his way to the French headquarters, Chateu de Fontainbleau near the front. An RCAF Spitfire of 412 Squadron piloted by Charley Fox strafed the car near the village called Montgommery.
Fox himself was killed in a car accident, old age 88, on 18-10-2008.
* The first visitors in the empty Führer Bunker, only the technical man Johannes Hentschel, stayed in the Bunker, were a group of exited Russian nurses who pounced upon the clothes and underwear of Eva Hitler.
* The massacres of Oradour sur Glane, France, on 10-06-1944, 642 victims, the men were shot, all women and children were burned in the church of the village. 
and in Lidice, 
Czechhslovakia, on 10-06-1942, 340 victims, 192 men, 60 women and 88 children were shot, were on the same day.
* Our small country of Holland,(see About) with 9 million inhabitants in 1940, had around 250.000 war victims, (see aunt Peters) (Jan Ackermans) and (the Looymans brothers), only 22.000 in the hungry winter of 1944/45. About 106.000 were Jewish people.
* The girl in the doorway of the train in Westerbork concentration camp, see above on 19-05-1944, is a Sinti girl from my hometown Eindhoven. Her name is Anne Maria "Settela" Steinbach and she and her father and mother were captured during a raid on 16-05-1944. She died, age 9 years, in the concentration camp Auschwitz on 03-08-1944.
* During April, 1945, a column of 2,000 Allied airmen were being evacuated from their prisoner-of-war camp at Fallingbostal in face of the advancing Russian army. Near the village of Gresse they stopped for a rest in a country lane. Six RAF Typhoons appeared and began strafing the helpless prisoners. Eight of their German guards were killed as were thirty of the airmen. There were over sixty injured. The injured were taken to the town of Boizemburg where they were operated on by German doctors and then transported to an airfield near Luneburg to await air-lifting to the UK. It is not known why the RAF pilots mistook the prisoners for Germans.
* From 1942, U.S. Marines in the Pacific used the Navajo language as their secret code. The language didn’t have the vocabulary for existing WWII technology, so existing words had to be given new meanings. For example, the word for “hummingbird” (da-he-ti-hi) became code for fighter plane. Around 400 Navajo Indians (Code Talkers) were trained to use the code, and the Japanese never cracked it.
* In 1974, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda (1922- ) came out of the jungle of the Pacific island of Lubang. He had been hiding there for 29 years, unaware that his country had surrendered.
* The main "success" of the Blitzkreig or “lightening war” was due to tank units supported from the air by dive-bombers, such as the Junkers Ju87 (Stuka divers). The Stukas were fitted with sirens, which sounded like screaming to terrify the population.
* Large, inflatable barrage balloons were used to protect major towns and cities in Britain from air raids. The balloons were launched before a raid and trailed a network of steel cables beneath them. Bombers had to fly high to avoid becoming tangled in the cables, thus reducing their accuracy.
* After the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt (see Roosevelt)searched for a bulletproof car. However, because government regulation prohibited spending more than $750 to buy a car, the only one they could find was Al Capone’s limo, which had been seized by the Treasury Department after he was arrested for tax evasion. FDR said, “I hope Mr. Capone won’t mind.
* The Nazis called their rule the Third Reich (1933-1945). The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806). The Second Reich was the German Empire of 1871-1918. The Weimar Republic was from 1919-1933.
