During the war, the treatment of prisoners of war was supposedly governed by the Geneva Convention, a document formulated in 1929 in Switzerland and signed by the major western powers including Britain, Italy, the US and Germany. The armies of the Western Allies were under strict orders to treat Axis prisoners in line with the… Read more »
The Siege of Malta was a military campaign in the Mediteranean Theatre of the World War II. From 1940–42, the fight for the control of the strategically important island of Malta pitted the air forces and navies of Italy and Germany against the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. The opening of a new front in North Africa in mid-1940… Read more »
The German-Soviet Pact, also known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact after the two foreign ministers who negotiated the agreement, had two parts. An economic agreement, signed on August 19, 1939, provided that Germany would exchange manufactured goods for Soviet raw materials. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union also signed a ten-year nonaggression pact on August 23,… Read more »
The surrender of Japan was announced by Imperial Japan on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United… Read more »
Nicholas Winton, organized a rescue operation that brought approximately 669 children, mostly Jewish, from Czechoslovakia to safety in Great Britain before the outbreak of World War Ii. Nicholas Winton was born Nicholas Wertheimer on May 19, 1909, in West Hampstead, England, and baptized as a member of the Anglican Church by decision of his parents who… Read more »