Wanda Klaff (born Kalacinski) was of German origin but had been born in Danzig on the 6th of March 1922. When she left school in 1938 she initially worked in a jam factory, leaving in 1942 to get married to one Willy Gapes and becoming a housewife. In 1944 Wanda joined the staff at… Read more »
He was viewed as Hitler’s finest General, admired even by the Allies for his skills as a military leader. But to one captured British soldier, Erwin Rommel was the man who saved his life – and gave him beer and cigarettes. Captain Roy Wooldridge, from the Royal Engineers, has told how he was introduced to the… Read more »
On this date in 1945, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday, a stooped, jowly-faced Führer in a field-gray overcoat tottered out from the bowels of his command bunker under Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery into the wasteland of his chancellery garden. A news camera recorded him, a shaking left arm behind his back, awarding Iron Crosses to a… Read more »
Elisabeth Becker was born 20 July 1923 in Neuteich, Danzig to a German family. In 1936, aged 13, she joined the Leaque of German Girls . In 1938 she became a cook in Danzig. In 1939 the Germans arrived in the city, and Becker reportedly adapted successfully. In 1940 she began working for the firm… Read more »
On 23-05-1945, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, assistant chief of the Gestapo, and architect of Hitler’s program to exterminate European Jews, commits suicide one day after being arrested by the British. As head of the Waffen-Schutzstaffel (“Armed Black Shirts”), the military arm of the Nazi Party, and assistant chief of the Gestapo, the secret… Read more »