Ilya Ehrenburg, the leading Soviet propagandist of the Second World War, was a contradictory figure. A recent article in the weekly Canadian Jewish News sheds new light on the life of this “man of a thousand masks.” Ehrenburg was born in 1891 in Kiev to a non-religious Jewish family. In 1908 he fled Tsarist Russia because of… Read more »
As the rays of early evening sun lingered over the giant wooden mast that protruded through the pine forest, two cars passed through the gates of the German radio station and stopped outside the three-storey transmission building. Forty-three-year-old unmarried Catholic farmer, Franz Honiok In the following minutes, seven SS officers posing as Polish partisans, would carry out… Read more »
Operation Barbarossa, German: Unternehmen Barbarossa, was the code name for Nazi Germany’s ‘s invasion of the Sovet Union, which began on 22 June 1941. Over the course of the operation, about four million soldiers of the Axis powers invaded Soviet Russia along a 2,900 kilometer front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Germans employed… Read more »
The Battle of Okinawa codenamed Operation Iceberg, was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa and included the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War during World War II. The 82-day-long battle lasted from early April until mid-June 1945. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa, a large island only 340 mi (550 km) away from mainland Japan, as a base… Read more »
The Nuremberg War Crime Trials were held between 1945 to 1949. However, the most famous trials at Nuremberg were those of the major war criminals and these were held from November 20th, 1945 to October 1st, 1946. The trials at Nuremberg held after these dates were for the so-called lesser war criminals. As the war reached its… Read more »