In the closing weeks of World War II, thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, the Mittelbau-Dora camp at Nordhausen and the Stutthof camp near Danzig were marched to the German Baltic coast. Most of the inmates were Jews and Russian POWs, but they also included communist sympathizers, pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals,… Read more »
Hannah Reitsch, the first female test pilot in the world, suggests the creation of the Nazi equivalent of a kamikaze squad of suicide bombers while visiting Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden. Hitler was less than enthusiastic about the idea. Reitsch was born in 1912 in Hirschberg, Germany. She left medical school (she had wanted to be… Read more »
In the course of World War I, the Belgians, British and French took control of Germany’s colonies in Africa. The situation for the African colonials in Germany changed in various ways. For example, Africans who possessed a colonial German identification card had a status entitling them to treatment as “members of the former protectorates”. After the… Read more »
German military brothels were set up by Nazi Germany during World War II throughout much of occupied Europe for the use of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. These brothels were generally new creations, but in the West, they were sometimes set up using existing brothels as well as many other buildings. Until 1942, there were around 500 military brothels of this kind in German-occupied Europe. Often operating… Read more »
Lidice was a small town in the former Czechoslovakia located about 12 miles (20 km) from Prague. German forces destroyed the town and murdered or deported its inhabitants in retaliation for the assassination in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, a prominent Nazi official. The story of the Lidice massacre begins in 1941, with a top-secret operation code-named… Read more »