Throughout the entire Second World War, the Kriegsmarine had only one U-boat commander convicted of war crimes. Kapitän Leutnant Heinz Wilhelm Eck of U-852 was indicted and sentenced to death by firing squad at the Nuremberg Tribunal on November 30 1945. Heinz-Wilhelm Eck was born in Hamburg on March 27 1916, and was raised in… Read more »
The People’s Court was a Sondergericht (“special court”) of Nazi Germany, set up outside the operations of the constitutional frame of law. Its headquarters were originally located in the former Prussian House of Lords in Berlin, later moved to the former Königliches Wilhelms Gymnasium at Bellevuestrasse 15 in Potzdamer Platz; a marker is located on the sidewalk nearby)…. Read more »
Mitsuo Fuchida , born 03-12-1902, Nara Prefecture, was the air-strike leader of the Japanese carrier force that attacked Pearl Harbor. Considered one of Japan’s most skillful fliers, he had gained combat experience during air operations over China in the late 1930s. At 6 a.m. on December 7, 1941, then-Commander Fuchida took off from the carrier-flagship Akagi… Read more »
On 25 October 1944, during the Battle of the Leyte Gulf, the Japanese deploy kamikaze (“divine wind”) suicide bombers against American warships for the first time. It will prove costly–to both sides. This decision to employ suicide bombers against the American fleet at Leyte, an island of the Philippines, was based on the failure of… Read more »
Three babies were born within weeks of each other in Mauthausen Concentration Camp. On 5 May 1945, the soldiers of the US Army’s 11th Armoured Division under command of Lieutenant General Edward Hale Brooks arrived at Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria. Among the tens of thousands of starving, sick prisoners they discovered, there were three tiny… Read more »