Hitler had volunteered at age 25 by enlisting in a Bavarian Regiment. After its first engagement against the British and Belgians near Ypres, 2,500 of the 3,000 men in the Hitler’s Regiment List were killed, wounded or missing. Hitler escaped without a scratch. Throughout most of the war, Hitler had great luck avoiding life-threatening injury…. Read more »
Fury is a fictional film that draws a composite portrait of tank crews and the final days of the war in Europe. Ayer was influenced by the service of veterans in his family and by reading books such as Belton Y. Cooper’s Death Traps about American armoured warfare in World War II. Ayer went to considerable… Read more »
Hans Wilhelm Langsdorff was born on the island of Rügen. His family moved to Düsseldorf in 1898 and befriended the future naval hero Count (Graf) Maximilian von Spee, who influenced Langsdorff to attend the Kiel Naval Academy despite his parents’ wishes. During WW1, Leutnant Langsdorff was awarded the Iron Cross at the Battle… Read more »
Count Galeazzo Ciano executed. On 11 January 1944, Benito Mussolini had his son-in-law, the politician Galeazzo Ciano age 40, shot for treason outside the gates of Verona along with four other fascists who had abandoned Mussolini. A glamorous playboy in public life, Galeazzo Ciano was the scion of a wealthy fascist founder. The youth wed Mussolini’s… Read more »
On May 27, 1941, the British navy sinks the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France. The German death toll was more than 2,000. On February 14, 1939, the 823-foot Bismarck was launched at Hamburg. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler hoped that the state-of-the-art battleship would herald the rebirth of the German surface battle fleet. However, after the… Read more »