The Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 16 was set up as an infantry regiment of the Bavarian Army at the beginning of the war in 1914 and during the First World War as part of the 6th Bay. Reserve Division on the Western Front, initially used in front of Ypres. In this First Flemish Battle on… Read more »

Theodor Gilbert Morell was the second son of a school teacher. He eventually went on to study medicine in Grenoble and Paris then was trained in obstetrics and gynecology in Munich. By 1913 he was licensed as a medical doctor, and went on to establish his own practice by 1915. During World War I, he… Read more »

Operation Hannibal was the naval evacuation of German troops and civilians from Courland, East Prussia, and Danzig-West Prussia as the Red Army advanced. The MV Wilhelm Gustloff‍ ‘s final voyage was to evacuate German refugees and military personnel as well as technicians who worked at advanced weapon bases in the Baltic from Gdynia, then known to the Germans as Gotenhafen, to Kiel.   The… Read more »

December 1944, Adolf Hitler attempted to split the Allied armies in northwest Europe by means of a surprise blitzkrieg thrust through the Ardennes to Antwerp. Caught off-guard, American units fought desperate battles to stem the German advance at St.-Vith, Elsenborn Ridge, Houffalize and Bastogne. As the Germans, under command of SS Standartenführer Peiper, Joachim “Jochen”… Read more »

In Nazi Germany, attempts were made to bring the celebration of  Christmas in line with Nazi ideology. The Jewish origins of Jesus and the commemoration of his birth as the Jewish Messiah was troubling for Nazi racial beliefs. Between 1933 and 1945, government officials attempted to remove these aspects of Christmas from civil celebrations and concentrate on the… Read more »

Blondi (1941 – 29 April 1945) was Adolf Hitler’s German Shepherd dog, given to him as a gift in 1941 by Martin Bormann.  Blondi stayed with Hitler even after his move into the Führerbunker located underneath the garden of the Reichs Chancellery on 16-01-1945. In March or in early April, she had a litter of five puppies with Gerdy Troost  German Shepherd, Harras. Hitler named one of the… Read more »

Adolf Hitler was born at around 6:30 pm on 20-04-1889 at the Gasthof zum Pommer,  in Braunau am Inn, Austria–Hungary,  the fourth of six children to Alois Hitler, then 51 and Klara Pölzl then 24 years old (see Hitler parents). They had six children Gustav Hitler, born 10 May 1885, died of diphtheria on 08-12-1887 in Braunau am Inn,… Read more »

Corporal Edgar Harrell was a Marine, a 20-year-old kid, who finished his watch on the USS Indianapolis at midnight July 29, 1945. It was unbearably hot, stifling down below where his berth was, so he got permission to make a pallet on deck, right under the barrels of the No. 1 forward turret. Harrell had… Read more »

Maria Mandl was born 10-01-1912 in Münzkirchen, Upper Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, the daughter of a shoemaker. After the Anschluss by Nazi Germany, Mandl moved to Munich, and on 15 October 1938 joined the camp staff as an Aufseherin at Lichtenburg, an early Nazi concentration camp in the Province of Saxony where she worked with fifty other SS women. On 15 May 1939,… Read more »

Eindhoven, my birthtown in 1946, a city in the south of the Netherlands, originally at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams, where I played in my younger years. By 1920, the population was 47,946; by 1925 it was 63,870 and in 1935 that had ballooned to 103,030. The direct involvement of the Netherlands in World War II… Read more »