England Farers became the name for all men and women who, during the Second World War (1940-1945), after the capitulation of the Dutch struggle forces and before the Allied invasion in Normandy on 6 June 1944 (D-day) from occupied territory knew escaping with the intention of joining the Allied forces in England or other Allied… Read more »

Werner Goldberg was a German who was of half Jewish ancestry, or hald breed in Nazi terminology, who served briefly as a soldier during World War II and whose image appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt as “The Ideal German Soldier”,  and his image was later used in recruitment posters for the Wehrmacht 1935 Nuremberg classed persons with three Jewish grandparents as Jewish; those with two Jewish… Read more »

Until the very last minute, the place of invasion – Normandy- was the most heavily guarded secret on the planet Even the units conducting the initial assaults did not know the locations of their landings. Surprise was crucial since Germany had 55 divisions in France – the Allies could transport no more than 8 divisions on D-Day… Read more »

The Siegfried Line was a series of fortifications on the western border of Germany, stretching more than 390 miles from Kleve, near the Dutch border, all the way to Weil am Rhein near the border of Switzerland. Called the Westwall by the Germans, it was built between 1938 and 1940 and is made of more… Read more »

On this date in 1945, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday, a stooped, jowly-faced Führer in a field-gray overcoat tottered out from the bowels of his command bunker under Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery into the wasteland of his chancellery garden. A news camera recorded him, a shaking left arm behind his back, awarding Iron Crosses to a… Read more »

The diligent help of the Sonderkommando’s when declining and bringing the viciims to the gas chambers was strange. Never have I experienced, nor ever heard that they told them, who were to be gassed, the slightest of what was waiting for them. On the contrary, they did everything to deceive them, and especially those who… Read more »

Irma Ida Ilse Grese (7 October 1923 – 13 December 1945) was a female SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women’s section of Bergen Belsen where the Jewish girl Anne Frank died. Grese  was convicted for crimes against humanity committed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and sentenced… Read more »

The Afrika Korps was formed February 19, 1941, after the German Armed Forces High Command had decided to send an expeditionary force to Libya to support the Italian army, which had been routed by an Allied counteroffensive, Operation Compass. The German expeditionary force, commanded by Erwin Rommel, at first consisted only of the 5th Panzer… Read more »

In the last German offensive of World War II, three German Armies conducted a surprise attack along a 50 miles front in the Ardennes beginning on December 15th 1944, and quickly overtook thin U.S.lines On the second day of the ‘Battle of the Bulge,’ a truck convoy of Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery… Read more »

Boats ordered by the 82nd Airborne  under commander James “Slim Jim” Gavin, in Nijmegen the day before failed to arrive until afternoon and a hasty daylight assault crossing was ordered. At about 15:00, the 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR , commanded by Major Julian Aaron Cook , began their assault across the Waal. The American paratroopers were… Read more »