The SS-Ehrendegen, also SS-Degen (officially Ehrendegen Reichsführer-SS, was a straight sabre or sword, especially of the dress sword worn with a Schutzstaffel (SS) uniform from 1935 until 1945. First introduced in 1935, it was designed by Professor Karl Diebitsch  , an SS Oberführer, who was also Heinrich Himmler’s personal referent on all art and design within the SS. The… Read more »

The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions carried out by the Soviet NKVD  secret police during World War II against political prisoners across Eastern Europe, primarily Poland and, Ukraine, the Baltic states. Bessarabia and other parts of the Soviet Union from which the Red Army was retreating following the Nazi Germany attack on the Soviet… Read more »

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 »

Known for having the poorest living conditions of any vessel of war, the German U-boat was a forbidding deep-sea carrier and an expert in sneak-attacks on merchant convoys and Allied warships.  Part of the largest submarine fleet in the world, the U-boats, under Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, played a huge part in securing the ocean depths for Germany, carrying out… Read more »

Arthur Greiser was born in Schroda, Posen, in the Kingdom of Prussia to a minor local official. In 1903, he began to study at the Könglich-Humanistische Gymnasium (Royal Humanities College) in Hohensalza, Posen. In Aug 1914, he joined the navy, and in 1917 became a naval aviator. For his WW1 service on the Western Front,… Read more »

On Mai 15 1940 the Dutch government surrendered to the Germans and during the four-day campaign, about 2,300 Dutch soldiers were killed and 7,000 wounded, while over 3,000 Dutch civilians also died. The invading army lost 2,200 men killed and 7,000 wounded. In addition, 1,300 German soldiers captured by the Dutch during the campaign, many… Read more »

SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), “Death’s-Head Units,”    was the SS organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps for the Third Reich. While the Totenkopf (Death’s Head/skull) was the universal cap badge of the SS, the SS-TV also wore the insignia on the right collar to distinguish itself from other SS units. On 26 June 1933, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler   appointed SS-Oberführer Theodore Eicke    the Kommandant of the first Nazi concentration… Read more »

She was the daughter of a minor German aristocrat who worked as a schoolteacher. She claimed that she knew nothing about Reinhard Heydrich’s crimes committed while he was head of the RSHA, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Main Security Office. Lina von Osten met the then Naval Lieutenant Heydrich on December 6, 1930, at a gala hosted by the… Read more »

Erhard Heiden (23 February 1901 – c. 1933) was an early member of the Nazi Party  and the third commander of the paramilitary wing of Schutzstaffel SS,  the Sturmabteilung (“Storm Detachment; SA”).  Heiden  was appointed head of the SS, an elite subsection of the SA in 1927. At that time the SS numbered less than a thousand men and Heiden found… Read more »

Heinz Hermann Schubert was born 27 August 1914, in Berlin, shortly after the outbreak of the World War I. He went to school in Eisenberg, Thüringen and then again in Berlin Lichterfelde, where he  attended also a commercial college. From April 1931 to August 1933 Schubert worked for a lawyer. From August 1933 Schubert worked as a… Read more »