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 Gustloff… Read more »

The disastrous defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, followed by the immense crushing at Kursk in 1943, foreshadowed beyond the question the eventual destruction of the German Reich. Hitler, however. refused to believe that the pure Aryan race could be defeated and therefore absolutely refused to allow or plan any such idea of a post-war resistance…. Read more »

Eyewitness Account of Einsatz Executions. On October 5, 1942, by accident, Hermann Friedrich Graebe  a German engineer and manager of a German construction firm in the Ukraine, and his foreman, came upon an Einsatz execution squad killing Jews from the small town of Dubno in the Ukraine.  He gave the following eyewitness account: “My foreman and… Read more »

Snipers of the Soviet Union played an important role mainly on the Eastern Front of World War II, apart from other preceding and subsequent conflicts. In World War II, Soviet snipers used the 7.62x54R rifle cartridge with light, heavy, armour-piercing (B-30), armour-piercing-incendiary (B-32), zeroing-and-incendiary (P3), and tracer bullets. Most Soviet World War II snipers carried a combat load of 120 rifle cartridges in the field. Unlike… Read more »

The organizers of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme, later known as Action T4, Karl Brandt  and Victor Brack, ordered that the killing of patients could only be carried out by clinicians, because the letter of authorization from Adolf Hitler dated 1 September 1939 only referred to doctors. The operation of the gas tap was therefore the job of… Read more »

MILAN, April 29, 1945, Italian Patriots executed Benito Mussolini. Saturday, and Sunday a howling mob is kicking and spitting on his remains lying in the center of this city where Italian Fascism was born. Mussolini’s face wears a disdainful snarl. He died shouting “No! No!” to a firing squad which took his life, and that… Read more »

Wanda Klaff (born Kalacinski)     was of German origin but had been born in Danzig on the 6th of March 1922. When she left school in 1938 she initially worked in a jam factory, leaving in 1942 to get married to one Willy Gapes and becoming a housewife. In 1944 Wanda joined the staff at… Read more »

He was viewed as Hitler’s finest General, admired even by the Allies for his skills as a military leader. But to one captured British soldier, Erwin Rommel  was the man who saved his life – and gave him beer and cigarettes. Captain Roy Wooldridge,  from the Royal Engineers, has told how he was introduced to the… 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 »

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 »