Waldemar Klingelhöfer was born 4 april 1900 in Moscow as the son of a funeral director of German origins. Waldemar Klingelhöfer attended school in Kassel, served in the German army from June–December 1918 and after the war studied music and voice. He gave concerts throughout Germany and later received a State’s Certificate as a voice teacher. In… Read more »

At the age of 18, she began teaching at a local school. This was the year during which the Nazis occupied Brussels Andrée Geulen was teaching in a school in Brussels, when one day in the summer of 1942  some of her students arrived at school with the compulsory yellow star sewn on their clothes…. 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 »

Erich Koch   , a Nazi war criminal who was accused of the death of millions while serving as governor of East Prussia and commissar for the Soviet Ukraine during World War II, has died on 12. November 1986 in the Staatsgefängnis, State prison in Barczewo and was 90. A Generalleutnant in the SS, Hitler’s dreaded security service, Koch, was… Read more »

In the closing weeks of World War II, thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, the Mittelbau-Dora camp at Nordhausen and the Stutthof camp near Danzig were marched to the German Baltic coast. Most of the inmates were Jews and Russian POWs, but they also included communist sympathizers, pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals,… Read more »

Hannah Reitsch, the first female test pilot in the world, suggests the creation of the Nazi equivalent of a kamikaze squad of suicide bombers while visiting Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden. Hitler was less than enthusiastic about the idea. Reitsch was born in 1912 in Hirschberg, Germany. She left medical school (she had wanted to be… Read more »

In the course of World War I, the Belgians, British and French took control of Germany’s colonies in Africa. The situation for the African colonials in Germany changed in various ways.  For example, Africans who possessed a colonial German identification card had a status entitling them to treatment as “members of the former protectorates”.  After the… Read more »

German military brothels were set up by Nazi Germany during World War II throughout much of occupied Europe for the use of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. These brothels were generally new creations, but in the West, they were sometimes set up using existing brothels as well as many other buildings. Until 1942, there were around 500 military brothels of this kind in German-occupied Europe.  Often operating… Read more »

Lidice was a small town in the former Czechoslovakia located about 12 miles (20 km) from Prague. German forces destroyed the town and murdered or deported its inhabitants in retaliation for the assassination in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, a prominent Nazi official. The story of the Lidice massacre begins in 1941, with a top-secret operation code-named… Read more »

The majority of German girls were members of League of German Girls (BDM). The BDM helped the war effort in many ways. On the eve of war 14.6 million German women were working, with 51% of women of working age (16–60 years old) in the workforce.  Nearly six million were doing farm work, as Germany’s agricultural economy was… Read more »