In the night of 7 to 8 March 1945 Hanns Albin Rauter  the head of the SS in the Netherlands was severely wounded by an attack staged by the Dutch resistance at “Woeste Hoeve” on the Veluwe,   a little village between Arnhem and Apeldoorn. SS Brigadeführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth who was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide… Read more »

Kurt Franz was born in 1914 in Dusseldorf. He attended public school in Düsseldorf from 1920 to 1928, and then worked as a messenger. He started an apprenticeship as a cook beginning at the age of fifteen (1929) for the restaurant “Hirschquelle”, and then at the Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof, before he gave his final exam…. Read more »

Austria and Vienna survived the war undamaged and Austrian people after the war “decided” not to talk about the war anymore, no guild and only Germany was blamed. But on an individual level, however, some 800.000 Austrians were drafted into the army (the German Wehrmacht) after the Annexation in March 1938 , and another 150.000… Read more »

Rape during the liberation is documented both during and after the advance of United States forces across France against Nazi Germany in later stages of World War II. The invasion of Normandy in June and a second invasion in the south in August, put over two million front line and support troops of the Western Allies into France in 1944. The Liberation of Paris followed on 25 August. Except for German forces penned… Read more »

He walked with a limp and was known to some as the ‘poison dwarf’. The Germany’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was an unlikely Lothario, nicknamed ‘the ram’ by the many actresses and society ladies he seduced. Manipulative and ruthless, he is also revealed as sexually obsessed and mawkishly sentimental. Left enfeebled by polio, his weak frame and… Read more »

Wilhelm Brückner born 11 December 1884 and raised in Baden-Baden. He did his Abitur there. Afterwards he studied law and economics in Strasbourg  Freiburg, Heidelberg and Munich. In the First World War, Wilhelm Brückner was an officer in a Bavarian infantry regiment and was discharged as a leutnant. After the war, he joined the Freikorp Franz von Epp   and participated in Schützenregiment 42 as a member of the Reichswehr  in suppressing the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Towards… Read more »

Dr. Bruno Lohse, who published a scholarly thesis on painter Jacob Philipp Hackert  in 1936, worked as an art dealer in Berlin from 1936 to 1939, selling paintings out of his father’s home. Having joined the SS in 1933, Lohse became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937  He would eventually be drafted into Goering’s Luftwaffe, then appointed by Göring to the Einsatzstab… Read more »

Morell joined the Nazi Party when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1935, Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann,  was successfully treated by Morell. Hoffmann told Hitler that Morell had saved his life. Hitler met Morell in 1936, and Morell began treating Hitler with various commercial preparations, including a combination of vitamins and hydrolyzed E. coli bacteria called Mutaflor, which successfully treated Hitler’s… Read more »

Nazi plunder refers to art theft and other items stolen as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Third Reich by agents acting on behalf of the ruling Nazi Party of Germany. Plundering occurred from 1933 until the end of World War II, particularly by military units known as the Kunstschutz,… Read more »

The Führerbunker was an air-raid shelter located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. It was part of a subterranean bunker complex constructed in two phases which were completed in 1936 and 1944. by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. It was the last of the Führer Headquarters, Führerhauptquartier used by Adolf Hitler, during the Second World War. Hitler took up residence… Read more »