Theodor Heinrich Bongartz, born 25-December 1902 in Krefeld, was a German SS Oberscharführer supreme leader and head of the Crematorium in the Dachau concentration camp, responsible for the killing of many prisoners, including Georg Elser,  a German carpenter who tried a bomb attack on Adolf Hitler. Theodor Bongartz was trained as a plasterer and worked… Read more »

Bormann was born as Martin Adolf Bormann 14 April 1930 in Grünwald , Bavaria, the oldest of the ten children of the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and private secretary to Führer, Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and his wife, Gerda Buch (1909–1946).  She got the Mother’s Cross of Honour  for her ten children. The Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei), was the name of the… Read more »

While the Germans occupied the Netherlands during the World War II on May 10th 1940, Allied air forces carried out a number of operations over Rotterdam and the surrounding region, with 650 civilian victims and half the city destroyed  These included bombing strategic installations, leaflet dropping, and during the last week of the war, the dropping of emergency food supplies. In one incident,… Read more »

Stalag X-B was a World War II German Prisoner of war camp located near Sandbostel in Lower Saxony in north-western Germany.   Stalag is a contraction of “Stammlager”, itself short for Kriegsgefangenen-Mannschafts-Stammlager. Between 1939 and 1945 several hundred thousand POWs of 55 nations passed through the camp. Due to the bad conditions in which they were housed, thousands died there of hunger, disease,… Read more »

On June 8, 1944, two days after the Allied landing, the German Army Commander-in-Chief for the West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, issued orders to “crush” the resistance “with swift and ruthless initiative,” and express the “expectation that the major operation against the gangs [i.e., partisans] in Southern France will be carried out with the… Read more »

The 101st Airborne Division (“Screaming Eagles”)     is a modular light infantry division of the United states Army trained for air assault operations. During World War II it was renowned for its role in Operation Overlord (the D-Day landings and airborne landings on June 6, 1944, in Normandy, France), Operation Market Garden under General Maxwell Taylor    the liberation of the Netherlands and, perhaps most famously, its action during the Battle of the… Read more »

Eindhoven, my birthtown in 1946, a city in the south of the Netherlands, originally at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams, where I played in my younger years. By 1920, the population was 47,946; by 1925 it was 63,870 and in 1935 that had ballooned to 103,030. The direct involvement of the Netherlands in World War II… Read more »

Marshal Bernard Montgomery  has at his headquarters two dogs, which he calls Hitler and Rommel. Not everybody knows how the four-footed Hitler came by his name, nor how Montgomery came by the dog. It was a gift from BBC war correspondents and Frank Gillard   had quite a bit to do with capturing this Hitler… Read more »

1 – ICE AIRCRAFT CARRIERS “BERGSHIPS” Project Habakkuk was a British plan by Geoffrey Nathaniel Joseph Pyke  to build aircraft carriers out of pykrete, a mixture of wood pulp and ice. The carriers, nicknamed “berg ships” were to operate as landing platforms for aircraft in the war against the German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic. A… Read more »