Blondi (1941 – 29 April 1945) was Adolf Hitler’s German Shepherd dog, given to him as a gift in 1941 by Martin Bormann. Blondi stayed with Hitler even after his move into the Führerbunker located underneath the garden of the Reichs Chancellery on 16-01-1945. In March or in early April, she had a litter of five puppies with Gerdy Troost German Shepherd, Harras. Hitler named one of the… Read more »
Adolf Hitler was born at around 6:30 pm on 20-04-1889 at the Gasthof zum Pommer, in Braunau am Inn, Austria–Hungary, the fourth of six children to Alois Hitler, then 51 and Klara Pölzl then 24 years old (see Hitler parents). They had six children Gustav Hitler, born 10 May 1885, died of diphtheria on 08-12-1887 in Braunau am Inn,… Read more »
Corporal Edgar Harrell was a Marine, a 20-year-old kid, who finished his watch on the USS Indianapolis at midnight July 29, 1945. It was unbearably hot, stifling down below where his berth was, so he got permission to make a pallet on deck, right under the barrels of the No. 1 forward turret. Harrell had… Read more »
Maria Mandl was born 10-01-1912 in Münzkirchen, Upper Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, the daughter of a shoemaker. After the Anschluss by Nazi Germany, Mandl moved to Munich, and on 15 October 1938 joined the camp staff as an Aufseherin at Lichtenburg, an early Nazi concentration camp in the Province of Saxony where she worked with fifty other SS women. On 15 May 1939,… 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 »
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 »
Ilse Hirsch, born in 1922 in Hamm, was a Nazi resistance fighter who played a key role in the assassination of Franz Oppenhof the mayor of Aachen in the later days of World War Two. Born in 1922, Ilse Hirsch joined the League of German Girl s , part of the Hitler Youth movement , when she… Read more »
Louis Zamperini was born in January 1917, in Olean, New York. Raised in California, Zamperini joined the track team in high school. Excelling at long-distance events, Zamperini competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was set to compete again in the 1940 games in Tokyo, which were canceled when World War II broke out. A… Read more »
What was it that caused Adolf Hitler’s physical and mental health to collapse in the closing days of World War II? He was losing the war, of course- surely that had a great deal to do with it. But for more than 60 years, historians have wondered if there was more to it than that…. Read more »
‘Omaha’ refers to a section of the coast of Normandy, France, facing the English Channel 8 kilometers (5 mi) long, from east of Saint Honorine des Pertes to west of Vierville sur Mer on the right bank of the Douve River, where 101 Airborne Chaplain Father Francis Leon Sampson dropped in on D-day, estuary and an estimated 150-foot… Read more »
