On the way to destroying Nanking, two Japanese army officers, Tsuyoshi Noda and Toshiaki Mukai  entered into a friendly competition with one another—who would be the first to kill 100 people with a sword during the war? The bloodshed began on the road, as the Japanese army advanced to Nanking, and continued through the rape of… Read more »

To this day, Arthur Nebe remains a controversial figure in the history of the German conspiracy against Hitler. Having been a major figure in Heinrich Himmler’s  SS empire as Head of the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police)  and later having belonged to Einsatzgruppen – B (attached to Army Group Center), Nebe has been posthumously accused of all manners of war crimes. But a… Read more »

Battle of Kursk, from July 5 till August 23, 1943, unsuccessful German assault on the Soviet salient around the city of Kursk in western Russia during World War II. The salient was a bulge in the Soviet lines that stretched 150 miles (240 km) from north to south and protruded 100 miles (160 km) westward into the German lines…. Read more »

Martin Gottfried Weiss was born in Weiden in der Oberpfalz. His father worked for the Royal Bavarian State Railways. He   had two sisters and was raised as a Catholic. After school he continued his education at a mechanical engineering school in Landshut. He finished school in 1924 and worked as intern in an ironwork. Later he worked for… Read more »

The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish nationals carried out by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) , the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. Originally, the term “Katyn massacre”, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre, referred to the massacre at Katyn Forest, which was discovered first and was the largest execution of… Read more »

The operational command of Einsatzgruppe B, attached to the Army Group Center, was established under the command of SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe  a few days after the German attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland code-named Operation Barbarossa. Einsatzgruppe B departed from the occupied city of Poznań (Posen) on 24 June 1941, with 655 men from the Security Police, Gestapo, Kripo, SD, Waffen-SS and the 2nd Company of… Read more »

The Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, also known as the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland or The Ravna Gora Movement, commonly known as the Chetniks was a World War II movement in Yugoslavia led by Draža Mihailović , an anti-Axis movement  in their long-term goals which engaged in marginal resistance activities for limited periods.They also engaged in tactical or selective collaboration with the occupying forces for… Read more »

Elbe Day, April 25, 1945, is the day Soviet and American troops met at the River Elbe, near Torgau in Germany, marking an important step toward the end of World War II in Europe. This contact between the Soviets, advancing from the East, and the Americans, advancing from the West, meant that the two powers had effectively cut Germany in two…. Read more »

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler violates the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact by sending German military forces into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the Rhine River in western Germany.    The Treaty of Versailles, signed in July 1919–eight months after the guns fell silent in World War I–called for stiff war reparation payments… Read more »

The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place during the Second World War in the European Theatre. Germany would be forced to surrender three months later. Till February 1945 the beautiful city was never bombed and for the fugitives a “save” city. In four raids between… Read more »