The Dachau liberation reprisals: Upon the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, about a dozen guards in the camp were shot by a machine gunner who was guarding them. Other soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, of the US 45th (Thunderbird) Division , under command of Major General Robert Tryon Frederick  killed other guards who resisted…. Read more »

Josef Stroop (he changed his first name to the more “Aryan”-sounding Jurgen in 1941) was born in Detmold, in central Germany on 26 September 1895. He joined the Schutz Staffel , SS . By 1939, he was an SS-Oberfuhrer and commander of a police unit. Stroop    the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto volunteered to fight… Read more »

  SS-Oberscharführer Erich Mühsfeldt,  also Mussfeld, and Erich Mußfeldt, (18 February 1913 – 28 January 1948) was a German non-commissioned SS officer serving in two extermination camps during World War II in occupied Poland, including at Auschwitz as well as at the Majdanek concentration camp . He was arrested and charged by the Allies originally in 1946, then transferred to Poland where the full extent of his war… Read more »

Tyrannic dictators can put a lot to their hand, but fortunately not everything. Thus Hitler could not prevent a black athlete with the ultimate honor at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. The four gold medals that Jesse Owens   took back to the United States were a thorn in the eye of the Führer, who wanted… Read more »

There are thousands upon thousands of joyful pictures of the liberation of France in 1944. But among the cheering images there are also shocking ones. These show the fate of women accused of “collaboration horizontale”. It is impossible to forget Robert Capa’s fallen-Madonna image of a shaven-headed young woman, cradling her baby, implicitly the result… Read more »

Allied war crimes include both alleged and legally proven violations of the laws of war by the Allies of World War II against either civilians or military personnel of the Axis powers. Some war crimes involving Allied personnel were investigated by the Allied powers and led in some instances to courts-martial. Some incidents alleged by historians to have been crimes under the law of war in operation… Read more »

Roll-call for 8-year-old girls at the child labour camp in Dzierżązna, set up as a sub-camp of the concentration camp for Polish children, adjacent to the Łódź GhettoSee also: Kidnapping of Polish children by Nazi Germany  At least 200,000 children in occupied Poland were kidnapped by the Nazis to be subjected to forcible Germanization. These children were screened for “racially valuable… Read more »

Karl August Hanke was born in Lauban (Lubań) in Silesia, on 24 August 1903, the son of a locomotive engineer. His older brother was killed in World War I. Hanke was too young for service in the war himself. He did, however, serve in the Reichswehr as a Zeitfreiwilliger (temporary volunteer) in the 19th Infantry… Read more »

Reinhard Hardegen born, 18-03-1913 in Bremen, began his naval career in April 1933. After two and a half years he was transferred, together with other officers, to the Marineflieger (Naval Air Force) branch of the Kriegsmarine  . Hardegen  was trained as an aircraft observer and later as a pilot. Following a crash and an ensuing six… Read more »

Five days after Hitler killed himself in his bunker in Berlin and two days before Germany surrendered, American and German troops were fighting together side by side in what has been called World War II’s strangest battle. It was the last days of the war in Europe on May 5, 1945, when French prisoners, Austrian… Read more »