The city of Lwow, which is also famous for its German name Lemberg, is now called Lviv and is part of modern day Ukraine. The city was known for its overwhelmingly Jewish population that topped 110,000 before the Second World War broke out in 1939. By the time Germans invaded Poland and got control over… Read more »

T4 Program, also called T4 Euthanasia Program, Nazi German effort—framed as a euthanasiaprogram—to kill incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderlypeople. Adolf Hitler initiated this program in 1939, and, while it was officially discontinued in 1941, killings continued covertly until the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. In October 1939, Adolf Hitler empowered his personal physician and the chief of the… Read more »

The Flensburg Government also known as the Flensburg Cabinet (Flensburger Kabinett), was the short-lived government of Nazi Germany during a period of several weeks around the end of World War II in Europe. The government was formed following the suicide of Adolf Hitler on 30 April during the Battle of Berlin, and headed by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz  and Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk   as the Reichspräsident and Leading… Read more »

The Afrika Korps, was a German military unit led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.  It is most well known for its unlikely victories and for being one of the German units to never be accused of war crimes.   The Afrika Korps entered the North African campaign to aid Germany’s Italian allies when the Italians suffered a series of defeats at the… Read more »

Przemyśl, Poland… July 26, 1942 – As a 51-year-old lawyer, Albert Battel  fulfilled his German army-reserve duty in Przemyśl, Poland, serving as the adjutant to the local military commander, Major Max Liedtke  . When the SS attempted to carry out the first liquidation of Przemyśl’s Jews, Battel and Liedtke ordered the army to block the bridge over… Read more »

Towards the end of World War II in 1944, Allied forces advanced from the west, while forces of the Soviet Union advanced from the east. Trapped in the middle, the SS – not wanting the world to know about the Holocaust – decided to abandon the Nazi concentration camps, moving or destroying evidence of the atrocities they had committed… Read more »

Few pictures published during the Second World War remain as striking, all these years later, as John Florea’s 1945 portrait of an American prisoner of war named Joe Demler. Photographed at a Nazi prison camp in Limburg, Germany, the figure in the photo is so emaciated that Demler was quickly dubbed “the human skeleton” when… Read more »

Armin Dieter Lehmann was born in 23-May 1928 in Waldtrudering, a borough of Munich.  Lehmann received his education at Elisabet Gymnasium in Breslau during World War II, and The Journalism School in Munich after the war. Lehmann told : Hitler seized power before I was five years old. It was not my choice to grow up under the form of government in which absolute… Read more »

Hilmar Wäckerle, born 24-11-1899 in Forchheim, was a commander in the Waffen-SS  of Nazi Germany during World War II. He  was the first commandant of Dachau concentration camp. The son of a Munich notary public, Wäckerle was sent to the Bavarian Army officer school at the age of 14 in order to pursue his chosen career. Having completed his three years as a cadet he was… Read more »

Hitler refused to marry his blonde mistress, Eva Braun, says Arthur Kannenberg. Kannenberg was Hitler’s butler at Berchtesgaden. He and his wife, Frieda,  who was one of Hitler’s housekeepers,  were captured on 01 June 1945. Kannenberg told the  Herald-Tribune  correspondent that Hitler refused to marry Eva Braun because he was “spiritually wedded to the German people.”… Read more »