Supposedly 22,000 Nazi supporters attended a German American Bund rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in February 1939, under police guard. Demonstrators protested outside. Aside from its admiration for Adolf Hitler and the achievements of Nazi Germany, the German American Bund program included antisemitism, strong anti-Communist sentiments, and the demand that the United States… Read more »

Operation Overlord was the code name for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful invasion of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation was launched on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings (Operation Neptune, commonly known as D-Day). A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels. Nearly 160,000… Read more »

Kyra Petrovskaya was born 31-12-1918 in Crimea, on the coast of the Black Sea 1918. She  is the descendant of one of the Russian noble families. Her father was a pilot during World War I. He was executed by the Bolshevik firing squad after the Russian Revolution, when Kyra was 7 months old. Her young mother never remarried, and they… Read more »

Hermann-Friedrich “Jupp” Joppien was born on 19 July 1912 at Bochum in Ruhrgebiet. In October 1931, Joppien  was serving with an Infantry Regiment. In 1935 he joined the Luftwaffe and underwent flying training. He was promoted to the rank of Leutnant in 1938. He was appointed Technischer Offizier in a Zerstörergruppe but was then transferred… Read more »

We know a great deal about what transpired at Oradour sur Glane because despite the thorugnness of the SS killing operation, there were a few survivors. There was only one school child among the survivors. The lone child who managed to survive was Roger Godfrin   .He was a refugee from Lorraine. Roger was born… Read more »

The forces available to General Helmuth Otto Ludwig Weidling   for the city’s defence included roughly 45,000 soldiers in several severely depleted German Army, Wehrmacht Heer  and Armed SS , Waffen SS divisions. Weidling died on 17 November 1955, age 64, in the custody of the KGB in Vladimir. KGB records listed the cause of death… Read more »

In 1939, there were some 140,000 Dutch Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled Germany in the 1930s (other sources claim that some 34,000 Jewish refugees entered the Netherlands between 1933 and 1940, mostly from Germany and Austria), The Nazi occupation force put the number of (racially) Dutch Jews… Read more »

The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945) was a major German attack near the end of World War II, in Belgium, France and Luxembourg. The attack surprised Allied forces. It became the worst battle in terms of casualties for the United States. It also used up huge amounts of Germany’s war-making resources. The… Read more »

Elbe Day, April 25, 1945, is the day Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River, 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… Read more »

Ravensbrück was the Nazi’s largest concentration camp for women. There, 132,000 women and children, and 20,000 men were imprisoned. In 1945, when Rinkel worked there, thousands of prisoners were killed on the orders of the SS in the gas chambers. In the 1950s, Rinkel moved to the United States, where she met her future husband… Read more »