The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began in earnest on April 19, the day before the start of Passover, when SS units under command of SS Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop    arriving for the final deportations were greeted by an ambush. Insurgents set fire to German tanks, hurled handmade grenades and Molotov cocktails  at advancing troops and managed to… Read more »

On April 1, 1933, a week after Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany, he ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores. But the boycott was mostly ignored by German shoppers and was called off after three days. However, the unsuccessful boycott was followed by a rapid series of laws which robbed the… Read more »

Faced with an effective British blockade, fierce resistance from the British and French Armies, the entrance of the United States Army, political unrest and starvation at home, an economy in ruins, mutiny in the navy, and mounting defeats on the battlefield, the German Generals requested armistice negotiations with the Allies in November of 1918. Under… Read more »

The Ghost Army  was a United States Army tactical deception unit during World War II officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. The 1,100-man unit was given a unique mission within the U.S Army: to impersonate other U.S. Army units to deceive the enemy. From a few weeks after D-Day, when they landed in France, until the… Read more »

Baptized a Catholic, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born on April 20, 1889, in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, located approximately 65 miles east of Munich and nearly 30 miles north of Salzburg. His father, Alois Hitler (1837–1903), was a mid-level customs official. Born out of wedlock to Maria Anna Schickelgruber in 1837,… 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), like the Anne Frank family, from Frankfurt am Main. The… Read more »

The Battle of Britain, Luftschlacht um England, literally “Air battle for England” is the name given to the Second World War air campaign waged by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) against the United Kingdom during the summer and autumn of 1940. The Battle of Britain was the first major campaign to be fought entirely by air forces, and was also… Read more »

Eager to invade France, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler demanded a new weapon that could easily pierce the concrete fortifications of the French Maginot Line — the only major physical barrier standing between him and the rest of Western Europe. In 1941, the year after France fell, German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Friedrich Krupp    A.G. began… Read more »

The Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II can be mainly characterized by its prominent non-violence, peaking at over 300.000 people in hiding in the autumn of 1944, tended to by some 60.000 to 200.000 illegal landlords and caretakers and tolerated knowingly by some one million people, including German occupiers and military. Dutch… Read more »

The first mass deportation of Polish nationals by Nazi Germany occurred less than a year before the outbreak of war. It was the eviction of Jews holding Polish citizenship, during the Kristalnacht attack of 9–10 November 1938 carried out by the SA paramilitary forces.  Approximately 30.000 Polish Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to prewar concentration camps… Read more »