Tsutomu Yamaguchi (March 16, 1916 – January 4, 2010) was a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb during World War II. Although at least 160 people are known to have been affected by both bombings, he is the only person to have been officially recognized by the government of Japan as surviving both explosions.  

A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 am, on August 6, 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day, and despite his wounds, he returned to work on August 9, the day of the second atomic bombing. In 1957, he was recognized as a hibakusha (explosion-affected person) of the Nagasaki bombing, but it was not until March 24, 2009, that the government of Japan officially recognized his presence in Hiroshima three days earlier.

Yamaguchi “never thought Japan should start a war”. He continued his work with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, but soon Japanese industry began to suffer heavily as resources became scarce and tankers were sunk. As the war ground on, he was so despondent over the state of the country that he considered killing his family with an overdose of sleeping pills in the event that Japan lost.

Yamaguchi lost hearing in his left ear as a result of the Hiroshima explosion. He also went bald temporarily and his daughter recalls that he was constantly swathed in bandages until she reached the age of 12. Despite this, Yamaguchi went on to lead a healthy life. Late in his life, he began to suffer from radiation-related ailments, including cataracts and acute leukemia.

His wife also suffered radiation poisoning from black rain after the Nagasaki explosion and died in 2010 (age 93) of kidney and liver cancer after a lifetime of illness. All three of their children reported suffering from health problems probably connected with their parents’ exposures.

The memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki contain lists of the names of the hibakusha who are known to have died since the bombings. Updated annually on the anniversaries of the bombings, as of August 2014 the memorials record the names of more than 450,000 hibakusha; 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in Nagasaki.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi died of stomach cancer on January 4, 2010, at the age of 93, in Nagasaki.

Herta Bothe was born in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Scwerin on 08-01-1921. In 1938, at age seventeen, Bothe  helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then worked temporarily in a factory, then as a hospital nurse. In 1939, Bothe was a member of the Leaque of German Girls .

In September 1942, Bothe became the  SS Aufseherin camp guard at the Nazi German Ravensbrück concentration camp  for women. The former nurse took a four-week training course and was sent as an overseer to the Stutthof camp near Danzig.. There she became known as the “Sadist of Stutthof” due to her brutal beatings of prisoners. 

In July 1944, she was sent by Oberaufseherin Gerda Steinhoff  to the Bromberg-Ost subcamp. On May 25, 1945, Steinhoff was arrested by Polish officials and sent to prison. She stood trial with the other SS women and kapos and was convicted and condemned to death for her involvement in the selections and what was called her sadistic abuse of prisoners. She was publicly hanged on July 4, 1946, on Biskuia Gorky Hill, near Gdansk.  

On 21 January 1945, the 24-year-old Bothe accompanied a death march of women prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp near Celle. The Jewish girl Anne Frank wit h her mother and sister    died in this concentration camp. Father Otto Frank survived the war.. While en route to Bergen-Belsen, she and the prisoners stayed temporarily at Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving at Belsen between 20–26 February 1945.

Once in the camp Bothe supervised a wood brigade of sixty women prisoners. The camp was liberated on 15 April 1945. She is said to have been the tallest woman arrested, she stood 6′ 3″ (1.91 m). Bothe also stood out from other Aufseherinnen because, while most of the SS women wore black jackboots, she was in ordinary civilian shoes. The Allied soldiers forced her to place corpses of dead prisoners into mass graves adjacent to the main camp. She recalled in an interview some sixty years later that, while carrying the corpses, they were not allowed to wear gloves, and she was terrified of contracting typhus. She said the dead bodies were so rotten that the arms and legs tore away when they were moved. She also recalled the emaciated bodies were still heavy enough to cause her considerable back pain. Bothe was arrested and taken to a jail at Celle. 

At the Bergen Trial she was characterized as a “ruthless overseer” and sentenced to ten years in prison for using a pistol on prisoners. Bothe admitted to striking inmates with her hands for camp violations like stealing but maintained that she never beat anyone “with a stick or a rod” and added that she never “killed anyone.”Her contention of innocence was deemed questionable as one Bergen-Belsen survivor claimed to have witnessed Bothe beat a Hungarian Jew named Éva to death with a wooden block while another teenager stated that he saw her shoot two prisoners for reasons he could not understand. Nevertheless, she was released early from prison on December 22, 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government.

  19 April 1945 Bergen Belsen, SS women camp guards are paraded for work in clearing the dead. The women include Hildegard Kanbach (first from left), Magdalene Kessel (second from left), Irene Haschke (centre, third from right), the Head Wardress, Herta Ehlert (second from right, partially hidden) and Herta Bothe (first from right).  Herta Bothe, prisoner nr 3, here next to Irma Grese, accompanied a death march of women from central Poland to Bergen-Belsen. She was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and released early from prison on December 22, 1951. Elisabeth Volkenrath was head wardress of the camp and sentenced to death. She was hanged on December 13, 1945. Irene Haschke was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.

During a rare interview, that was broadcast in 2009, Bothe (living in Germany under the name Lange) became defensive when asked about her decision to be a concentration camp guard. She replied:

Did I make a mistake? No. The mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it, otherwise I would have been put into it myself. That was my mistake.

On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, perpetrated by Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg

  and other conspirators, inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The name Operation Valkyrie, originally referring to a component part of the conspirators’ overall plot, has become associated with the event. The apparent purpose of the assassination attempt was to seize political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party (including the SS) in order to obtain peace with the western Allies as soon as possible. The underlying desire of many of the involved high ranking Wehrmacht officers was apparently to show to the world that not all Germans were like Hitler and the Nazi Party. The details of the conspirators’ peace initiatives remain unknown, but they likely would have included demands to accept wide-reaching territorial annexations by Germany in Europe.

The plot was the culmination of the efforts by several groups in the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi-led German government. The failure of both the assassination and the military coup d’état which was planned to follow, led to the arrest of at least 7.000 people by the Gestapo. According to records of the Führer Conferences on Naval Affairs, 4.980 of these were executed after trials by Roland Freisler..

 On 18 July 1944 rumors reached Stauffenberg that the Gestapo had wind of the conspiracy and that he might be arrested at any time—this was apparently not true, but there was a sense that the net was closing in and that the next opportunity to kill Hitler must be taken because there might not be another. At 10:00 on 20 July Stauffenberg flew back to the Wolfsschanze for another Hitler military conference, with two British bombs in his briefcase.

The conference took place in the wooden main room of Wolf’s Lair instead of the underground concrete bunker due to the hot weather. At around 12:30 as the conference began, Stauffenberg made an excuse to use a washroom in Wilhelm Keitel‘s  office where he used pliers to crush the end of a pencil detonator inserted into a 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) block of plastic explosive wrapped in brown paper, that was prepared by Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven . Loringhoven committed suicide at Mauerwald in East Prussia age 42 on 26-07-1944..

Stauffenberg prepared the bomb which was slow going due to war wounds that had cost von Stauffenberg an eye, his right hand, and two fingers on his left hand. Interrupted by a guard knocking on the door to hurry up.

As Stauffenberg was disabled following the loss of his right hand and two fingers from his left hand, Major Ernst John von Freyend

 , adjutant to Wilhelm Keitel, offered to carry it for him. Von Freyend survived the explosion and died age 70 on 24-03-1980. Von Stauffenberg at first refused, but then relented upon approaching the conference room and he asked von Freyend to put him as near as possible to Hitler so that ‘I catch everything the Führer says for my briefing afterwards’. Freyend placed the briefcase by the conference map table to the right of General Adolf Heusinger who was standing next to Hitler and Stauffenberg adjusted its position. However, After a few minutes, von Stauffenberg received a planned telephone call and left the room. Heinz Brandt, wanting to get a closer look at a map on the table, re-positioned the briefcase farther away from Hitler on the other side of a thick table leg, thus unwittingly deflecting the blast from Hitler but causing his own death with the loss of one of his legs when the bomb detonated. Seven minutes later, between 12:40 and 12:50 the bomb exploded, demolishing the conference room. Three officers and the stenographer were seriously injured and died soon after. Hitler survived, as did everyone else who was shielded from the blast by the conference table leg . Hitler’s trousers were singed and tattered  and he suffered from a perforated eardrum, as did most of the other 24 people in the room. Had the second block of explosive been used, it is probable that everyone present would have been killed. More then twenty were injured, a ten seriously and only 4 were killed in the room. Generaloberst Günther Korten   age 45, stenographer Dr. Heinrich Berger

 age 39, Oberst Heinz Jürgen Brandt , age 37, Aide de camp to General Adolf Heusinger and General Rudolf Schmundt 

 age 48, Chief of the Army Staff Office.

From the Beginning…

Canada entered the 1939-1945 War on 10^th September 1939. Within two months the first contingents of Canadian troops arrived in the United Kingdom to supplement the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF). Forestalled by the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk and the Channel ports, Canada’s role became one of defence of the British Isles. Far across the globe a small force of Canadians arrived in Hong Kong in time to meet the Japanese invasion, and fought with the British, Indian and Hong Kong forces in defence of the colony until the surrender on Christmas Day 1941.

Dieppe.

On l9th August 1942 troops of the Canadian 2^nd Division formed the bulk of the Dieppe Raid. Of the 5,000 Canadians who took part, only about 2,000 returned to England: nearly 1,000 had been killed and 2,000 taken prisoner. A further 500 Canadians lost their lives when they landed in Sicily as part of the Eighth Army on 10^th July 1943.

The Cost of Battle.

On 3^rd September a combined Canadian, British and American force made the first full-scale invasion of mainland Europe, attacking on the ‘toe’ of Italy and reaching Naples on 1^st October. Canadian troops fought at Ortona and Monte Cassino and in May 1944 took part in the costly, but successful, attack on the Hitler line: the first major operation by a Canadian corps in the 1939-1945 War. The battle northwards through Italy continued to the war’s end and ultimately cost the lives of nearly 6,000 Canadians.Normandy.

Landing in Normandy on 6^th June 1944 as part of the Allied invasion force, the Canadians played an important role in the battle to take Caen.  They then advanced along the French seacoast to the Pas-de-Calais and took Dieppe on 1^st September. Canadians fought with British soldiers in the freeing of the Scheldt Estuary and success here enabled the first Allied convoy to arrive in Antwerp in November 1944.

Some Canadian units played a prominent part in the liberation of the Netherlands while others went on to participate in the Battle of Germany. In February 1945 the Canadian First Army attacked in the Reichswald Forest, and helped drive the Germans back across the Rhine; the German forces surrendered to General Montgomery on Luneburg Heath on 5^th May 1945. From D-Day to VE Day 12,500 Canadians died.

Contributions on the Sea.

During the 1939-1945 War the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) grew to a strength of nearly 100,000 personnel and nearly 400 vessels. Their main duty was to act as convoy escorts across the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean and to Murmansk in the USSR. They also hunted submarines, and supported amphibious landings in Sicily, Italy and Normandy. In all the RCN lost 1,797 seamen, and 95 became prisoners of war

Contributions in the Air.

Although a major task of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) based at home was the hunting of U-Boats in the North Atlantic, its most important area of operations was Europe, where 48 Canadian squadrons served. The scale of their contribution was recognized on 1st January 1943 by the formation of No. 6 Group, an RCAF formation within Bomber Command. Canadian airmen fought in the Battle of Britain, North Africa, Italy and the Normandy invasion. About 17,000 died, the great majority while serving with Bomber Command.

Captain Crawford Smith, Perth Regiment, making friends with Suzie Calder of Harderwijk, Holland.

Andy Sparling the Canadian leader of The Commodores Orchestra in Canada sent me a message about his father Phil Sparling. Phil was a member of the Canadian Royal Air Force swing and jazz band that played for Canadian and British troops near the front lines in and around Eindhoven and Nijmegen in November and December 1944. He wrote a book about this band and his father. Dance Through the Darkness Apr.29 . The Canadian Royal Air Force band followed the Canadian Army on close distant and played in many liberated town. This was still a dangerous life as for example, in the book, he described how they stayed at an infirmary or a small hospital beside an airfield at Eindhoven in December 1944. The were awakened by German Messerchmitts strafing and bombing the airfield. There were casualties. My father and his bandmates were moved from a barracks to stay in the infirmary for the night. The barracks was destroyed.   That same week, the band crossed over the Grave bridge   near Nijmegen under enemy fire, to play for troops in a church about 400 meters from the front lines. In all the band played about ten times for troops in an around Eindhoven between Dec. 18 and Dec. 31, 1944.

The Canadians were very popular in Holland and after the liberation, an estimated 4,000 to 9,000 so-called “liberation children” were born, of which about 6,000 were from Canadian soldiers. More than 1,800 Dutch women left for Canada with their Canadian husbands, as so-called “war brides”, and a famous Dutch song sings remained “Trees has a Canadees”

Thanks to all Canadians.

Heinrich Hoffmann was born in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany in 1885. His father, who owned a photographic shop in Munich, Bavaria, introduced him to photography. Beginning in 1908, he worked in his father’s shop as a photographer. In 1911, he married Therese “Lelly” Baumann ; they would later have two children, Henriette “Henny”  in 1913 and Heinrich in 1916. He joined the Nazi Party in 1920, and found himself serving in the function of photographer in many party events, and before long he had befriended Adolf Hitler and secured a position as the party’s official photographer. He became very wealthy from the royalty proceeds that he collected, particularly that from photographs of Hitler.  In 1928, his daughter Henriette married Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.  In the same year, his wife died a sudden death; he would later marry a woman by the name of Erna. In Oct 1929, he introduced Eva Braun to Hitler, who would later become Hitler’s wife. In 1933, he was elected to the Reichstag. In 1938, Hitler granted him the title professor. As he became an influential figure in the Nazi Party, he continued to take photographs of Nazi Party leaders and events through the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. After about 1941, Hoffman began to lose favour with Hitler, primarily because Martin Bormann  – Hitler’s personal secretary after Rudolf Hess  flew to Scotland in a quixotic attempt to broker a peace deal – did not like him, and in large part controlled access to Hitler. Bormann also fed Hitler misinformation and innuendo about his rivals for Hitler’s attention, such as Hoffman. He was arrested by the Americans on 10 May 1945. He was tried for and was found guilty of war profiteering. After serving a prison sentence, he was released in 1951 and settled in the small village of Epfach outside of Munich. He passed away 7 years later, on 12-11-1957. His widow, Erna , continued to live there together with the former silent-movie star Wera Engels.