The KGB - whatever its current name – says that the remains of Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Goebbels’s family were secretly buried in 1946 at a Soviet military base in East Germany, and that in 1970 they were dug up, burnt on a bonfire, ground into ashes and thrown into a river. The Russians also claim they kept some fragments of Hitler’s body, which they still have.
A British WWII soldier repeatedly smuggled himself into Auschwitz to see what was going on there so he could tell the truth to others. During one of his trips, he saved a Jewish prisoner’s life, but he didn’t know it until just now. Videos inside.
Susan Travers’s service in the Foreign Legion during WWII included not only lots of fighting but also love affairs with married men, so she didn’t want to tell her story while the people who were in it were still alive. She had to wait until she was 91.
A 13-year-old Anne Frank leans over her second-floor balcony to get a good look at a neighbor on her wedding day. This 20-second film made on July 22, 1941 in Amsterdam, is the only film footage of the young Jewish diarist who died in a Nazi death camp.
The cover of an album with photographs of Angora rabbit raising in Nazi concentration camps
It turns out that many of the same death camps where the Nazis methodically exterminated millions of Jews and other prisoners were also used to breed Angora rabbits. The rabbits were raised for their soft fur, which was used to make warm clothes for German soldiers. Like the extermination camps themselves, it was a well-organized, large-scale industrial operation run with typical German thoroughness:
The Angora rabbit project was an SS-administered program to breed rabbits for their soft, warm fur, one use of which was to line the jackets of Luftwaffe pilots. The rabbits were raised in luxury not far from the maltreated prisoners in 31 Nazi concentration camps in Germany, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. The project was a showpiece for visiting dignitaries, as well as a constant reminder to prisoners of how little their lives were valued.
Somewhere, Mo Ahmadinejad is jumping with joy: he has his proof now! Death camps? What death camps? They were just rabbit farms!
The first rapes in East Prussia were an eruption of pure rage, bloody revenge for Wehrmacht atrocities on Soviet soil in the march to Stalingrad; soldiers destroyed homes, raped women — some as young as 12 — and killed children. But revenge could not have been the sole motive, for even Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish survivors were not safe; some, as young as 16, were raped by the soldiers who set them free. By the time the first libidinous Soviet wandered into the diarist’s cellar a few months later — pointing menacingly to a teenage girl and asking “How many year?” — German women appeared to the Red Army simply as rightful spoils of war.
Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than “concede” — as some women put it — to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.
It’s easy to imagine what the women of Tbilisi felt last August when the drunken Russian horde was only 20 miles away.
Army troops on board an LCT, ready to ride across the English Channel to France. Some of these men wear 101st Airborne Division insignia. Official U.S. Navy photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.
Wounded men of the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, receive cigarettes and food after they had stormed Omaha Beach on "D-Day", 6 June 1944. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.
An American soldier killed on Omaha Beach. 6 June 1944.
There are nearly 10,000 U.S. soldiers' graves at the cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, near Omaha Beach, just outside of Bayeux, France.
Life magazine bought these photos from Hitler’s photographer in 1965 for a hefty sum - so why did it wait 44 years to make them public? Don’t magazines buy photos to publish them? Makes you wonder how many more historic photos they don’t want us to see.
A man survives the bombing of Hiroshima with some burns and goes back home to Nagasaki – just in time to get A-bombed again. He’s now 93 years old and a little deaf in one ear. Oh, and his legs are not as strong as they used to be.
Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.
The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test – which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 – averaged 97.4.
The unprecedented demands of the second world war – fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars – might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.
“We wonder whether more skilled men were required at the front line, as warfare became more technical,” [Deary] says.
Officers and NCOs (who had higher IQs than soldiers under their command) made up 27% of the deaths, according to the article. It would be interesting to compare this number with the percentage of officers and NCOs among the survivors, but the study doesn’t seem to have looked into that.
