Holocaust victim

  Yes, American troops detested the SS during World War 2 to an extent even greater than how much they resented the regular German Army (Wehrmacht). It was not a war-time bias, but an inflamed, lynching anger which often ended in bloodshed against the apprehended SS personnel. This passionate feeling happened because of three large reasons. To start with, the SS were the most extreme believers of the Nazi Party. They had been dipped in the inhuman, vile ideology and were much more savage than other Germans soldiers. They usually did not give up and the combat became much more deadly to the Americans. They were fanatics, as well as ordinary soldiers. Second major reason is that the SS committed colossal war crime. As the news of the Malmedy Massacre, in which SS troops murdered over 80 of the captured American soldiers, hit the U.S., myriads of units resolved that they would not take prisoners of SS any longer. Both verbal and written orders were given to shoot them when they were s...

  There’s a lot to love about Richard Feynman. The man was a brilliant physicist, lock-picker, jokester, story-teller, teacher, and so much more. The way Stanford professor Leonard Susskind put it, “he always made me feel smart… He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem together.” But, for a while at least, Feynman didn’t brush his teeth, according to his colleague Murray Gell-Mann. He thought brushing was a superstition. Gel-Mann says his dentists had a lot of trouble. At one point, they even brought in scientific studies, trying to get the guy to brush and floss. Some of his other habits were more amusing. He worked at Caltech for much of his life. The Caltech faculty club had a jacket-and-tie dress policy. Every morning, he would show up at work with a jacket and tie. But every day, by noon, he’d no longer be wearing them. When he got to the faculty club for lunch, he’d go to the backup wardrobe and pick out a mes...

  In Moscow, a boy stopped going to school. A week passed, then two… Lev didn't have a phone, and his classmates, on the teacher's advice, decided to go to his house. Lev's mother opened the door. Her face showed sadness. The boys greeted her and asked, "Why isn't Lev going to school?" His mother replied, "He won't be studying with you anymore. He had an operation. It didn't go well. Lev can't walk on his own." The boys were silent, looked at each other, and then one of them suggested, "We'll take turns taking him to school. " "And bringing him back home. " "And we'll help him with his studies"—they interrupted each other. The mother had tears in her eyes. She led her friends into the room. A while later, Lev emerged, groping his way with a bandage over his eyes. The boys were stunned. They understood their friend's misfortune. Lev barely said: - Oh, hello. They all started talking: "I'll...

  Consider how it would be like to live in such a place where fear is the order of the day. It was the case in Belarus when the country was occupied by German Nazis in the course of the Second World War. It was transformed into one of the most unsafe spots on the map. The Nazis did not only have intentions of conquering the territory but also that of exterminating the population that was already there and they did it using extreme violence. They rounded up all the Jewish families first and enclosed them into small and walled-off camps. There they were fire at in large groups, publicly and without discrimination. They also murdered lots of non-Jews. The German soldiers incinerated at least thousands of villages, forcing people into their houses or barns and then setting them on fire. Consequently, a third of the entire population in Belarus perished in the three years of war-an unfortunate event. Daily life became a struggle. The army confiscated every food leaving many starving. Yo...

  The chronicle of the camp of Ozarichi in the times of the World War II is very tragic and shameful and there are still masses of people who do not know about it. It was a very wicked and desperate plan that was formulated by the German army back at the start of 1944 as Soviet army was trailing the then visibly receding German army. They made temporary camp in freezing muddy fields in the Belarussian town of Ozarichi today. These camps were horrible in their intent. The Germans first of all, rounded up the thousands of population, consisting mostly of children, old folks and crippled women, into these open grounds so that they could form a human shield. This was to stall the soviet army. Second they brought people with typhus to spread the disease to the prisoners and then to the soldiers of the Soviet who tried to help. The camp was abominable. If not there was no shelter as there was no food neither. Most of the individuals could just last a couple of days. Between 17,000 indivi...

  Did you know that during World War II, some Italian doctors made up a fake deadly disease to trick the Nazis and save Jewish people? They called it Syndrome K (or Il Morbo di K). It was described as a serious, contagious illness — but it didn’t actually exist. The hospital was called Fatebenefratelli, and it was known as a safe place for Jews, thanks to Professor Giovanni Borromeo. On October 16, 1943, the Catholic hospital opened its doors to Jews looking for shelter. But Borromeo knew that the Nazis might search the hospital. So, he and two other doctors — Vittorio Sacerdoti and Adriano Ossicini — came up with a smart plan. They decided that every Jew who came to the hospital would be listed as a new patient and “diagnosed” with Syndrome K. These patients were then put in quarantine. When the Nazis came to search the hospital, they were told that certain rooms had people with a terrible, highly infectious disease that caused disfigurement. The trick worked. The Nazis stayed awa...

He’d probably be rubbing a lot of people the wrong way and getting people’s panties in a bunch. Albert Einstein was a very unique individual. Outspoken. And he could adopt views that were controversial, never making apologies for them. I don’t think he’d “fit in”, in some ways. For instance, Einstein was a womanizer. And one of his many “special lady friends” was a Russian spy. He was warned of this and didn’t really care, pretty much just shrugged his shoulders and continued his dalliance. In other ways he’d also be… disappointing to some. For example, his political views. Einstein was, at times fiercely critical of Zionists, deriding them as “terrorists” for the Deir Yassin massacre. At other times, he would be highly supportive, feeling ‘moved and honored’ when offered the Israeli premiership… but declining it because he felt incapable of ruling a country. He could speak against religion, yet also defend his notion of God passionately. Some of his more socialist-leaning views, sur...

  There is not a single physicist who was not impressed by Dirac's work. Those who have studied his work know that he had an original and genius-level way of thinking. Dirac worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, magnetic monopoles, relativistic quantum mechanics, etc. The latter, relativistic quantum mechanics, is the field in which his contributions probably shine the most. He discovered the Dirac equation, which describes the motion of electrons (or any spin-1/2 fermion). He was also instrumental in discovering the statistics that fermions obey. Through the Dirac equation, Dirac was able to predict the existence of antimatter, such as positrons, which are antielectrons (same mass and spin, opposite charge). This was a huge discovery and came purely from Dirac's theoretical arguments. Feynman had a more personal reason to be even more impressed (or at least attracted) by Dirac's work. Feynman produced the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. It is said...

In 1985, China Airlines Flight 006 was bound for Los Angeles from Taipei. Everything was going smoothly during the flight, but about an hour and a half before landing, the Boeing 747's No. 4 engine failed. The No. 4 engine failed while the Boeing 747 was flying at 40,000 feet, and the pilots were focused on restarting the engine. The captain was so preoccupied with dealing with the engine trouble that he didn't notice the aircraft making a sharp right turn and beginning to descend. Because the No. 4 engine was not working, the aircraft was losing speed. Then the plane stalled and went into a steep dive. The aircraft plummeted at a speed of approximately 10,000 feet per minute. All passengers and crew experienced forces of up to -5G. It must have been hell. The pilot believed the attitude indicator was not working while the plane was diving through the clouds. He had lost complete control of the aircraft. In minutes, the plane went from 40,000 feet to 10,000 feet (3048m). At app...

It originated in King Leopold’s Belgian Congo and the first known person to likely be infected happened around 1920. Now here’s the creepy thing… AIDS didn’t really hit the world in a global way until 1981. That’s when it began making massive waves. Because of the sixty-plus years separating the genesis of AIDS until its widespread impact globally, this means the disease likely remained somewhat localized, possibly in some fairly remote area of Congo. It is speculated that sailors on shore leave to Congo brought it to Europe — likely a particularly promiscuous Scandinavian sailor, if I recall correctly. Another speculated “patient zero” was a rather naughty Canadian flight attendant who couldn’t keep it in his pants… anyway, these men visited Congo, returned home, slept around and, boom! Millions of casualties, worldwide. In the sailor’s case, his wife and youngest kid died shortly after him, also of AIDS.

The only European country occupied by the Nazis whose inhabitants were able to successfully defend themselves against the Holocaust was Denmark. When the Nazis ordered Danish Jews to sew the Star of David on their clothes, almost all Danes took to the streets the next day with exactly the same stars. After this incident, the order "over the stars" was withdrawn. After learning of the Nazis' plans to exterminate the Jews, members of the Danish resistance organized their transport by sea to Sweden. Only 120 Danish Jews died during the war. That is hundreds or even thousands of times less than in other European countries. In the photo: King Christian X and his wife with Stars of David sewn on their clothes. "Bear one another's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ."

  It might be assumed that most of the terrible crimes committed during World War II took place in dark underground prisons, but some of them happened in bright university rooms where doctors wore white coats. On May 5, 1945, an American bomber plane crashed in Japan, and the airmen from the plane were captured and taken to Kyushu Imperial University, where a group of scientists wanted to examine human organs On May 17, 1945, the eight American soldiers were brought to the professors’ medical lab, tied to a metal table, and kept conscious. The reason was that the doctors wanted to observe how the human body would react to extreme pain and trauma. They surgically opened their chests and removed pieces of lung, liver and brain tissue to study the changes that happened in the human body during such trauma and to see how long a person could survive. In other experiments, they injected saline solution into the veins to test it as artificial blood. Unfortunately, all eight airmen died fr...

The Berlin Wall wasn't toppled by a grand strategy or military strike. It fell by pure accident when a tired bureaucrat skimmed his notes for the very first time on live television. By November 1989, East Germany was hemorrhaging citizens. Hundreds of thousands were protesting in the streets, and tens of thousands were fleeing to the West through neighboring countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Desperate to relieve the mounting pressure, the East German Politburo drafted a new set of travel regulations. The plan was to allow citizens to apply for visas to travel or emigrate directly from East Germany, rather than having to route through other countries. Crucially, this was designed as a controlled, bureaucratic release valve. Citizens would still have to visit a government office, apply for a passport, and wait for approval. The new rules were scheduled to be announced on November 10, giving border guards a day to prepare for the influx of paperwork. Enter Günter Schabowski, ...

In 1905, Einstein didn’t have to convince a panel of skeptical peers that special relativity was correct. He only had to convince one man that his math wasn't complete nonsense. The modern system of peer review—where a manuscript is sent to independent, anonymous referees to evaluate before acceptance—simply did not exist at the time. Getting published in Annalen der Physik , the most prestigious physics journal in the world, was a streamlined process that rested entirely on the judgment of a single editor. At the time, the theoretical physics editor for Annalen der Physik was Max Planck, the founding father of quantum theory. The culture of German physics at the time viewed journals as platforms for active debate rather than infallible gatekeepers of truth. The standard for publication was not that an idea had to be proven correct, but that it had to be mathematically coherent and free of obvious crankery. If a paper met those criteria, it was printed so the wider scientific comm...

Starting an early car wasn't just a test of brute strength—it routinely broke drivers' wrists. If you were too weak to risk a "Ford fracture," your best alternative was surprisingly modern. Before the electric starter became standard, drivers had to manually turn over the engine using a heavy metal crank at the front of the vehicle. The difficulty lay in fighting the engine's compression and the thick, sluggish motor oils of the era, which turned to molasses in cold weather. But the real danger was "kickback." If the engine's spark timing was set incorrectly, the fuel-air mixture could ignite too early, violently reversing the engine's rotation and ripping the iron handle backward. This backward snap was responsible for the broken wrists and snapped forearms that plagued early motorists. To minimize the risk, seasoned drivers learned to pull up on the crank in quick, sharp jerks rather than pushing down, and to keep their thumb tucked alongside t...

  "Lions led by donkeys" is a commonly used phrase to describe the “poor bloody infantry” of the British Expeditionary Force of World War One, and to blame the incompetent old generals who led them from the safety of their chateaux. In fact, during the war, 78 British and Dominion generals were killed on active duty, 146 others were injured, gassed, or captured. Of course, some generals were not up to the task, but it must remembered that the British generals were accustomed to small colonial wars. The British commanders (along with other armies) had to adjust to a more radically different technological environment. World War One popularized the use of the machine gun, able to shoot down row after row of soldiers from afar on the field of battle. This weapon, along with the barbed wire, artillery and mines, made it difficult and dangerous to move through the open ground. So the war in the trench was born. The British introduced tanks in 1916, which were used along with aircra...

  When street combat in WWII's "Little Stalingrad" became suicidal, Canadian troops took entire city blocks without ever stepping outside—by relying on their pre-war day jobs. The Battle of Ortona in late 1943 transformed the tight, ancient streets of an Italian coastal town into heavily fortified kill zones. Advancing down the roads was a death sentence, and Allied armored advantages were completely neutralized by deep rubble. To capture the town, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division had to invent a new way to fight. Regiments like the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada were heavily drawn from the country's working-class and rural frontiers. As former miners, loggers, and construction workers, they possessed an innate comfort with physical hardship, a working knowledge of tools, and, crucially, a practical familiarity with explosives. When traditional tactics broke down in the rubble-choked streets, these soldiers adapted by pioneering a tec...

  Rommel is probably the best example as he fought the Americans both in Africa and in France. Rommel respected the American troops, and said that while they were green, they fought hard and learned fast. He liked the American kit and deeply respected American logistics, viewing it as the greatest challenge to overcome. He liked that Americans adapted quickly, saying that it was much easier to teach a new soldier something new rather than a veteran, and that while it was easier to trick the Americans than the British, it was harder to trick them multiple times. He criticized Americans cautiousness, lack of initiative, and over reliance on logistics. He believed that Americans lacked the initiative and tactical understanding of fast mechanized combat and contrasted them with his own emphasis on maneuver warfare, reconnaissance, concealment, and rapid exploitation of breakthroughs. Rommel had made a name for himself in France by ignoring logistics and making deep tank thrusts behind ...