Holocaust victim

 Susan and Joseph Hilsenrath woke up to the sound of breaking glass and a brick crashing through their bedroom window on the night of November 9, 1938. Susan hid in fear as her younger brother climbed up to the window to see what was happening outside. “Susi, it’s our neighbors,” said Joseph, who was only eight years old. That night, the Nazi government led violent attacks against Jewish people. In their town of Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Susan’s neighbors turned against her family, tearing down a lamppost and ramming it through their front door. That night became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It changed their lives forever. Susan’s family had hoped to escape to America with help from a relative. But by late 1938, it took an average of two years for a German Jew to get a visa. With no other choice, Susan’s parents, Israel and Annie, paid almost all their money to a smuggler to take her and Joseph to France. They believed France would be safe and never imagined ...

 Marie Curie had an amazing memory, and one event from when she was twenty years old shows just how special it was. At a party she attended, one of the guests recited a poem that Marie really liked. She enjoyed it so much that she asked him for a copy of it. The guest, wanting to impress her and also test her memory, said she didn’t need a written copy. If her memory was as good as people said, he told her, she should be able to remember it by hearing it just one more time. "I’ll try," Marie said, "but I’m not sure if I can do it." She listened to the poem a second time and then went into another room. About thirty minutes later, she came back to join the guests—and to everyone’s surprise, she recited the entire poem out loud without making a single mistake.

 Zeke Walter Keith Singleton came out of Memphis with the kind of drive that did not let you walk away. In 1963 he and his brother signed up for the Marines, stepping into a world where softness died quick. Training, promotion's, Okinawa. Then Vietnam in December 1966, a place where every sunrise felt like a coin toss. It was on March 24, 1967 when his platoon was in a raging gunfight. Men were falling left and right, a condition which makes most humans freeze up. Singleton didn't freeze. He walked out of his cover and ran headlong into the danger zone over and over again, pulling his wounded men behind him as if he didn't care for death closing in around him. But it wasn't quite enough for him to lose men. He desired combat to end.He noticed a line of bushes firing bullets at his patrol. He grabbed a machine gun and ran ahead. Alone. He fired and continued firing, killing eight enemy soldiers and making the rest flee. The bullet's struck him in any event. He was tw...

 Not only for his movies but for his attitude to his work. Like Sterling Hayden, it was only a job, a means to an end. For Sterling it was to go sailing on his boat, and for Joel to maintain his first love, ranching. Very early in his career, he had become friends with Will Rogers who advised him to put his money in land, which he did. Will personally vouched for him to the bank as Joel needed a large loan. He knew his place in the firmament of stars. He once said he got the comedies that Cary Grant turned down and the Westerns that Gary Cooper passed on. When WWll broke out he was in his mid-thirties and too old for war. Again, acknowledging his shortcomings, he realised he would not look right on the screen acting a young war hero and refused to do any war pictures. When the war ended he had just turned 40 and spent the rest of his career on Westerns, with the exception of, Shoot First, 1953, aka Rough Shoot. When the time came to retire he recognized it, and he hung up his spurs...

 One rainy day in 1850, the New York police found a young woman who looked lost and messy. She spoke a language they didn’t understand. She was taken to a hospital, where doctors said she had lost her memory. Later, they found out who she was—Adele Hugo, the daughter of the famous writer Victor Hugo. Adele’s story touched many hearts. She had fallen in love with an English soldier named Albert Pinson. But he didn’t love her back. Still, she followed him all the way to Nova Scotia. There, he used her and left her with nothing. She ended up alone and with no help in New York. When she was sent back to France, Adele was heartbroken and full of shame. She made a promise to herself that she would never speak again. Her father, Victor Hugo, spent 35 years trying to get her to talk, but she never did. For 65 years, from 1850 until she died in 1915, Adele stayed silent—as a way to remind herself never to fall in love again.

 Krystyna Skarbek was born in Poland and escaped to England after her country was taken by Germany during World War II. She quickly volunteered to become a spy and even suggested her own first mission. Her idea was to go to Hungary, print propaganda flyers, then ski through the mountains into Poland to hand them out. Once there, she planned to help the Polish resistance and carry out intelligence work. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agreed to her plan, and she left for Budapest in December 1939. She succeeded in getting into Warsaw, where she carried out her mission of helping the resistance and gathering intelligence. Her success became so well-known that posters offering a reward for her capture were displayed in train stations across Poland. To protect herself, she later changed her name to Christine Granville. In 1941, she was caught by the Gestapo, but she tricked them into believing she had tuberculosis by biting her tongue until she bled and coughed it up. Th...

 He was just a young toddler when his Jewish family tried to escape the Nazis by crossing the Swiss border in 1942. They almost made it, but in the end, they were caught and taken to a camp in Rivesaltes, a place known for its cruelty, near Perpignan in southern France. He and his brother were separated from their parents. After he grew up, he spent many years trying to piece together the story of how they survived. He knew that Father Louis Bezard, a French priest, had hidden them in a suitcase and carried them through a train station in Toulouse. He also knew that in a town called Marssac, they had been raised as French Catholic boys by different families. He remembered being reunited with his mother, but also learned that his father had died in a concentration camp. But the biggest mystery was how he and his brother had escaped from the camp in the first place. Who had rescued them? The answer came 66 years later, from an archivist. It turned out that a woman named Mary Elmes, w...

 She was born in Győr on the 7th of October 1929. She had 4 sisters: Judit (1925), Margit (1936), Márta (1933) and Zsuzsanna (1927) and 2 brothers: János (1923) and Károly (1924).Her parents were Hungarian Jews. In 1920, Erzsébet's paternal grandfather, Jakab Neuwirth, was beaten to death by two antisemites. His murderers stole all his money and the pocket watch which was given to him by King Charles IV of Hungary because his sons had served in WW1. In 1942, Károly and János were called to forced labour battalions. Judit, Zsuzsanna and Erzsébet were deported to Auschwitz together in 1944. Sarolta, Pál, Margit and Márta were also deported in 1944 but separately from the other 3 sisters. Pál passed selection in Auschwitz but later perished in Mauthausen 1945. His wife and 3 daughters he was deported with were murdered after arrival in Auschwitz. Zsuzsanna survived and was liberated at a forced labour factory in Moravia. János and Károly were liberated in Austria in 1945. All 3 return...

 Sara Cohen was born on May 13, 1943, weighing six pounds and four ounces (2.8 kilograms). She was the daughter of Carolina and Joseph Cohen. A Jewish child, she was born in Groningen, the Netherlands. Sara never met her father. He had been deported to a concentration camp a month before her birth. Her mother was left to care for Sara and her two older children, who were just two and three years old. The family lived at J. C. Kapteynlaan 7 b in Groningen. On February 8, 1944, Sara, her mother, and her siblings were deported to Westerbork. From there, they were sent to Auschwitz, where all three were killed in the gas chambers. Sara was only eight months old when her life was taken.

 Little Eric is less than a year old in this photo, taken on the eve of WWII in Enschede, the Netherlands. Four years later, he was taken to the gas chamber in Auschwitz and killed. He looks so harmless, so cheerful. Has no clue what brutal fate awaits him. How could he possibly have known, this charming little lad? There are more crimes and cruel choices made in the history of the world than there are stars in the universe. Humanity has a near-infinite capacity for abject cruelty. But nothing quite shocks me as much as those who would take a small child and harm it. To see any baby, chubby-faced, cherubic, incapable of any wicked act, and destroy it, just because it is the “wrong kind of baby”? I cannot just wrap my head around that… Little Eric in his bucket broke me a little because of how absolutely delighted he looks at being in that bucket. It must have been a warm day; he’s having a little bath, the sun is shining and life is good for him in that moment. He would have been 8...

  On January 11, 2010, Miep Gies, the last survivor of a small group of people who helped hide a Jewish girl, Anne Frank, and her family from the Nazis during World War II, dies at age 100 in the Netherlands. After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne Frank left behind describing her two years in hiding. These writings were later published as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” which became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.Miep Gies was born into a working-class, Catholic family in Vienna, Austria, on February 15, 1909. At age 11, with food shortages in her native land following World War I, she was sent to the Netherlands to live with a foster family who nicknamed her Miep (her birth name was Hermine Santrouschitz). In 1933, she went to work as a secretary for Otto Frank, who ran a small Amsterdam company that produced a substance used to make jam. By the following year, Frank’s wife and ...

 Trudi Davids was born on 17 September 1931. She had an older sibling and a younger sibling and had lived at Parklaan 27 in Groningen in the Netherlands. Her early life was an ordinary one with a lot of family but not much happiness. That all changed in May 1940 when the Nazis arrived. Life changed extremely quickly. That she was Jewish made life extremely hard. By September 1943, her family was compelled to leave their home and make their way to Westerbork, a so-called transit camp. A temporary-sounding place, but everyone knew what it really meant. Trudi stayed there for more than a year. She was just a young child, consigned to an waiting place, her life put on hold. There are just three pictures of her today, three thin pieces of proof she once lived and smiled. They came in on October 7th, 1944. She was thirteen. She never walked through those gates. She was killed when she got there, gone even before her life started. She would have been ninety-three today. Instead, she is fr...

 This is Carlo Angela, a doctor who worked during the Second World War in the town of San Maurizio Canavese as medical director of a mental health facility. It was here that during the German occupation, Angela offered refuge to numerous Jews, falsifying medical records to justify their hospitalization; he made incorrect diagnoses and manipulated medical records, transforming Jews into “Aryans” and healthy people into psychiatric patients. In his work of rescuing the Jews, Angela was helped by his deputy Brun, by Mother Tecla and by the nurses Fiore De Stefanis, Carlo and Sante Simionato. He was also suspected by the fascist police, summoned and interrogated in Turin, even risking being shot. Angela's actions remained unknown for over half a century and only came to light in 1995, when Anna Segre decided to publish her father Renzo's diary, written during the period in which he had escaped the extermination camps, with his wife Nella, in the clinic run by Dr. Angela. Based on t...

  Here’s a photo of King Christian X of Denmark riding his horse alone through the streets of Copenhagen, like he did every day. When Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in just one day in 1940, the Dutch and Norwegian kings fled their countries. But King Christian stayed. He remained on the throne, becoming a quiet symbol of strength and hope for his people. Even though he was getting older and not in great health, he still rode alone every morning through the capital, showing the Danish people they were not alone. There are many stories about him, and he became one of the most loved kings in history. One well-known tale says he wore the Star of David on his clothes to show support for the Jews of Denmark, even though he wasn’t Jewish himself. Another trusted story says that the Germans once raised their flag—the swastika—over the Danish Parliament. King Christian told a German general to take it down. When the general refused, the King calmly said, “Then a Danish soldier will remove it....

 The Soviet Union had just taken over Lithuania, and fear spread quickly among the thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled from Poland the year before. They were terrified. Not only were they in danger because they were Jewish, but many of them were young men who might be forced to join the Soviet army. Desperate to escape, they soon found help from someone they never expected. Jan Zwartendijk was a Dutch manager for Philips Electronics, running the office in Kaunas. Just two months earlier, he had also been made the temporary consul for the Dutch government, replacing a man who supported the Nazis. Zwartendijk had lived in Germany in the 1930s and knew how dangerous it was for Jews. He discovered that no official papers were needed to enter the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. So, he started writing “visas” that said people could travel there without needing extra documents. He handed out over 2,000 of these notes, which were copied and reused to help 6,000 to 10,000 pe...

 There have been a million child actors, and many of them went on to achieve lasting success, but no one ever did it like Jackie Coogan. In 1921, at the age of six, he co-starred with the greatest film star of that era in the top-earning film of the year. In the following years he made film after film and became a huge star in his own right. As his childhood drew to a close, he did a beautiful thing which helped make the world a better and safer place for future generations of child actors: He sued his parents. Actually it was his mother and stepfather. His biological father was cool. But Mom and the wicked stepdad blew all his money. It was about $50 million in 2022 dollars. He won the lawsuit, but there was only a little over a hundred grand left. Public sympathy for his plight led to the passage of laws to protect the earnings of child actors from being misappropriated. As an adult, Jackie married Betty Grable. Perhaps there are people nowadays who have not heard of Betty Grable...

 Her father was a French doctor, and her mother, Louise, was a British citizen living there. In 1941, she moved to England and later joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a group created during World War II to gather secret information and disrupt enemy plans in areas controlled by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. On May 1, 1944, Phyllis parachuted into Normandy, France, as part of a secret group called the Scientist circuit. She spoke French fluently and pretended to be a teenage girl whose family had moved to the area to escape Allied bombing. She rode around on a bicycle, selling soap and chatting with German soldiers to collect information. Phyllis had a clever way of hiding the codes she used to send messages. She had a piece of silk with one-time codes printed on it, which she wrapped around a knitting needle and tucked into a flat shoelace she used as a hair tie. She then used Morse code equipment to send the secret messages. Even though German soldiers sea...

 The Allies made a very harsh decision by sending millions of people back to Stalin's Soviet Union. Among those in great need were the Cossacks, Russians who had fought against Stalin and now felt trapped in Austria.In May 1945 around 50,000 Cossacks, men, women, children and old men were rounded up by the British in the Lienz area and assured protection. This was a deception. The officers were secretly handed over to the Soviets first. Then on June 1 the rest were driven to the same fate. The scene was chaos. People knew what waited for them. Gulags torture execution. They were not going quietly. Some fought back. Others chose death. They threw themselves into the Drave River, stabbed themselves, leaped from trucks anything to avoid going home.By 1947 the British and the United States had repatriated nearly 2.5 million individuals, many of whom had fled Russia years before the war. The soldiers who were implementing the decisions also seemed shaken. This was not a triumph. It was ...

 She earned big awards from France, Britain, and the United States — the French Croix de Guerre, the British George Medal, and the American Distinguished Service Cross. Like her parents, who had joined the Resistance after Germany invaded France in 1940, Jeannette worked as a secret messenger. She traveled between German-occupied France and the “free zone” controlled by Vichy France. Thanks to a German-issued ID card, she could move around easily, often helping refugees and other agents. At one point, the Gestapo arrested her and held her for three months. Even under pressure, she refused to give up any information. When she was finally released, she immediately went back to helping the Resistance. Later, when her group was betrayed, she barely escaped capture and was sent to Britain, where she trained with British and American intelligence. The training was intense. She learned how to fight with her bare hands, drive German vehicles, handle explosives, and most importantly, use an...

 A voice was urgent and terrified. A unit of Green Berets was pinned, surrounded by a large number of enemy troops. They were finished unless someone did something insane. Roy Benavidez overheard it and reacted. No waiting. No strategy. Just act. He grabbed a knife, boarded a helicopter, and flew directly into combat.He started in a rush. One man against the army. Bullets hit him. A bullet wounded his leg. Another skimmed over his head. He continued. For six hard hours, he pulled wounded men, fought off enemies, and did not give up. A bayonet protruded through his arm. Shrapnel from a grenade shredded his stomach. He was bleeding but still moved. He kept fighting. After it all finished, his body had thirty-seven wounds.The medics found him lying still on the ground and thought that he died. They had already started closing the bag when he surprised the doctors. He spat on the doctor. He was alive. Roy Benavidez received the Medal of Honor because he never gave up

 Daughters remained with their fathers in some cases but others ran away and went to pursue new lives.And one of the saddest tales is that of the Goebbels family. Magda Goebbels dosed her six children with p*i-s*o*n on May 1, 1945. She could not allow them to exist in the non-Nazi world. Other children were loyal to their fathers. Edda Goring, daughter of Hermann Goring lived comfortably before the war. Later, she vindicated her father up to her death in 2018. Gudrun Himmler, daughter of Heinrich Himmler also remained loyal. She devoted her life to assisting former Nazis and was always referring to her father as hero. She passed on in 2018 as well.aSome other children prefer another path however Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank became a writer. He opposed his father and published his wrongdoing. Martin Adolf Bormann, the son of the secretary of Hitler, ended as a priest and freely spoke about the evil his father defended. Her daughter Aldegund Hilde Schramm became a politician. ...

 January 5, 1943. New Guinea. Twelve big bombers take off into the morning sky, engines making noise, carrying men who know they have a tough job. At the front is Brigadier General Kenneth Newton Walker, a leader who won’t stay back while others fight. Their mission is simple. Attack a Japanese convoy near Rabaul. They succeed. Nine ships are destroyed and on fire. Its a successful attack, but in war, success doesn’t last long.On the return trip, the fighters come in. Most of the fighters dive and attack the formation. Walker's B17 is hit, one engine smoking, the plane barely able to stay aloft while Japanese pilots circle like shark's. And then it vanishes. No wreckage. No survivors. Eleven men are just gone. Missing first, dead later.Walker's path was long ago. He was born in New Mexico in 1898 and enlisted in the Army in 1917. He flew when airplanes were extremely vulnerable, taught other individuals to fly, and fought until he could not anymore. Roosevelt awarded him th...

  Blind Tom” Wiggins (1849-1908) was born blind and, as a baby, was sold into slavery along with his whole family. Because his owners thought he had no value, someone even tried to kill him—but he survived. Tom later found a piano, and right away, people noticed his amazing gift for hearing, remembering, and playing music. Many experts now believe that Tom may have been on the autism spectrum, which could explain his incredible memory. He went on to perform in concerts across the Americas and Europe. His amazing talent touched people all over the world, including Elton John, who wrote a song to honor him.

 Life in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II was awful. People were sick and starving. Many were dying. In the midst of all of this was a woman named Irena Sendler. She was a social worker, but she was also extremely courageous. Irena joined a secret organization that was ready to assist. She volunteered to rescue children. She rescued them in whatever means she could. At times in ambulances, at times in trolleys, and even coffins. She rescued over 2,500 children. She wanted to hide the children's real names. She wrote them on tiny slips of paper and planted them in glass jars under a tree. One day, the Nazis arrested her. They beat her badly and injured her legs. They asked her to tell them her secrets, but she never told them any. She was meant to be killed, but her friends rescued her. She dug the jars out of the ground after the war. She attempted to reunite children with their parents, but the parents had mostly perished. She rescued many, but she could never be sure that it...

  February 1944. In New Guinean jungles, a lone American soldier finds something strange. A little Yorkshire terrier is in an empty foxhole. Corporal Bill Wynne purchases her for two Australian pounds and calls her Smoky. She then stays with him everywhere. Two years of combat, Spam for supper, rain every day, 150 air raids, and two typhoons. Smoky never leaves his side. When bombs drop, she yips and shakes as if she senses something horrible is about to happen. She does this more than once to save Wynne. Then there is the instant that makes her a legend. An airfield requires a telegraph wire under a runway crowded with planes and people. Digging would shut down everything for days. Wynne attaches a string to Smoky and pushes her through a seventy-foot pipe barely wide enough for her to squeeze through. She gets through fast. This saves the operation. She is the first therapy dog to visit wounded veterans for twelve years after the war. Today, monuments and awards still keep her me...

 On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank is thirteen and is given a diary. It is only a notebook, but it becomes very significant to her. A month later, her family moves into a little hidden room because the Nazis are after them. Friends do all they can to assist in keeping them safe. They remain hidden for two years while the world outside is at risk.Then it ends. Someone betrays them. There is a knock and the Gestapo burst in. Karl Josef Silberbauer leads them. The Franks are deported. Camps are next. Otto lives but his wife and daughters don't. Anne dies in Bergen Belsen just weeks from liberation. After the war Otto publishes the diary. It becomes more than pages. It is the voice of a girl staring down oblivion. Years after, Simon Wiesenthal encounters Silberbauer as a policeman in Vienna. Otto defends that he acted based on what was right at the time of the arrest, and Silberbauer is acquitted of the crime. He is also portrayed as one of numerous former Nazis employed by West German inte...

Prisoners at the Nazi camps in World War II did in fact fight back against their keepers. This period of history has been lost or forgotten to a certain extent and many tend to think that it was inevitable.One of the biggest uprisings was in Sobibor in year 1943. The camp was provided to kill people, but a selected group of the prisoners managed to organize one. They killed some guards, grabbed some weapons and about 300 inmates escaped to the forest. Most of them were recaptured or killed but about 50 of them became survivors of the war. The uprising was so successful that the Nazis closed up the camp and subsequently never used it again. There was yet another massive rebellion at Treblinka. Prisoners were getting access to tools and they even constructed fake bombs. They bombed one of the buildings, started a fire and everybody in the mix sought to break through the barricade fences. Others got lucky, and lived. Even at Auschwitz where things were the most horrible, the prisoners wor...

 World War II was hell. Warsaw burned and the children starved, died, were wiped from existence in the Ghetto. Everyone else turned a blind eye. Not Irena Sendler. She gazed at the horror and told herself, screw this, I am not going to stand by. She built a clandestine network and devoted all her energy to it. Coffins, sacks, sewers, tunnels. She attempted to do everything so that a child might escape from the wall. A child, once out, was provided with a new name, a new family, and an artificial life which could keep them alive. But she was doing something greater than saving lives. She was saving their stories. Real names on scraps of paper, put in jars, buried under an apple tree. A vow that they would not be forgotten entirely. And then the Gestapo arrested her. They beat her. They asked her names. She gave them none. She was sentenced to death, but her people bribed a guard, anShe survived. Approximately 2500 children survived as well. Most of their parents did not. The world b...

 Prisoners at the Nazi camps in World War II did in fact fight back against their keepers. This period of history has been lost or forgotten to a certain extent and many tend to think that it was inevitable. One of the biggest uprisings was in Sobibor in year 1943. The camp was provided to kill people, but a selected group of the prisoners managed to organize one. They killed some guards, grabbed some weapons and about 300 inmates escaped to the forest. Most of them were recaptured or killed but about 50 of them became survivors of the war. The uprising was so successful that the Nazis closed up the camp and subsequently never used it again. There was yet another massive rebellion at Treblinka. Prisoners were getting access to tools and they even constructed fake bombs. They bombed one of the buildings, started a fire and everybody in the mix sought to break through the barricade fences. Others got lucky, and lived. Even at Auschwitz where things were the most horrible, the prisone...

 General Franz Halder noted in his diary that the campaign in the Soviet Union had thus far caused 1,005,636 German casualties, 202,251 of which were killed. He also noted that there were 112,627 cases of frostbite. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 Sep 1939, Halder was responsible for overseeing the military campaign. In this capacity he had the first-hand knowledge to the atrocities the SS conducted against the Polish, but many criticize that Halder did little to stop them despite not necessarily agreeing with them. Despite his profession as a soldier, Halder was a known pacifist, and on several occasions advised against waging further wars, but the loyal general always heeded to Hitler's orders.Hadler was promoted to the rank of colonel general on 19 Jul 1940. Subsequently, he had a role in the design of invasion plans against France and the Low Countries as well as the plans for the Balkans. In Aug 1940, he began participating in the invasion plan against the Soviet Union, but h...

 Her given name was just Jenny, but her dramatic looks and the presence of her in wartime Berlin made a name out of herself. After serving her time as a fashion model, a propaganda icon Jenny, was frequently photographed in uniform, and was featured in the posters that were intended to present an ideal Aryan woman. Her story behind the camera was much more sinister though. Jenny was not only a model. She entered work as a personal assistant to top -rung SS officials and later worked as a liaison officer at the Ravensbr dck concentration camp where women inmates were being tortured and subjected to inhuman experiments on a medical scale…

 There is something shady about field marshal Erwin Rommel not falling in battle as the people were told. Then his exit was planned and was veiled. The actual report that contradicted this was that he was killed in action because of an air attack in his car in France but this was a lie. The actual case was related with the unsuccessful mission of toppling Hitler on July 20, 1944. Rommel was not a powerful player in the plot, but there were some rebels who wanted him to lead Germany in the post-plot days. Contributions to the name were seen by interrogations, and Hitler long suspicious started to take him as a threat. A trial in open court was also too risky as Rommel was one of the most popular German generals and his popularity could create unstable situations. Masked men turned up instead at his home on October 14, 1944, and delivered an ultimatum: appear in a public trial and have punishment visit his family and depose his reputation, or meet a quiet end that would spare them al...

 Many people remember the famous Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci, but not everyone remembers that at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the favorite to win wasn’t Nadia—it was Elena Mukhina, a Soviet gymnast. She had beaten Nadia two years earlier at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, winning both the all-around and floor titles. Elena was so talented, she even created a new acrobatic move, now known as the “Mukhina.” It’s still considered one of the hardest moves in gymnastics and is ranked as an E-level skill in the scoring system. Sadly, in 1979, Elena broke her ankle during training. She had to have two surgeries, and doctors told her to stop training to let her body heal. But her coach, Mikhail Klimenko, refused to listen. He pushed her to keep going. Just two weeks before the 1980 Olympics, he made her try a very risky move called the Thomas salto. It’s a 540-degree spin in the air with a flip when landing. Elena wasn’t ready. She landed badly, fell on her chin, and broke her...

 April 26, 1947. Nanking. A rope, a condemned man and a memory of a heinous event that no one would ever forget. Lieutenant General Hisao Tani was put to death by hanging. He had led Japans 6th Division in the Nanking Massacre of 1937, a time of killing and fear that would forever change the city. When Japan fell, men such as Tani were unable to conceal themselves. The Nanking War Crimes Tribunal dragged things into the light of day. Survivors testified on the stand and recounted tales that seemed too evil to be believed. Japanese soldier's even acknowledged what they had witnessed. The proof stacked up and the judgment was unequivocal. Guilty. The sentence was death. When the trapdoor closed it did not execute only one man. It was a symbol. It was a symbol of justice or at least humankind's attempt at it. It was a warning to others who thought that they could do terrible thing's and escape punishment.But justice cannot reverse what happened before. It cannot bring back the...

 Hitler was never ‘interviewed’, per se, but instead secretly recorded as he spoke to the Commander-in-Chief of Finland’s Defense Forces, Marshal Mannerheim. Creatively referred to as the “Hitler and Mannerheim recording”, it is the only known recording of Hitler’s unofficial speaking voice. But do we still have it? Out of pure luck, yes. Okay, but can we even understand what Hitler is saying in it? Yes, the audio quality is great. Needless to say this recording is almost too good to be true for us history lovers. The ol’ Fuhrer never liked to be recorded off-guard, though, not much less than anybody does, I reckon. So who had the balls to do it? Well, here’s the story in short So Hitler and Mannerheim met secretly to celebrate Mannerheim’s birthday up in Finland on June 4th, 1942. I say ‘secretly’ because this really was intended to be a private affair; as far as the ‘public sphere’ was concerned, Hitler was there to have his official greetings and birthday wishes recorded, nothin...

 In 1939, Tadeusz Pankiewicz was a pharmacist in Krakow when the Nazis arrived. Unfortunately, his family’s pharmacy, called "Under the Eagle," was located in the part of the city that the Nazis turned into the Jewish Ghetto in 1941. The Nazis ordered all non-Jewish businesses to move to other parts of the city, but Tadeusz managed to convince them to let him stay. He became friendly with the German officers, and he and his employees were the only non-Jews among the 15,000 Jews imprisoned in the ghetto. Tadeusz, who had always cared for people, continued his work as a pharmacist, helping in any way he could. He secretly provided medicine and medical care to the people in the ghetto and even gave out hair dye to help people escape. As the Gestapo raids grew more frequent, he warned people about upcoming raids, gave out tranquilizers to keep children quiet when hiding, and allowed people to meet and hide in his shop. In March 1943, the Nazis destroyed the Krakow Ghetto and sent...

 He had been a prisoner since 1940 and was becoming more trouble than he was worth, having escaped nine times so far and frequently sabotaging his work details. But at Auschwitz, Coward organized his biggest act of sabotage yet — smuggling hundreds of Jewish prisoners out of the camp, right under the Nazis' noses. Because Coward spoke fluent German, he was tasked with being the Red Cross liaison between England and the roughly 1,200 British POWs at Auschwitz. The Red Cross would relay his messages to England, which would then use that intel to negotiate with Germany over the living conditions of the POWs. This role allowed Coward to move somewhat freely around the camp, and even to surrounding towns, where he witnessed trainloads of Jewish prisoners heading into the extermination section of the camp. Soon, he was smuggling Red Cross supplies intended for the British into the Jewish section. And not long after that, he devised a way to not only smuggle supplies in, but to smuggle Je...

 Suppose that you are a kid and you cannot play games or attend school as every day you can only work or even better look to find yourself some food. This is how the life of Jewish child in Warsaw Ghetto was ca 1941. Kids were very skinny, with sad eyes and tired look as it was captured in the photos of that time. People became starving slowly as the Nazi soldiers were not able to give them enough food. The most affected were children. They swallowed and their small bodies became weak and they were constantly hungry. Everyone went to streets with their hands outstretched in order to be given even a bit of bread. But being hungry was not the only thing which was going on. The ghetto was very dirty, congested and very dangerous too. People had to live in small and tight rooms even as families. The toilets were not there and no fresh water. Such diseases as typhus spread very fast. Children that were starving could easily become sick and most of them died. This is estimated that 92,00...

 The most terroristic man was Heinrich Himmler because indeed Hitler was the face of the Nazi Party but worked behind the scenes. The fact that he planned mass murder in cold and organized manner was what made him so frightening as compared to raging speeches and wild acts. Killing the millions was not insanity it was job that has to be well looked after and Himmler was the right person who excelled it. In order to increase its power, Himmler transformed a small guard company into an effective SS. He demonstrated his devotion to the group also, on the night of the long knives when the SS aided in annihilating rivals of Hitler. This party put the SS into great influence and loyally bound them to Hitler. Himmler then increased his grip further by absorbing all the police in Germany including the secret police, the Gestapo. This granted the SS the authority to arrest, torture, and kill anybody unconditionally. He also divided SS into two branches; one was a combat division that engage...

 Some are pretending to cry because they finished all their blueberries. They took this photo shortly after the girls finished a shift at work as secretaries receiving trains of prisoners at the Auschwitz death camps and typing up how many were killed and how many selected for slave labor. This photo was taken only few miles away. On the day the photo was taken, July 22nd, 1944, a train arrived to Auschwitz with 150 men, women and children aboard. 117 were sent to be killed. The Hocker album contains hundreds of astounding photos of the Nazis working at the death camp.

 Kato and Miklos Bernath were childhood sweethearts in Szikso, Hungary, when the Nazis ravished their world. Miklos became a partisan, Kato a slave laborer. Miklos was captured and starved, Kato was sent to be murdered in Auschwitz. But against all odds, they did not die. After liberation, they returned to Szikso and discovered each other alive - though most of their families had been massacred. They wed, and their first child, a boy, was born a month early in a DP camp in Germany. He survived and was named after Miklos' and Kato's murdered fathers. That boy grew up, became a doctor in America, married, and raised two daughters.

 For 29 days, from July 31 to August 28, 1940, Chiune Sugihara and his wife Yukiko worked almost non-stop—18 to 20 hours every day. They sat in Lithuania, hand-writing and signing transit visas to help more than 6,000 Jewish people escape danger during World War II. When it was finally time for them to leave, Sugihara looked at the crowd and said, “Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best.” As he bowed, someone in the crowd shouted, “Sugihara! We’ll never forget you. I’ll surely see you again!” Thanks to what he and his wife did, it’s believed that nearly 100,000 people are alive today. Chiune Sempo Sugihara (January 1, 1900 – July 31, 1986) is the only Japanese person ever honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for his bravery and compassion.

 In the holocaust, millions of innocent citizens of Europe were killed in the Nazi concentration camps. Although rightfully, most of attention has been paid to the male perpetrators of the genocide, the place of female guards should not be overlooked by the history because some of the guardwomen performed the acts of inhumanity that were just as shocking as of their male counterparts. She can be mostly associated with one name as she was the bloodthirstiest sadist and cruelest woman: Irma Grese was called the Hyena of Auschwitz…

 Yes, Hitler was a monster. No doubt of that. Genocide, war, mass murder. Wrong. But here's the unpleasant truth. His regime did a couple of things right that are still hotly contested today. And yes, that does feel sick to confess. But history isn't in the business of making people feel good. He had a strange love for animals. In 1933, the Nazis introduced one of the first real laws to protect animals. They banned live dissection. They set rules for slaughterhouses. They created transport rules. It was strict and surprisingly advanced for its time. And then there was the anti-smoking literature. They launched one of the first hardcore anti-tobacco campaigns. Public place bans. Posters. Funded cancer research. Sounds wonderful, until you realize that it was all part of a larger movement for racial purity. Not health, control. And the Autobahn? That was not merely about cars. It was about jobs, power, and quick troop transport. The Volkswagen as well. A car for the people that w...