Holocaust victim

 Initially, I believed that German soldiers of the world war II were ordinary soldiers who took orders and did them. My teacher in history informed us that they were not like the SS. However, as I read ancient journals, I found out that the truth was even worse--and could only depend on their fighting location. An example is that of General Erwin Rommel in North Africa. He even burnt the orders of his seniors that he was required to kill prisoners. In some localities such as France, a number of the German soldiers were professional in their deeds and did not harm civilians as they did not want to be despised. However, this changed when they visited Russia. The Barbarossa Decree allowed the German leaders to have no restrictions when it came to acting. In the East, they appeared to have lost their sense of humanity. The most terrifying was the fact that the British had placed microphones in the German cells of prisoners. The soldiers were seen on camera discussing the killing of ind...

 Adolf Hitler had no children. Four of his five full brothers and sisters died at a young age. The only one to live to adulthood was his sister Paula who died in 1960 and never found children of her own. It appeared as though the family line was over, however there was one branch remaining. Hitler's father had a son with a previous marriage in Alois Jr. Alois Jr.'s son, William Patrick Hitler, grew up in Europe and moved to the United States prior to WW2. He wanted to be against his uncle's regime so he wrote to President Roosevelt and was permitted to serve as a medic for the U.S. Navy. After the War, William lived in New York. The family name of his father was so disreputable that he changed it to Stuart - Houston. He and his wife had four sons, namely: Alexander, Louis, Howard, and Brian. Howard died in a car accident in 1989. The other three brothers lead a quiet life on Long Island. None of them married and had children. They say that there was no official plan to end ...

The German soldier of 1939 and the German soldier of 1945 are like two people. The German soldier of 1939 had a camera to take pictures. The German soldier of 1945 had toes that were frozen from the cold.In 1939 the German soldiers were like tourists in their uniforms. They would spend their evenings in cafes in Paris sending postcards of the Eiffel Tower back to Berlin. The German soldiers had leather boots that were stiff and black and their uniforms fit them well. They also had food in their mess kits. The German soldiers walked around with a lot of confidence like a teenager who has never been hurt before. They won their battles quickly. Were able to go back home before the harvest season. By 1943 things had changed for the German soldiers. The mud in Russia had taken away their confidence. The soldiers leather boots were not good for the very cold weather so they had to wear big straw shoes that made them walk funny. By 1945 the German army was made up of men and young boys. You w...

 It is a common belief that all the best military men of German origin in the world war two are dead in the war or those who survived were executed at the war ending. But this is not really true. Some of them in fact lived very long and passed peacefully as old men. I have got a story about Gotthard Heinrici. He was an excellent protector of his men. By April 1945, thousands of big guns were prepared by the Russian army to be thrown into the German front line. Heinrici realized that his men could not stay there in their posts as they would all be killed within a short time. His commands declared that he should not ever pull back. Instead, he decided to rescue his men. He silently withdrew his entire army some two kilometers a few hours previous to the commencement of the firing by the Russians. When those shells at last have landed, they struck only empty space and empty holes. His troops were secure still farther on. He rescued thousands of lives on that day. He was captured by th...

 If you're attempting to identify who hated Adolf Hitler the most, you're not going to find that answer in some dusty history textbook. You're going to want to look for a tiny, tense home in Austria, where Hitler's own father, Alois, was through with the little boy long before he was born. Alois was the original stickler: he was a customs official with a uniformed job as well as plenty of concerns about order and proper behavior. Alois had hoped to raise a son who would one day take over his dull, monotonous job; instead he got an only child, born with odd, artistic, "Nancy-boy" sensibilities who was always wanting to be with mom, daydreaming about art, etc. In Alois's eyes, he had also raised a failure. This was not simply an issue between father and son, it was a power struggle to see who could hold the other in a psychological prison. Alois called Adolf a "Nancy-boy," resorted to swinging belts in order to beat him and cleanse his son of his s...

 You know when I think about the Nazi years it is really scary to see how people can be fooled by sounding words that hide a terrible truth. Some people still talk about how great the German economy was in the 1930s. That is not true. The government was actually bankrupt. They were spending money they did not have on weapons and things for war. Their plan was to start a war and take what they needed from countries.What really bothers me is how they treated people. Men like Heinrich Himmler made the government stop thinking of people as beings. They built camps just to kill people. When we say that six million Jews died in the Holocaust we have to remember that these were not just numbers. They were families with mothers and fathers and children. Think about Anne Frank a girl who had to hide in a small attic for years before they found her. Then there is Maximilian Kolbe. He was a prisoner who gave his life to save a stranger, a father who had a family. It is hard to understand how ...

 Being put to death before a firing squad is among the most terrifying things that a person could go through. Majority of the people would desire to conceal their fear. However there were individuals who took another course. They would not permit covering their eyes. They desired to meet death in its own way. Among the most famous ones is Mata Hari. She was also a renowned dancer accused of spying in the world war I. In France, she was guarded out to be executed and the soldiers presented her with a blindfold. She refused it. She stood still and gazed directly upon them. There are accounts that she was even smiling or even kissing before the shooting began. James Connolly is another instance. He was badly wounded and could no longer stand himself. The execution was done by the soldiers tying him to a chair. He did not accept a blind fold even in that state. He decided to fight the soldiers until the last. There is also Joachim Murat. He used to be a great ruler and warrior. He woul...

  When people mention WW2, they normally think of the tanks and planes. I've spend a lot of my life reading about it and the real difference for the Germans early on was a concept called Auftragstaktik. In English we refer to this as "Mission Command." Back then the majority of the armies, such as the British and the Americans, were very strict. If a soldier was ordered to march to a certain house he would go. If that house was on fire, he would stop and wait for his captain's order as to what to do next. This was slow and to the letter, the approach was. The Germans did the opposite. Their officers would give a goal, like "take that bridge," but they didn't tell the men necessarily how to do it. They believed in sergeants and even corporals to utilize their own judgment. If a road was blocked, a German soldier wouldn't even wait for a radio call, instead he simply found another road right away. A well known example is the attack on Fort Eben-Emael i...

 This is one of the questions that can be asked about German soldiers. We do not have to look at the names that the Nazis were propagating, we should look at what actually the soldiers did. Günther Viezenz has to be the most difficult soldier.Lieutenant Günther Viezenz was in the 252nd Infantry Division and had an unusual record: He single-handed had eliminated 21 enemy tanks. That figure is phenomenal since he did not have huge artillery. He did not shoot at a distance, he destroyed every tank by using handheld weapons like the Panzerfaust which is a form of a bazooka. It was necessary that he had to use these weapons by the speed of his legs and keep within a few feet of the tank as it kept moving and firing. This was very dangerous labor. Even to survive 21 of these experiences is an indication of extraordinary courage, talent and fortune. His record is genuine because the German Army gave him the Tank Destruction Badge in Gold four times. Viezenz was not a Nazi, the regime neve...

 In the summer of 1941, a young woman named Andrée de Jongh stood in her modest Brussels apartment facing a challenge that seemed far beyond her reach. A British pilot had been shot down and was hiding in Belgium, surrounded by German patrols. Every passing hour placed him in greater danger. There were scattered efforts to help such men, but no reliable system, no organized path to safety. Andrée, only twenty‑four years old, had no military training, no secret service background, and no influential allies. What she did have was determination and a vision. She decided she would build the escape route herself. Her plan was daring yet practical. She imagined a chain of safe houses stretching from Belgium through France and across the Pyrenees into Spain. She would find trustworthy people at each stage, create forged documents, and personally test the route by walking it. Within weeks, she had begun to weave together what would later be known as the Comet Line, one of the most remarkab...

 No celebrations and parades were dealt with when German soldiers came back after 1945. The majority found the country lying in heaps of bricks and smoke. Many had spent time in Soviet prison camps, and they spent the next decades of their life not returning home until the middle of the 1950s. By the time they got home, they were not known to them. During many years, wives had learned how to survive and take the family by their own. The children did not know the man standing before them that was skinny, fatigued. The family was greatly shocked by this. Most men were unable to find their place in the world and that is why they were depressed and took their own lives. To cope with the humiliation of defeat they were silent. A wall of silence had been created in German households. They did not talk about crimes and horrors. They instead concentrated on hard work. This science contributed to the resurrection of the economy within the shortest time possible, yet it kept them occupied an...

 You know we always hear that every single German soldier back in the day was just a cold hearted killer. But I found out about this one guy named Albert Battel who really makes you stop and think. He was an officer in Poland and one day the SS (the really bad guys) showed up to take people away from their homes. Instead of just standing there or helping them, Battel actually told his own soldiers to point their machine guns at the SS and block the bridge. He was literally ready to start a fight with his own side to do what was right. While everyone was arguing at the bridge, he sneaked about 100 Jewish workers and their families into his army base to hide them. He wasn't just unhappy about the situation, he was risking his own life. If he had been caught, they would have ended him right then and there for being a traitor. The big bosses in the Nazi party were so mad that the head guy Himmler, even wrote a secret note saying they should arrest him the moment the war ended. Thank go...

 He entered a circus full of Nazis and asked for the impossible. He was eighteen and had nothing left. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Irene Danner's life fell apart piece by piece. Expelled from school. Violin lessons banned. Ballet forbidden. Her family's circus dynasty destroyed by anti-Semitic laws. His mother was Jewish. And under the laws of the Reich, that was enough. In 1941, in Germany, it meant deportation, it meant death. One desperate evening, Irene slipped under the tent of the Circus Adolf Althoff. The show had just ended. The lights were still on. The performers were laughing and toasting. For a moment, it seemed like a normal world still existed. He reached the owner, Adolf Althoff. "Please," she whispered. "Let me work here. I'll do anything." Adolf understood immediately. It wasn't a request for work. It was a request for salvation. And he also understood the price. The circus employed ninety people. Their families traveled with them t...

 She buried her husband, gave birth two days later, and returned to work before the week was over. It was 1887 in Dodge City, Kansas, and Elizabeth Morrow was only twenty two when everything she thought her life would be collapsed in a matter of days. Her husband caught typhoid without warning. One moment he was standing in their small rented room, promising that things would get better. Three days later, he was gone. Fever stole his voice. Delirium stole his recognition. Death came quickly and without mercy. There was no goodbye, no last conversation, no time to prepare for what came next. Elizabeth stood beside his grave alone. She was pregnant, penniless, and already in debt for the funeral. Every coin used to bury him was borrowed. Every face around her belonged to someone who could offer sympathy but not survival. Grief pressed down on her chest, but she did not have the luxury of falling apart. There was no one else to carry what was coming. Two days later, her daughter was b...

 In 1996, a newborn baby girl was left in a garbage bin near the city of Calcutta, India. Three friendly street dogs discovered and protected her for nearly two days, even attempting to feed the baby before authorities were contacted and the little girl was rescued. Locals thought the dogs had gotten hold of someone's clothes and were playing with them, when the owner of the scooter was on his way to work the next day, the dogs started wagging their tails and sat near the cloth, he thought the behavior was strange and when he unwrapped the cloth, he found the newborn baby. The baby girl showed symptoms of jaundice but survived. She was 8-10 days old when this incident occurred.

 I have spent numerous years reading the Second World War, and the thing that people should always know is that the way that fame functioned in those years in Germany was different. Even a tyrant such as Hitler and his propaganda man, Joseph Goebbels, was forced to be cautious with masses. They even feared that the German people would rebel against the government or even riot in case they arrested the most renowned movie stars. It was quite an odd circumstance. As in the case of Hans Albers. He was a big star, a true heartthrob whom a German Clark Gable could resemble. Albers was not a fan of Nazis. He was a Jew who had a partner Hansi Burg and he could not abandon her as it was against law. Due to the amount of love that he had gained among the masses, the Nazis would not risk approaching him. The celebrity status that he enjoyed in his life served as the defense mechanism to protect her hence successful in taking her to Switzerland. Then there was Theo Lingen who was a very funny...

 When Lale Sokolov arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, everything that made him who he was was taken away. The SS guards stripped him of his clothes, his belongings, and even his identity. His hair was shaved, he was given a prison uniform, and a number — 32407 — was tattooed onto his left forearm. Inside the camp, names were treated as if they no longer mattered. To the Nazis, prisoners were not people; they were numbers, meant to be processed, controlled, and erased. Lale became prisoner 32407. Because he spoke several languages — German, Russian, French, and Slovak — he was assigned a role that would both protect him and burden him for the rest of his life: he became the camp’s tattooist. Each day, he sat with needle and ink as endless lines of prisoners were brought before him. Men, women, and children stood waiting while he marked numbers onto their skin — permanent symbols of a system built to strip away identity. The work filled him with guilt, but it also gave ...

 BERLIN (JTA) — Alwin Meyer knew about the Holocaust when he made his first trip to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, in 1971. At 21, the young German man had grown up in its shadow. But he was still shocked by some of what he learned. “I knew about Auschwitz, but not that there were newborns and children in the camp,” Meyer recently told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It was almost unbelievable. But it is true.”Meyer has devoted his life since to uncovering and documenting the stories of children who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, and his book about 27 of them comes out this week in English for the first time. “Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz” highlights stories of survival and hope, yet does not flinch from the stark reality: that such qualities were rare in this death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland – especially for children. Translated from German by Nick Somers, the book weaves together the biographies of 27 people who were children when they arrived in Au...

 Mail, packages and money were welcomed by concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a prisoner’s letters express gratitude along with a glimpse of life in the camps. Henry Zguda, a Polish Catholic, spent three and a half years interned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a political prisoner. During a series of interviews held with Zguda in 2003, he shared his camp experiences, including a discussion of his camp letters. A study and translation of all his letters from both camps in combination with first-person interviews, offer an intriguing lens into prisoner mail, incoming packages and money practices in German concentration camps. A postal station existed at every concentration camp, and each ran with surprising efficiency given the harsh conditions and intended short life span of all prisoners. Restrictions evolved as to who could send mail and what paper and envelopes could be used, especially in the first camps such as Dachau (1933). In the earlier years of B...

 On Sep­tember 1, 1939, just before Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland that marked t­he beginning of World War II, Zygmunt Klukowski, a young Polish doctor, confided in his diary that everyone was talking about war. "Everybody," he continued, "is sure that we will win." The reality was startlingly different. Nazi Germany's war with Poland, begun on September 1, was an uneven contest. Five German armies with 1.5 million men, 2,000 tanks, and 1,900 modern aircraft faced fewer than a million Polish troops with less than 500 aircraft and a small number of armored vehicles. In addition, German planning and technical support -- and German understanding of the importance of modern tactical airpower -- gave the aggressor great advantages.  Within five days, German forces occupied all of the frontier zones. By September 7, forward units were only 25 miles from Warsaw, the Polish capital. Polish air forces were eliminated, and the Polish army was split and encircled. B...

 German soldiers wore American uniforms and drove stolen US jeeps to fool the enemy. Their objective was to confuse the Americans by switching road signs and cutting telephone wires. Since they were dressed in incorrect uniforms, appeared in battle were not treated as regular prisoners in the event of a capture. A soldier who got caught in his own uniform would often be sent to a prison camp, but these men were considered spies. There were three men, Schmidt, Billing and Pernass, which were caught and after a very quick trial, were executed on the spot in the cold. The scariest occurred on December 23, 1944. The men were lashed to wooden posts in a Belgium courtyard. An American firing squad was on hand and a med. officer was present to confirm a dead body. In a famous picture Wilhelm Schmidt hangs limp on the ropes after the shots. The above picture depicts a severe reality of what spies face.

 The early life of Stephanie St. Clair (or Stephanie Saint-Clair) is largely shrouded in mystery. But it’s believed that she was born in the West Indies on December 24, 1897. Some sources suggest that she was from the island of Grand-Terre, while others say she was from Martinique. However, it’s also possible that she was born in France. For St. Clair’s part, she insisted that she was of “French-European” heritage. The mystery surrounding St. Clair’s birth was by design, due to her desire for privacy and her eagerness to cultivate a reputation. But regardless of her true origins, St. Clair had made her way to Montreal, Canada, by 1911. Just one year later in 1912, she boarded a ship that was headed toward New York City. While on the ship — and in post-migration quarantine — St. Clair learned to speak English. After being cleared, she explored what would be her new home and soon settled in the neighborhood of Harlem. How she got her initial influx of capital remains unclear. But wha...

 When Jason Gould came out to his mother in the early 1990s, Barbra Streisand didn't pause. She told the world she was proud of him — and then spent the next three decades making sure everyone knew exactly where she stood. Jason was born on December 29, 1966, the only child of Streisand and actor Elliott Gould. He grew up inside the machinery of extraordinary fame — recording studios and film sets were the furniture of his childhood, his mother already one of the most celebrated entertainers in American history. Streisand has said consistently that she never pushed him toward performance. She wanted him to find his own shape rather than fill the outline of hers. That is harder for a famous parent to actually do than it sounds. She did it anyway. She gave him room. He used it carefully. In the early 1990s, Jason came out as gay. Streisand's response was immediate, unwavering, and public. She became one of the most prominent celebrity voices in America advocating for LGBTQ rights...

  He joined the Air Force on August 31 of that year, and was promoted to Chief Master Sergeant on April 1, 1967. During the North Vietnamese invasion of Laos and the Vietnam War, Etchberger was among a group of Airmen hand-picked for a classified mission: manning secret radar facilities in the Kingdom of Laos. According to the 1962 International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, the U.S. was to have no military facilities in that country. As such, the selectees would officially become civilians employed by Lockheed Aircraft. Etchberger was deployed to Lima Site 85, used to direct bombing missions against targets in Laos and North Vietnam. The code name for this top secret mission was "Heavy Green." The site was staffed by sixteen 'former' airmen, including Etchberger, two CIA agents, and one forward air controller. A large force of local guerrilla Laotian and Hmong fighters of the "U.S. Secret Army" also defended, and heavily engaged, the base prior to, a...

 Look no further than ‘Fighting Joe Wheeler’ - ex Confederate Cavalry General officer, wounded three times, with 16 horses shot from beneath him between 1861–1865, serving as a General of Volunteers in Cuba in 1898 at the tender age of 61. He commanded young Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and even shouted to his command in the heat of the moment at the Battle of Las Guasimas (June 24, 1898): "Let's go, boys! We've got the damn Yankees on the run again!” He would later accept an appointment into the Regular Army as a Brigadier General, in 1900, 39 years after he had resigned his commission and served under Arthur MacArthur as a Brigade Commander in the Philippines. He also attended the hundredth-anniversary celebration of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point, New York) in 1902, and met some of his former fellow Confederate officers, including James Longstreet and Edward Porter Alexander while wearing his dress uniform of general in the U.S. Army. Longstreet reportedly ...