Start of World War II: September 1939-March 1940.

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. By September 17, the war was virtually over. Ten days later, after a devastating air assault, Warsaw surrendered. "We were not yet ready," wrote Dr. Klukowski two weeks later, "to discuss the causes of our defeat...This is a fact, but we just can't believe it."

This was the war Adolf Hitler had hoped for in 1939. But in addition to the localized conflict with Poland, the German invasion provoked a global conflict. Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3 when it became clear that negotiating a German withdrawal was hopeless. In Britain and France, the populations had braced themselves for war in the closing weeks of the summer. There was little popular enthusiasm for war, but a strong wave of anti-German and anti-Fascist sentiment produced a resigned recognition that Adolf Hitler would only stop if he was faced by force.

Almost immediately, the British and French empires (except for Ireland) joined the contest, turning it into a worldwide war, fought not only in Europe but across the oceans. German invasion also triggered Soviet Union intervention. The terms of the German-Soviet pact, signed in August 1939, gave Joseph Stalin a sphere of influence in eastern Poland. On September 17, once it was clear that Poland was close to defeat, Red Army units moved into Poland and met up with victorious German troops along a prearranged frontier. On September 28, the two dictatorships signed another treaty, which divided Poland between them.

For the Western powers, this provoked fears of a totalitarian alliance against them. For Poland, dismemberment and harsh totalitarian rule was the reality. Britain and France did nothing to help their smaller ally. Their military staffs had drawn up a "war plan" during the summer of 1939 in which the loss of Poland was accepted as inevitable. The core of the plan was to blockade and contain Nazi Germany until the war of attrition forced the Germans to abandon the contest as they had done in 1918. Britain and France expected a war of at least three years. This explains why for the first six months of the war the Western states did very little. The lull was nicknamed the "Phony War" -- a war with no fighting.

A small amount of naval activity did occur, which gave citizens on both sides something to cheer about. In December 1939, Britain's Royal Navy so damaged the German pocket battleship Graf Spee that it was scuttled in the South Atlantic. Conversely, German submarines began to sink Allied merchant ships. On October 14, 1939, a German submarine managed to penetrate the defenses of the main British naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, and there sank the battleship Royal Oak. The Germans bombed Polish citizens mercilessly, but for a while refrained from bombing cities in the West. The British only dropped leaflets on German cities.

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

Billy Bailey was born in 1946, the ninth of 23 children, in South Carolina, where they lived in poverty. When he grew up, he developed an alcohol addiction and had a filthy temper. Bailey also got in trouble with the law on numerous occasions, committing six felonies ranging from grand larceny to burglary. In 1979, in Delaware, after being placed in a work release facility, Billy Bailey learned he faced a potential 45-year sentence for his most recent string of crimes. After attempting to kill himself with a knife only to be stopped by his brother-in-law, Bailey asked him to stop at a liquor store. There, he robbed the clerk before knocking her down and attempting to shoot her, but thankfully, the gun jammed. He fled the scene, being dropped off by his brother-in-law at Lambertson’s Corner. There, Billy Bailey entered a farmhouse and stole a shotgun. The elderly couple inside where then slaughtered by Bailey, the man being shot twice in the chest and once in the head with the pist...

Jewish women being stripped naked by Ukrainians in 1941.

They are trying to strip her of her humanity and dignity, but look into the eyes of this brave and lovable woman, and you will see she has not succumbed to them. The decision to kill all Jews in Kyiv was made by Major General Kurt Eberhardt, Chief of Military Government; Friedrich Jeckeln, Senior SS Commander of Army Group South; and Otto Rush, Commander of Einsatzgruppe C. Sonderkommando 4a, a subordinate organization of Einsatzgruppe C, carried out the order with the support of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police SD and Order Police Battalions, which were supported by the German Wehrmacht. The shooting was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Security Police. At the time, members of the 303rd Battalion of the German Security Police were guarding the perimeter of the execution site.

HOW BAD WERE THE REGULAR GERMAN SOLDIERS DURING WORLD WAR 2?

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...

During the last days of April 1945, Berlin was a fire zone city. Majority of the German officers were disposing of their uniforms and were making an attempt to vanish before the Soviet army came. And yet was there but one man (General Robert Ritter von Greim) who did so do the very reverse. He flew to the very middle of the battle to visit Hitler one more time. The flight logs and eyewitness reports of this journey have been under my study and it is among the most desperate of the whole war. By now, the Soviet army had nearly besieged Berlin to the latter. Hitler had just dismissed his long time Air Force commander Hermann Goring accusing him of being a traitor. He would have preferred von Greim to succeed the job. Von Greim did not take a heavy bomber to get into the city. He flew in a small thin-bodied aircraft termed a Fieseler Storch. Not only was he not alone but he also had the famous female test pilot, Hanna Reitsch who was famous due to her incredible bravery. Since they w...

In December 2003, Joyce Vincent died of an apparent asthma attack in her North London flat. The television remained on.

The mail continued to be delivered. Her rent was set to be automatically deducted from her bank account. Days passed and no one noticed she had died. Those days turned into weeks and the weeks into months. There were large bins on the side of the building next to her flat, so the neighbours never gave much thought to the foul odor they could smell. The block was full of noisy children and teenagers and no one questioned the constant hum of the TV noise in the background. Eventually, Joyce's bank account ran dry. Her landlord sent her letters of demand. These, like the others, simply fell into the mix on her floor. They received no reply. Finally, with more than six months of back rent, the landlord obtained a court order to forcibly remove her from the premises. The bailiffs broke down the door and only then was her body discovered. At that point, it was January 2006, more than two years after her death. In all this time, no one ever came looking for Joyce Vincent. No family, no fr...

The story behind this photo continues to shock anyone who recognizes it.

In 1968, two men kidnapped Kim Bird. They put her in a homemade coffin, took this photo and buried her in the woods. They hung the photo on a local bulletin board and signed on the back, "I am buried in the woods, you have no more than 5 days to find me." For days, passersby looked at the photo and thought it was a joke. Until a former colleague of Kim's saw the photo. She immediately went to the police, but they didn't know what to do. After all, they only have the photo, but where it is buried is unknown. Then Kim's classmate started looking at the photo and realized that some letters are written strangely, highlighted in bold, and if you look closely, you can read the girl's secret message. On the leaf was written Kim + Brad (classmate's name). It was exactly the kind of inscription they had once left on a tree during a vacation in the woods as a token of their love for each other in high school. Brad immediately went with the police to the site and th...

In a small village in Iran, Suraiya's family lives: her husband, two daughters, and two sons.

Her husband suddenly falls in love with a fourteen-year-old girl, and the desire to marry her overwhelms him in exchange for marrying the girl, Suraiya's husband agrees to cover the medical expenses of her ailing father.But in the meantime, he finds it difficult to bring in a new wife while already having one, and he's also worried about the increased expenses. Then Suraiya's husband hatches a plan. He strikes a deal with the village headman and spreads a rumor about his wife. The rumor was that, "his wife is having an affair with someone else."To bolster this rumor, they even create false witnesses by threatening or luring certain individuals. As a result, Suraiya's guilt is quickly proven. According to the law, Suraiya is sentenced to death. The death penalty was horrific. A pit was dug in public on the road. Suraiya's hands and feet were tied. She was buried waist-deep in the pit. Earth was piled around her. Then, from a distance, stones were thrown at...

1941 Nazi murderer now identified

A man in a long coat with a full head of hair and sunken cheeks kneels at the edge of a mass grave, resigned to his fate. The dozens of corpses below him and the gunman pointing a pistol to the back of his head leave no room for doubt — he knows his life is about to end. The victim's identity remains a mystery, but a match has been found for the perpetrator with 99% certainty. The gunman in the photo, striking a "casual pose," while showing "performative indifference" and "procedural matter-of-factness," is most likely Nazi war criminal Jakobus Onnen, and the photo was probably a Nazi trophy, said German historian Jürgen Matthäus... read more

Why did Southerners, who were bitter after the Civil War, decide to join the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War?

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 ...

A final cigarette... then the hangman's noose: Three men put to death in Kuwaiti car park in country's first execution in six years

Blindfolded, his hands bound, a condemned prisoner puffs desperately on a final cigarette. Just a few minutes later he and two others are led up a short flight of stairs, nooses are placed around their necks before a trapdoor opens beneath their feet. This is justice Kuwait-style. The Gulf-Arab state hanged three convicted murderers today, the first executions to take place there since 2007, state news agency KUNA reported. Kuwait, which has a population of around three and a half million people, operates a judicial system which is a mixture of Islamic Sharia law, English common law, and the Ottoman civil code. The state carried out 72 executions (69 men and three women) between April 1964 and May 2007. Crimes that carry the death sentence include drug trafficking, murder and treason. Sentences are not carried out publically however members of the media act as witnesses and pictures are published in the hope it will act as a deterrent KUNA said 48 people remain on death row in Ku...

Holocaust victim

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