Holocaust victim

 This question is heavy. When you are talking about the most terrible death of the highest Nazi not a fast death but a slow and slow one you have to think of Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich himself was a notorious person being known as the Butcher of Prague and was involved in the holocaust arrangements largely. His death was an unpleasant, long suffering penalty of his offences. The event occurred in May 1942. In Prague his car was ambushed by resistance fighters but they did not use gunfire but used a distorted grenade. The explosion ripped the cushion of his seat scattering horsehair and fragments deep into his body. Heydrich was taken to the closest hospital. German physicians labored hard in an effort to treat him to save his life by removing his spleen. But infected--sepsis--soon set in, and the debris of the seat which was impure was fatal. He spent eight days in agony, racking with high fever and loss of consciousness and consciousness. It was the same man who caused pain to ot...

 Even among senior Nazis who expressed regrets, they were punished, yet expressing regret tended to give them a lighter sentence. This is demonstrated in the case of Albert Speer. The most infamous person who was convicted during the Nuremberg Trials was Speer, the architect of Hitler and the director of armaments of the Nazi regime. A twenty-year prison term was given to him, which he served. His vivid confession; telling he was simply a technician and had no knowledge of the Holocaust was what probably avoided the death penalty that most of the leaders were sentenced to. When Speer was free, he became globally famous. He wrote best selling memoirs and the press promoted him as the only Nazi who ever confessed guilt. Over the decades the media presented him as a reformed man. Journalist Gitta Sereny took years to research on his background and discovered that Speer lied. She located evidence of his awareness of the Holocaust, as well as his aid in the logistics of the Holocaust, s...

 Maybe you might be thinking of Erwin Rommel who was a Field Marshal called the Desert Fox. He had not actually made a wooden box with tools, but he ordered his own coffin and arranged his own death so as to protect his family from the Nazis. In 1944 Hitler believed that Rommel was involved in a conspiracy to kill him. Since Rommel was a great war hero, Hitler could not murder him openly or the people would be angry. So Hitler sent two generals to Rommel's house with a box of poison, and gave him a choice. They offered him the choice of going to a public trial for treason, which would send his wife and son to a concentration camp, or kil*lin-g himself immediately. If Rommel chose po-i*son, Hitler promised the family would be safe and he a hero's funeral. Rommel did not wait to think about the choices Hitler gave. He went inside, and told his wife and his 15-year old son, Manfred, "I will be dead in fifteen minutes", and then, got in the car with the men that would kil...

 This is shocking but its true that in WW2, there were like 1 or 2 million babies born because German soldiers were dating local women in places like France and Norway. At first the Nazis actually liked these kids. They had this program called Lebensborn because they thought the babies had special genes or something and they wanted more people to look like them. So the kids were treated okay while the war was happening. But then in 1945 when Germany lost, everything got really bad for them. People were so angry at the Nazis that they took it out on the kids. In Norway they even called them German brats and bullied them. Its so mean because it wasn't the babies fault. Thousands of them were taken away from their moms and put into orphanages or schools where people were mean to them. Did you know one of the singers from ABBA (Anni-Frid) was one of these kids? Her grandma had to literally sneak her away to Sweden in the middle of the night so the angry mobs wouldn't hurt her. In F...

 Wilhelm Keitel was not a German general who dared to stand in the face of Hitler. The German army was the realm of yes men in which he was virtually the king. The other generals did not even respect him, they scorned him behind his back with this title Lakeitel, a taunt at his name, on the German word, Lackey, servant, which does all he is asked to do blindly. Keitel was not a mere follower. His stand was not about standing by and watching Hitler make such disastrous propositions, he was the one who actually wrote his name physically on the official papers that enabled such crimes to occur. He was also a participant who approved some of the most brutal orders in the war. He ordered even uniformed Allied commandos, in an effort to surrender, to be shot in the spot, and permitted the use of the disappearance to deal with political opponents at night, and signed documents to execute Soviet officers, one on the spot. Others argue that he attempted to resign but the historical events d...

 This is General Dietrich von Saucken. He is said to be the typical old Prussian army general, when it comes to appearance and manner. During the world war I, he was shot seven times in action, and got numerous medals in valour. After the war, he stayed in the German army. He was afterwards sent to Russia where he acquired how to speak Russian. During World War II, he participated in numerous battles and was awarded numerous times once more. He was known to attempt to save his troops and minimize the losses. However, he was taken out of his job in early 1945, after serving nearly 35 years, due to the belief that the war could never be won anymore. However, he was subsequently recalled since there was still a need in Germany to have seasoned military commanders. Hitler later called him to his bunker and ordered him to defend East Prussia against the Soviet army. Von Saucken was not like other officers. He carried his sword despite not being permitted to and failed to give the entire...

  He was only 14 years old when he woke up in a hospital bed with 100 stitches on his chest. It was 1951, and doctors in Australia had just removed one of his lungs to save his life. To survive the ordeal, James Harrison had relied on the kindness of strangers. He received 13 units of blood from people he would never meet. As he lay recovering, his father sat by his side and whispered, “You are alive today because of people you will never know who gave their blood to save you.” Those words stuck in James’s heart. Right then, he made a silent but powerful promise: as soon as he turned 18, he would become a donor too. He wanted to pay back the debt he owed to the world. There was just one major problem. James had a terrifying, paralyzing fear of needles. Despite his phobia, James walked into a donation center in 1954 on his 18th birthday. He sat down, stared at the ceiling, and told the nurse, “I can’t look at it. Just do what you have to do.” He never looked at the needle. Not that ...

 Actually in history, Eva Braun does not enjoy a queen life, just becuase she was girlfriend of Hitler. Lots of people think she is a very lucky woman but I think she lived in a golden cage. What I feel the most tragic thing is that she lived like a phantom; for ten years and more, her life was a completely secret one. She was forbidden to appear in public with the person she loves. Imagine, every time when important leaders or officials paid a visit, she was always told to hide in her bedroom and not appear when he appeared. She always felt she did not exist. She was so disappointed with this kind of life, that she tried to die twice, first was in 1932 by her father's gun, second was in 1935 by taking pills. The trigger was that Hitler would neglect her for months, and that she was still a young lady just crying for a loving relationship as she was ignored by the whole world completely. Her family life was so failed that her father Fritz Braun was so rigid that he was always asham...

 the delusions of someone who had been out of touch with the harsh reality of their actions for an extended period, an inability to connect the consequences of his earlier self-serving decisions with his present situation. Ribbentrop identifies his last statement as being sent from a man who has been a servant of evil, who served a dictator and left many families with no fathers, brothers or sons. He shows in his final statement how completely self-absorbed Ribbentrop was until the very end. Ribbentrop called out for peace between the West and the Soviet Union and implored that Germany remain united as his dying wish was for a world without war. Had anyone else made these statements before he died they may have made them seem noble. However, these justifications for peace by Ribbentrop became so incomprehensible that they seemed to only infuriate him. Ribbentrop used many years to create and sustain chaos and terror throughout Europe and then used his last dying breath to pretend t...

 A crude question snatches at your stomach, raw facts chill the blood. Nazis did not strip victims of their hair to stick it into the eye of one life--it was pure profit. No waste, not even corpses, was screamed out by full war. Hair was sheep wool or beast skins and was straight stock of murder mills. They washed it clean, killed all the bugs, packed them into gigantic squeeze bags called bales. They were carried to war machine-cranking plants on wagons. Hair turned to what? Stout wool--to keep the feet warm--mittens, boots, so that when in the Russian hell the troops should not suffer frost. They stuffed it in tight in sub walls in cold weather, and even stuffed soldier cots. Taste the spit: someone whose mouth had been filled with trash to be pushed by butchers. They grabbed souls, and looted shells to fight. Pure dark tally. What stings you the most? Pour it here--we will hold this together.

  This is the best answer for this question: the SS got their fame because they were brutal. This is what was invented or rather exaggerated by the world. They were the ones who committed the most atrocities of World War II. SS was not an ordinary group of the German army. They were the military branch of the Nazi Party. Hitler developed them as his security men and to impose his ideology, therefore, their whole operation was connected with Nazism concept of race and terror. The best way to show their brutality is that they operated the whole holocaust. The SS planned it and ran the camps and deployed their personnel in every concentration and extermination camp location. Thus, they had killed approximately six and half million Jews and millions of other individuals who were not liked by the Nazis included the perons who were not in good health and shape. There were also special units within the SS that were known as Einsatzgruppen. They were traveling assassination teams which kil...

 That is an interesting question. Most people think the great generals are in safe, air conditioned offices far from where they were shot. But in the German army during world war 2 it was something else entirely and much more dangerous for the leaders. I remember reading a story about a battle in Russia. A German unit was trapped at the foot of a hill. The Russian defense was so strong that the soldiers were afraid to move. The attack was a complete failure. Suddenly the general was no longer behind. He took a rifle and ran up the hill to the enemy. When his men saw their leader risking his life, they felt the need to follow him. They rose up, attacked and took the hill. Later his boss asked Hitler office to give this general a large medal for bravery. But the response of a man named Otto Gunsche was very cold. He said no. He explained that Hitler expected any general to lead in this way. It wasn't extra courage, it was just a job. They called it driving forward. They thought a lea...

 It occurred to children as young as 17 years of age who had no choice at all. As early as 1935, Germany reintroduced the draft. Had you been a healthy guy, you had to appear because of a notice. By 1939, the regular army (Heer) was mostly made up of these draftees. Only about 90% of the army was volunteers but that was just men who did what the law required or they were going to shoot them as deserters. Even the Waffen-SS that initially worked as an elite volunteer formation evolved rapidly. By 1944 they became short of men and began forcibly drafting people in. They picked up Navy and Air Force guys and forcibly hurled them into SS equipment. An excellent example is a renowned author Gunter Grass. He was drafted at 17 in 1944. He did not choose the SS, the govt simply placed him there since they required bodies. By the war end, more than 50per of SS were not even German. They belonged to an occupied nation or stolen out of prison camps. They even included old men and young boys i...

 It is a very dark thing to talk about, but to understand history we have to look at the truth. Many people ask why the prisoners had to turn their backs during such tragic times. Most think that it was for the victim, but the reality is much within colder. It was actually in the interest of the mental health of the Nazi soldiers. In the beginning these mobile units used to shoot people at very close range. But the Nazi leaders encountered a problem they had not anticipated: their own men were falling apart. Even with all that hateful training, it is difficult for a man to look into the eyes of another human being and pull the trigger. Many of these soldiers resorted to heavy drinking or suffered a total mental breakdown. They just couldn't deal with the human side of it. There is the story about Heinrich Himmler, one of the top leaders, who went to view a mass shooting in Minsk in 1941. He actually got sick off watching it. He didn't care about the poor people dying but he was...

 There are some parts of history that seem unbelievable to people. This is one of them. Frank Hayes, an unknown and unsuccessful jockey who never won any races previously, participated in a race at Belmont Park in the summer of 1923. The race started, and everything turned around quickly. Halfway through the race, his mount, a mare called Sweet Kiss, overtook other horses and won the lead. Everything seemed favorable for a win at this point. However, something had already gone terribly wrong. In the middle of the race, Hayes experienced an unexpected heart attack, which resulted in his death while he was still on the horse. Oddly enough, even after Hayes's death, his body remained balanced and in control of the horse. His corpse was not falling off, and the mare ran to the end in the leading position. Only when the race ended did the body slip down from the mount. It turned out that Hayes died in the middle of the race. Nevertheless, the official results showed that he had won.

 It is a heavy realization that the most men who were responsible for the mass killers during the war, were the only ones who were never came out and told the world they were sorry about the killing they had done. We often think that they would be crushed by the weight of their doings, but on the contrary, most went to their graves making excuses. They typically asserted that they were merely small cogs in a big machine or they usually just followed orders. However, there are a few noteworthy instances in which that silence was eventually broken. Hans Frank, who was in charge of occupied Poland, was one example. In his trial, he had said that the guilt of his country will last for a thousand years. While in prison, he was converted to religion and said remorse before his execution. Then there was Oskar Groning. He did not say a word about his past until 2015 when he was ninety three years old. He made the decision to speak up because he wanted to make a point against those who stat...

 If Hitler had never attacked the Soviet Union and instead stayed friends with Stalin we would be living in a different world, a much darker one. To be honest I think the only reason we still have freedom today is because those two leaders couldn't trust each other. If they had kept their agreement the UK would have been in trouble. Britain was already struggling during the air raids. Without the Eastern Front to worry about Hitler could have used all his tanks and planes to cross the English Channel. It's a thought. I was thinking about this the day. If that had happened the Soviet Union would have given Germany all the oil and food it needed. The British blockade wouldn't have mattered. Just think about the Middle East! They would have just divided it between them. The US would have been in a spot too. With our big industry trying to fight a combined German and Russian empire would have been like trying to stop a huge wave with a small bucket. It wouldn't have worked....

 This is an sad question and my answer will make you more sad. It is a very frustrating story of Oskar Dirlewanger. He was not a normal soldier, he was violent and mental. His prior to the war incarceration came before the war. Nazis released him to head a group of other criminals and hunters. The German officers could not tolerate even other bad officers. They sent letters telling that he was too inhumane and brutal, not to be in their army. That is just an indication of how bad he was. He did horrible things in such places as Belarus. He would also slaughter a whole village, have the women and children in a large wood barn and then lock the door. Then he would light the barn ablaze. In case somebody attempted to go out of the window to get free, his men would shoot them. He did this to two hundrad villages. In 1944, his troops killed approximately fifty thousand individuals within a period of one week during the Warsaw Uprising. They didn't care who it was. They entered hospitals...

 Mr. Baillot was born in 1793, and in the photo below, taken in 1897, he is 104 years of age. In 1812, at age age of 19, he was conscripted to serve with Napoleon Bonaparte. His Emperor called on him right as he returned from Russia. And when the Emperor calls, you answer! So Baillot went and joined the Siege of Hamburg under Marshal Davout, and distinguished himself in battle. Then, a break… Napoleon lost his throne, was sent to Elba. But he came back with a vengeance and Baillot, along with thousands more veterans, joined his Emperor again as they marched to Belgium. He was there, that fateful day on Sunday 18, 1815, at Waterloo. The final battle of Napoleon. As Napoleon reviewed his troops and addressed them before the battle, Baillot saw him ride his horse. Heard his voice. It would be the first and only time he saw and heard Napoleon… A Scottish cavalry man nearly took off Baillot’s head, but the tin lunchbox he kept under his cap protected his skull and saved his life, but no...

 In April, 1945 Eisenhower visited the Ohrdruf camp and observed things which were really messed up. He observed children who were mere bones and heaps of corpses all over. It was so much that general Patton even fell ill and had to turn his head but Eisenhower compelled himself to watch all of it. He was not merely angry he was concerned about the future. He has famously said that one day some would attempt to say this never happened or call it fake news. He was aware of the shortness of human memory and that people love to distort the past to paint themselves in a more favorable light. To prevent all those lies he was quick. He asked his crews to capture as many photos and videos as possible. He desired tons of film so that no one would challenge the facts in future. He would also take the local German civilians of nearby towns through the camp. He hoped they would see the starving survivors and the smell of the place so they could not claim ignorance of what was going on in the ...

 We talk a lot about the Nazi camps and accuse only the SS guards. There is one sad aspect, there were also such prisoners as Kapos. The Kapos were prisoners but they were compelled by the Nazis to oversee other prisoners. This was a cost saving strategy and a psychological sadist game that created mistrust between inmates. It was a vow or die to be a Kapo. When the Nazis picked you, you got an extra bowl of soup and a bed which were meager. You could buy yourself another day to live in a starving environment where soup would give you that time. It was very expensive, in case a Kapo did not manage to beat other inmates or to exhaust them, the SS guards would execute him. There were Kapos who became villains. One such case is that of Emil Erwin Mahl who worked at Dachau and was involved in murders. After the war, he was tried due to brutality. But not all Kapos were evil. Others were employed in office in the camps and would rewrite names on death lists so as to save lives. These pe...

 In World War II, the majority of German generals were merely taking orders and not questioning them. However, there was a senior officer by the name Johannes Blaskowitz who was not like the rest. Later in 1939, when he was serving in Poland, he witnessed extremely brutal acts committed by SS units. Innocent individuals were being murdered such as Jewish families. These were not soldiers but civilians. Blaskowitz did not overlook what he saw. Although it was risky to his career, he prepared formal reports and forwarded them to the senior leaders, including Hitler. He emphatically wrote in such reports that such actions were wrong. According to him, a real soldier must not kill innocent men, women, and children, but rather fight against other soldiers. Hitler reacted with anger. Rather than taking the criticism, he offended Blaskowitz. Subsequently, this influenced the role of Blaskowitz in the army. Although he was a good commander, he never attained the highest ranks as being a Fi...

  Beaten. Starved. Humiliated. The first ten years of Mary Ellen Wilson's life were a quiet hell on the streets of New York, where she was born in March 1864. Her father was orphaned, her mother could not support her, and she was entrusted to a seemingly distinguished couple: Mary and Francis Connolly. But behind the façade of this house there was neither love nor care, only hunger, beatings and isolation. Mary Ellen wasn't really alive: she fought back. She was a child who was degraded to a servant, a fragile being who learned about pain far too early. And yet fate wanted someone to notice her. A volunteer named Etta Angell Wheeler caught sight of the small figure with the cloudy eyes and scarred body. She tried to get help, but she discovered the biggest horror: According to the law of the time, children were not protected. They were invisible. And then something inconceivable happened. Wheeler turned to the animal welfare association. If animals deserve protection, why not c...

 Suppose you are a combat veteran at the last, dark years of World War II. You have lived your entire life as a courageous person, and now, your army has betrayed you. It was the case with a man known as Captain Friedrich Klausing. Klausing was a battlefield hero, but there was a secret. He was aware that the war was ruining his nation and therefore in 1944 he became a part of a renowned conspiracy to eliminate Hitler. Unfortunately, the strategy did not work. The leaders determined that he must die at once because he attempted to change things. Something very cruel was done on his last morning in the army. They surrounded him before execution and tore the medals off his chest. They ripped the rank signs off his shoulders. They meant that he was no longer a leader or even a human being. Then they took him to a wooden post in a secluded yard as the sun was rising. There were ten men in a line with rifles. A rifle was loaded with a blank bullet to make the soldiers less guilty. In th...

 One cannot find a worst brutality of SS soldiers, as they did many gruesome things. Among the most dreadful tricks was to make the villagers enter a building and be burned alive. This practice was widespread by German troops including the SS and was particularly practiced in Belarus which was a part of the Soviet Union. This was not a one-off event, it was a part of a premeditated complete annihilation. Germans were trying to avenge the people who collaborated or assisted Soviet partisans. This horror has become an image of the village of Khatyn. In 1943 SS Dirlewanger soldiers imprisoned close to 150 individuals, including many children, in a barn and burned them. Anyone who escaped was shot. There were hundreds of villages where similar atrocities were committed with lots of suffering. Discussing the worst atrocity of the SS the Holocaust has to be mentioned. The death camps led by the SS, most notably the Auschwitz were designed and operated. They organized a murder which was i...

 It is simply wrong to think the Soviets only got Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. While his surrender at Stalingrad in 1943, was a massive, massive morale boost for them, the Soviets definitely caught other very high-ranking Germans too even more Field Marshals and top SS people. It usually had to do with which side took possession of these high ranking Nazis when the fight had ended. In addition to Paulus there were eventually two other Field Marshals for the Soviets. One was Ewald von Kleist. The British caught him but they handed him over to the Soviets in 1948. Kleist didn't have the easy time that Paulus had. He was convicted of war crimes and died in the Soviet prison in 1954. He was the only Field Marshal who died there. The other was true believer, fanatic Hitler trusted Ferdinand Schorner. The Americans caught Schorner first, but saw him off to the Soviets in 1951. The Soviets sentenced him to 25 years in jail. This is indicative of how the most committed Nazis were punish...

 This is a good question to answer since not many people know about kurt gerstein and his story is one of the most painful things about the second world war. he was a german man who joined the SS not because he loved hitler but because he wanted to know what the nazis were really doing. he actually hated them because they killed his sister in a secret program of hospitals. Since he was a scientist the ss took him to death camps such as Belzec and treblinka where he was supposed to drop the zyklon b gas into the chambers and he had to stand and watch the people being killed. it was so bad that he would even cry at night and even used a stopwatch to keep time of how many minutes it took the people to die so that he could have evidence to the world in the future. He risked his life several times in order to tell the truth. once on a train he met a swedish diplomat called goran von otter. gerstein was shaking and crying when he was telling him about the camps. he asked the diplomat to ...

 Towards the end of April 1945, Hitler was genuinely in no way going to make a getaway. I read much of this over the years, and the state of affairs in Berlin was nothing but anarchy. By April 25 the Soviet army had encircled the whole city. No operating airports remained, they were all destroyed or occupied. On April 26, a well-known woman pilot, Hanna Reitsch, in fact, flew a small aircraft and landed in a street near the bunker. She informed Hitler that she could do it to him, but this would have been nearly a suicide mission. Russian fighter planes were in the sky. A slow little aircraft attempting to take off would have been shot down in a few seconds. It was not safe to hide in the air. Another reason that made him remain was what occurred to Mussolini in Italy. Hitler was informed on April 28, that Mussolini was arrested, killed, and then hanged upside down at a gas station as people threw items over his corpse. Hitler was horrified at that destiny. He advised his assistant ...

 It is a very good question regarding the human cost of war and the answer is not simple. You can only guess what was going through the heads of all German soldiers, but historical data imply that sorrow over killing female combatants was not common. These mostly comprised having to deal with the Soviets in the Eastern front. This was not an ordinary military war but an extermination war based on ideology. Nazi propaganda kept eating holes among German soldiers that the Russian were subhuman. And that hatred was put there to forget regular feelings such as pity or sympathy. When a German soldier spotted a woman in a Soviet outfit, he did not even see a woman. He viewed what right-wing propaganda termed a zealot. They even employed the degrading term against them: Flintenweiber (literally: gun-women). Indeed, there were numerous German contingents in which the un-spoken rules, or even orders, were to dispose drunkenly of the women who were taken prisoner. This was the idea, they wer...

 When the war stopped the few Jews who lived through the camps tried going back to their old towns. They believed that they could simply go home but it was a complete mess. The majority of them found that their neighbors had already settled in their houses. These individuals were lying in their beds and cooking with their kitchen utensils. The neighbors were not pleased to see them. They believed that the owners had died and they did not want to restore the property. One of the stories is of a woman called Hana Hoffman who discovered a neighbor in the dress of her mom. The neighbor did not even bother to care, he just appeared to be surprised that Hana survived. In Poland it was quite bad. In 1946, the survivors were literally assaulted by a large group of locals in a town known as Kielce. Although the war had ended a year ago, they killed approximately 40 Jews. This occurred due to a falsehood of the kidnapping of a kid, yet in the real sense it was not about not wanting Jews back...

 There is a terrible secret in Palmiry Forest in Poland. The World War II was started in 1939, and one of the most tragic occurrences was the Operation Tannenberg. Every one has heard of the battles, few of us of the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, a list of death in which 60,000 names--not of soldiers, but of teachers, doctors, priests, and other Polish leaders are recorded. Nazi had a barbaric plan: eliminate anyone who can lead Poland. Men were arrested at their personal homes during the night at an occasion when they were not expected. No trials or judges were involved. They were taken to the deep forests such as Palmiry. The Nazis informed them that they were heading to labor camps, and rather they were lined up along pits and killed. The high-ranking official, a victim was Maciej Rataj who had served his country well. Nazis attempted to conceal the murders adding soil and planting pine trees over the pits. The Polish resistance did this secretly marking the graves and records. Eve...

 The most famous of the nephews is William Patrick Hitler. He was born in England. In the 1930s he went to Germany in the hope of finding work through his uncle. Hitler disliked him and called him a loathsome person. William later fled to America. When war broke out he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt requesting that he be in the U.S. Navy. The FBI investigated him and he was allowed to enlist in 1944. He joined the army as a medic, was wounded and was awarded a Purple Heart for fighting while in his uncle's army. After the war he changed his name and resided in Long Island. Other nephews served in the military on the German side. Heinz Hitler was a radio-operator at the Eastern Front. The Russians captured him in 1942, and sent him to a Moscow prison. After a few months, he died there. Another nephew was Leo Raubal, Jr. He looked a lot like Hitler. Leo was a Luftwaffe pilot and was stranded at the Battle of Stalingrad. His officers asked Hitler to save him by flying him in a ...

 The German army entered the war in 1939 in high-quality uniforms of thick wool and with a dark-green collar. The leadership spent a lot to ensure that the soldiers appeared shiny and professional with a victory likely to come fast.It was different in 1941 when the invasion of Russia took place. The military was not well prepared to the extreme cold. Guy Sajer in his memoirs describes how the men were forced to wrap their feet in straw or steal clothes off the conquered men just to get by. The catastrophe motivated Germany to prepare heavy reversible winter parkas, white on the outside and gray on the inside, and so on. By 1944 and 1945 Germany had ran out of resources. The exhausted finances and factories that were bombed altered things. Making jackets shorter saved fabric and pure wool was substituted with inexpensive, scratchy, and thin synthetic mixtures. Uniforms faded to brown or dark yellow, when green dye was used up. At the conclusion of the war, soldiers did not necessari...

 This is the original foursome from right to left, Silver, the Lone Ranger, Tonto, and Scout. They were on television till I went to high school (1957) when I lost interest in them. I am recounting this from memory so I know I will get some of it wrong. Tonto was played by a real Native American named J. Silverheels and Clayton Moore played the Ranger. The basic story is that the Lone Ranger had a brother who was a Texas Ranger or maybe the Ranger was with a group of fellow Rangers. At any rate, everybody is massacred but the Ranger who wears a mask for anonymity and swears vengeance against evil. Of course, he wore a white hat and had a white horse. I remember he took the badges of his comrades and brother and melted them down and tracked down the bad guys and shot them. That was the beginning of the tradition of the silver bullets.The Ranger wore a mask so when he took it off he could go into towns and use the silver from a silver mine he found (or a grateful prospector left him)...

 The most terrifying aspect of the end of WW2, is not the battle, but what the Allied forces made the German soldiers to do when the fighting was over. I was doing some research for a history project when I came across the fact that when General Eisenhower found the concentration camps in 1945 he was so outraged and angry that he decided to teach the surrendered Germans a lesson they would never forget. Many German soldiers and local residents claimed they had no idea of millions and millions of people being killed close by. To silence these excuses, the Allies came up with what they christened as forced confrontation. In towns like Gardelegen, the Nazis had attempted to hide their crimes by either dumping thousands of their victims into shallow pits or by burning them in barns just before the beginning of the arrival of Allied troops. The Americans and British assembled the German soldiers and forced them to dig up the dead with only shovels or occasionally bare hands. This is the...

 At four years old, he learned how to stay silent inside a suitcase so he could stay alive. Before the war, Joseph Schlipstein’s world was small and gentle. His mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen. His father lifted him high, laughing, as if the sky were something a child could almost touch. Safety was not a concept to him. It was simply life. Then everything broke. Soldiers came. Orders were shouted. Joseph was taken with his parents, clinging to his father’s hand, too young to understand why fear had suddenly replaced routine. The train was packed tight with bodies and dread. People stopped speaking. When the doors finally opened, Joseph saw words he could not read but would later learn to fear. Buchenwald. This was not a place for children. It was a place designed to erase them. Joseph was too small to work, too weak to justify keeping alive. His father understood this immediately. Protection could not look like comfort anymore. It had to look like disappearance. Each day, h...

 There is that one story from the end of the war where soldiers found a body in a garden. The man had the same hair and the same mustache, so they got excited.But once the doctors checked the teeth and the old medical papers, they saw it was just a normal guy. It wasn't a trick, it was just a man who looked similar. Moreover, you should not forget that he was extremely ill at the end. His hand was trembling constantly and he was unable to walk in a straight line. For a fake person to imitate those exact diseases for several months without making a single mistake? No, that is a very difficult task. He didn't resort to using a double to survive. He simply inhabited huge concrete rooms underground and had guards everywhere. He was so frightened that he even made people taste his food for him before he ate. The old documents from the bunker show that he was truly there until the very last day.

 This question is leaving us out of simple historical facts and making us think more. The clear-cut response is that no. Even the senior Nazis who were hanged following the main Nuremberg Trial did not have any individual last wish prior to their execution.An example is Wilhelm Keitel, the field marshal, and General Alfred Jodl who requested to be executed by a firing squad. They thought it would be a more noble death of any soldier. Allies declined the offer because they claimed that these men were not honorable soldiers but war criminals who should hang before a crowd as other criminals. Also less known, Viktor Brack was also guilty. He came up with an idea of murdering the disabled in Germany. Brack and other accomplices constructed and utilized gas chambers in the form of showers and brought a more effective form of murder to the table. Their methods were subsequently relocated to bigger death camps, including the Auschwitz, which hastened the killing of millions.