N1104 Berlin, Germany — In the final hours of the Third Reich, as Soviet artillery reduced the capital to rubble and Adolf Hitler lay dead by his own hand, Magda Goebbels carried out one of the most chilling acts of the Nazi era: the murder of her six children, all under the age of thirteen, before … Read more
Margarete “Gretl” Braun Fegelein, the younger sister of Eva Braun and therefore the sister-in-law of Adolf Hitler for roughly forty hours at the very end of the Second World War, died in obscurity in Bavaria in 1987, taking with her the last untold secrets of the Nazi inner circle she had inhabited for more than … Read more
Margarete “Gretl” Braun Fegelein, the younger sister of Eva Braun and therefore the sister-in-law of Adolf Hitler for roughly forty hours at the very end of the Second World War, died in obscurity in Bavaria in 1987, taking with her the last untold secrets of the Nazi inner circle she had inhabited for more than … Read more
Avevo diciassette anni quando ho capito che l’amore nella mia famiglia si misurava in debiti. Non in gesti, non in cure. Solo in quanto potevo dare prima che diventassi un problema. L’ho scoperto una mattina umida di agosto, quando mia madre irruppe nella mia stanza con un contratto di locazione in una mano e una … Read more
Washington awoke to a constitutional firestorm on April 11, 1951, after President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of every command he held in the Far East — and MacArthur learned he had been fired not from the president, not from the Pentagon, but from a commercial radio broadcast that crackled into his Tokyo … Read more
Mi chiamo Leona Colwell e fino alla vigilia di Natale credevo di sapere cosa significasse essere indispensabile. Poi mio padre mi chiamò e, con la calma di chi legge un copione già provato, mi disse che sarebbe stato meglio se avessi smesso di far parte della sua vita. Non c’era rabbia nella sua voce, solo … Read more
Two men who spent more time at Adolf Hitler’s side than almost anyone else in the Third Reich — his personal pilot Hans Baur and his chief chauffeur Erich Kempka — were captured, interrogated and imprisoned after World War II, then released into a Germany that no longer had any use for them. Their postwar … Read more
They typed the orders that sent millions to their deaths, dined beside Adolf Hitler in his mountain retreat, and followed him into the concrete tomb beneath Berlin where the Third Reich met its end. Yet when the guns fell silent in 1945, the four women who served as Hitler’s private secretaries walked out of the … Read more
Avevo appena chiuso la riunione più importante della mia carriera quando squillò il telefono. Era mio padre. Non ci parlavamo da cinque anni, da quando mi ero rifiutata di coprire i suoi debiti di gioco. Ma quella voce non era arrabbiata, era spezzata. “Valerie, è tua madre,” singhiozzò. “È il suo cuore. Insufficienza allo stadio … Read more
Allied troops in the Second World War sometimes shot captured Waffen-SS soldiers instead of taking them prisoner, a practice that historians now describe as one of the most uncomfortable and contested episodes of the entire conflict, driven by revenge, fear, and the psychological collapse of restraint under total war rather than by any official military … Read more