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The end of World War II in Europe left the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany's military facing an uncertain and often difficult future. Some were tried as war criminals, others were imprisoned and later released, and a few spent their final years defending their records. The fates of several of the most prominent German commanders … Read more

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union, its former partner in the war against Poland. Within weeks, German forces had swept across vast eastern territories, including the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which Stalin's Soviet Union had annexed the previous year. German occupation transformed life across … Read more

Joachim Peiper was a German SS officer whose name became tied to some of the most notorious atrocities committed by Nazi forces during World War II. He was born on January 30, 1915, in Wilmersdorf, then part of the German Empire, as the third son of an imperial army officer. His father, Waldemar, had served … Read more

On December 22, 1947, in Krakow, Poland, the former staff of Auschwitz heard their sentences read aloud. After a month of gruesome testimonies, the court revealed that many SS officers had committed inhumane torture and mass murder, often for pleasure, and that their cruelty went far beyond what their superiors ordered. One of the perpetrators … Read more

On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen, one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. The British forces found 13,000 unburied bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. Thousands more inmates would die of diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis in the months following liberation. The British captured male … Read more

On June 4, 1944, the people of Rome poured into the streets to celebrate their liberation. After nine months of brutal German occupation, marked by hunger, massacres, and the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, hundreds of thousands rejoiced. Among them were freed prisoners and thousands of Jews who had survived by hiding. But … Read more