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On the afternoon of July 25, 1934, Engelbert Dollfuss lay dying on the floor of a chancellery office in Vienna. He was 41 years old and had ruled Austria for two years and two months. He was a European head of government shot by Austrian Nazis four years before the Second World War began. Today, … Read more

In April 1941, German forces launched a surprise invasion of Greece, sending tanks and aircraft deep into Greek territory while paratroopers seized key bridges and airfields. Within weeks, the Greek army collapsed and the country fell under Axis occupation. What followed was a repressive system built on intimidation. Even as German authorities carried out mass … Read more

On June 5, 1942, an explosion arrived without warning near Sevastopol in the Soviet Union. About 16 kilometers behind the front, a massive railway gun had just fired, using a 32-meter barrel to launch a 7-ton shell at roughly 720 meters per second. The weapon was operated by a crew of around 500 men. It … Read more

During World War II, the Western Allies occasionally made organized use of captured Axis weapons, equipment, and vehicles, turning them against their former owners. This practice went well beyond individual soldiers picking up trophies on the battlefield. Battlefield pickups were common but discouraged. Allied troops were taught to identify weapons by their distinctive sounds, and … Read more

For decades, a story has circulated among gun collectors and on the internet about an Allied commando mission to assassinate Hermann Göring, the head of the German Air Force, at his sprawling estate north of Berlin. The supposed evidence for this raid is a single object: one of the rarest German machine guns ever made, … Read more

Franz Reichleitner was born on December 2, 1906, in Ried im Innkreis, then part of Austria-Hungary. He was 26 years old when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Reichleitner joined the Nazi Party in 1936 and became a member of the SS in 1937. The SS, or Schutzstaffel, had been … Read more

Gustav Willhaus was born on September 2, 1910, in Forbach, then part of the German Empire. He came from a Protestant family and, after completing elementary school, trained as a construction mechanic. From 1924 to 1928, Willhaus was a member of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force also known as the Stormtroopers or Brownshirts. He … Read more

When German forces launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the invasion of the Soviet Union opened a new and brutal phase of the Second World War. Armies advanced rapidly across vast territories, and cities fell within days. Behind the front lines followed a system of terror aimed not only at defeating an enemy but … Read more