PN1501

On August 2, 1634, twelve-year-old Victoria de la Rovere was married to her first cousin, Ferdinando III, who was twenty-four and already Grand Duke of Tuscany. Their union was forged in ambition rather than affection, and it embodied the perilous games of power and bloodlines that defined seventeenth-century Italy. Beneath the surface of the dynasty … Read more

In 2019, a disturbing discovery in a Berlin cemetery revived painful memories of World War II. A grave had been dug open by someone who knew the identity of the man buried there. The grave was unmarked, but the man was Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Butcher of Prague and one of the most brutal … Read more

In December 2019, police in Berlin reported that the grave of one of the most notorious Nazis had been disturbed. Someone had attempted to break into the burial site of Reinhard Heydrich, the man who chaired the conference at which the Final Solution was planned. The timing was striking. It came 80 years after the … Read more

Reinhard Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, architected the Holocaust, and ruled occupied Bohemia with such brutality that he earned the name "the Butcher of Prague." When Czech resistance fighters ambushed his car in a Prague street in May 1942, his death triggered one of the war's most horrific reprisals. But for his four children, the … Read more

The briefing room held about 30 people, and not one of them wanted to be the man who had just spoken. Corporal Daniel Kovacs was 22 years old, the lowest-ranking soldier in a space filled with colonels, majors, and lieutenant colonels. For 15 minutes, the room had watched General George S. Patton trace a route … Read more

In the fall of 1944, somewhere behind the Third Army's line of advance, a chow line had been moving for 45 minutes. Private First Class Eddie Cortez had not left his station behind the serving table. He was 20 years old, from San Antonio, Texas, and he had been running mess operations for his battalion … Read more

Ninety seconds. That was the number, not two minutes, not a rough figure chosen for administrative convenience. Ninety seconds, stated in exactly those words in English to a man who understood English well enough that he did not need an interpreter. Patton said it once. He did not repeat it. He did not elaborate on … Read more