PN1501

Margarete Himmler is remembered less for her own actions than for her place beside one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany. As the wife of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, she shared his hatred of Jews and never questioned the morality of his work. Yet behind the scenes she was mocked by … Read more

Edith Frank, the mother of Anne Frank, was born on January 16, 1900, in Aachen, then part of the German Empire. Her parents, Abraham and Rosa Hollander, were wealthy Jews who traded in industrial equipment. Edith was the youngest of four children. She was 14 when her sister Betina died, and she had two brothers, … Read more

On the evening of January 30, 1933, in Berlin, just hours after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, his supporters marched through the Brandenburg Gate carrying torches. Within six months, every rival political party had been banned or dissolved, and Germany had become a one-party dictatorship. The Nazis promised more than a new political … Read more

On a warm afternoon in June 1782, on an open prairie in what would one day become Ohio, a 59-year-old man named William Crawford was tied to a post and burned for two to three hours before roughly 100 Lenape men, women, and children. Crawford was a Virginia surveyor, a colonel of Pennsylvania militia, and … Read more

The trapdoor opened under Thomas Ketchum in Clayton, New Mexico, on April 26, 1901. The rope took his head clean off. The body fell one direction, the head another. Photographers were already set up. The movies gave audiences the clean drop and the cut to black. The frontier gave something else entirely. What follows comes … Read more