q1903

When people think of the marijuana trade in late 20th-century America, they usually picture Colombian and Mexican cartels smuggling drugs across the border. Fewer know that, at the same time, an organization inside the United States was producing as much marijuana as the cartels imported — perhaps more. Operating largely unnoticed, this network harvested hundreds … Read more

Lavrentiy Beria was one of the most powerful and feared men in the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin himself compared him to Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Nazi SS. Beria served as Stalin's chief of secret police and became the longest-lasting and most influential of the Soviet leader's security chiefs. Beria came from humble beginnings. … Read more

After the end of the Second World War, a series of war crimes trials sought to bring the perpetrators of atrocities and crimes against humanity to justice. When the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as the Third Reich fell, they encountered a scene of depravity and suffering. Around ten thousand bodies lay throughout the … Read more

On December 21, 1945, at 5:47 p.m., General Dwight Eisenhower sat in his office at the Farbin Building in Frankfurt, Germany, reading a cable from the 130th Station Hospital. General George S. Patton Jr. had died at 5:50 p.m., twelve days after a car accident near Mannheim. He was sixty years old and paralyzed from … Read more

On the morning of January 11, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt read his intelligence brief before breakfast at the White House. He had been president for twelve years, managing economic collapse, world war, and the daily difficulty of leading a democracy that did not always wish to be led where it needed to go. The file that … Read more

At 6:41 on the morning of January 3, 1945, the war room at 12th Army Group Headquarters in Luxembourg City was already running at full hum. Signals traffic moved in and out. Situation maps were being updated. Overnight reports from six different corps were being assembled into the picture that Omar Bradley would read over … Read more