t1703 PARIS — The order that saved Paris may have been the one that was never given. On August 23, 1944, Gen. George S. Patton Jr. stood 20 miles from the French capital with the road to Paris wide open. His Third Army had just shattered the last German defenses outside the city. No enemy resistance … Read more
Third Army headquarters, Germany — In the final days of the European war, a captured SS officer walked into General George S. Patton’s command post in handcuffs and made a demand that would define how the American military would treat the remnants of Hitler’s most notorious organization: he insisted that an American lieutenant salute him. … Read more
Gen. George S. Patton ordered the arrest of more than 40 officers and enlisted men across the Third Army in February 1945 after uncovering a vast black market network that stole food, fuel, medicine and equipment meant for frontline troops and sold it to French civilians and German collaborators, according to military records and testimony … Read more
BUDAPEST — Two of the most notorious architects of the Holocaust in Hungary, Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre, were executed by public pole hanging before a massive crowd in the courtyard of the Marko Street Prison on the morning of March 29, 1946, bringing a dramatic close to one of the darkest chapters in the … Read more
BUDAPEST — Two of the most notorious architects of the Holocaust in Hungary, Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre, were executed by public pole hanging before a massive crowd in the courtyard of the Marko Street Prison on the morning of March 29, 1946, bringing a dramatic close to one of the darkest chapters in the … Read more
Meine Schwiegertochter Jasmin hat mir an diesem Abend direkt ins Gesicht gelacht. Wir saßen in ihrem neuen Wohnzimmer, das sie mit dem Geld eingerichtet hatten, das ich vierzig Jahre lang mühsam zusammengekratzt hatte. Sie lachte, weil ich in meinem einfachen braunen Kleid gekommen war, und sie sagte laut genug, dass alle es hören konnten, dass … Read more
LONDON — The woman the prisoners of Auschwitz called “the Hyena of Auschwitz” walked to the gallows without a tremor, and Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most seasoned executioner, would later set down in his memoirs that Irma Grese was among the calmest people he had ever hanged. She was twenty-two years old. The date was December … Read more
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads responsible for the mass murder of over a million Jews, Communists, Roma, and other targeted groups across Eastern Europe, faced a reckoning that was as incomplete as it was delayed, with only a fraction of the perpetrators ever answering for crimes that reshaped the moral landscape … Read more
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads responsible for the mass murder of over a million Jews, Communists, Roma, and other targeted groups across Eastern Europe, faced a reckoning that was as incomplete as it was delayed, with only a fraction of the perpetrators ever answering for crimes that reshaped the moral landscape … Read more
LUNEBURG, Germany — The British hangman worked in silence, methodically carrying out the sentences that a military court had handed down, and by midday on December 13, 1945, eleven former guards and officials of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were dead, their bodies buried in unmarked graves so that no sympathizer could ever turn their resting … Read more