t1703 Karl Wolff, the SS general who served as Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and later claimed to have helped end the war in Italy, died in a hospital in Rosenheim in the summer of 1984, leaving behind one of the most troubling questions of the Nazi era: how did one of the most influential men … Read more
NORFOLK NAVAL BASE, Va. — When the gangplank dropped at this sprawling Virginia installation on June 4, 1943, and 2,500 veterans of Rommel’s Afrika Korps stepped onto American soil for the first time, they expected to find a nation on its knees. What they encountered instead, according to newly examined memoirs, Red Cross inspection reports, … Read more
Ihre Stimme klang schwach, als würde sie mit aller Macht gegen die Tränen ankämpfen. Ich hörte das erstickte Seufzen am anderen Ende der Leitung, und jedes Wort, das sie hervorbrachte, schien unendliche Kraft zu kosten. „Bitte, bitte, komm sofort. Es ist etwas Schreckliches passiert. ” Mehr brauchte ich nicht zu hören. Ich griff nach meinem … Read more
The family of Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death” knowingly sheltered, financed and visited Josef Mengele for more than three decades after World War II — and never faced a single day in court for it, a review of historical records confirms. Newly resurfaced testimony and declassified documentation reveal that the Mengele family of Günzburg, Bavaria, operators … Read more
Drei Tage vor meinem einunddreißigsten Geburtstag ertappte ich meine Schwiegermutter Margarete an unserem Küchentisch. Vor ihr lagen offizielle Dokumente, über die sie sich mit einer solchen Intensität beugte, dass sie das leise Knarren der Dielen nicht hörte. Als sie schließlich aufblickte und mich sah, zuckte ihr Gesicht für einen winzigen Augenblick – nicht mit Überraschung, … Read more
The children of Albert Speer, Hitler’s favored architect and one of the most notorious figures of the Nazi regime, gathered at Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat in 1945 to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons, blissfully unaware that within two years their father would be convicted as a war criminal and they would not see him again for … Read more
New historical research into the family of Irma Grese, the notorious SS guard hanged for war crimes in 1945, reveals a story of complete familial erasure that challenges long-held assumptions about how the relatives of Nazi perpetrators faced postwar justice. The woman known as the Hyena of Auschwitz went to the gallows at Hamelin Prison … Read more
My parents handed me a trash bag and told me to figure it out myself. My brother got the house. I got the sidewalk. I nodded, grabbed my backpack, and left. They had no idea the company I built was already paying me twelve million dollars a year. My name is Marcus. I’m thirty-one. I … Read more
In the pre-dawn darkness of December 16, 1944, the telephone lines at a forward American command post in Belgium erupted with a chorus of desperate voices, each one delivering the same catastrophic message: German forces were attacking in overwhelming numbers, units were being overrun, and commanders on the ground were begging for permission to retreat. … Read more
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Verdun, France — The two words that ended the siege of Bastogne arrived by telephone on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, and they did more than confirm a military breakthrough. They validated a promise that every senior commander in the theater had privately judged impossible, and they forced Dwight … Read more