t1703 Two generals climbed out of a staff car at a quiet villa near Ulm on the afternoon of October 14, 1944, carrying an ultimatum signed by Adolf Hitler himself. By the time they drove away, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the most celebrated German commander of the Second World War, was dead, and his wife and … Read more
The woman who drove Dwight D. Eisenhower through three years of world war, who sat beside him at Allied headquarters from North Africa to Normandy, and who allegedly loved him enough to believe he would leave his wife for her, died in a small apartment in Southampton, New York, in January 1975, having spent three … Read more
Mit vierzig bist du einfach nur noch peinlich, sagte meine Mutter ins Mikrofon, und zweihundert Gäste hörten, wie mein Herz für einen Moment stehen blieb. Ich stand in einem Hochzeitssaal am Starnberger See, hielt mein Champagnerglas fest und lächelte, als hätte sie gerade das Wetter erwähnt. Meine Schwester Marlene saß neben ihrem Bräutigam Jonas in … Read more
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE — The Western Alliance came within minutes of catastrophic collapse in January 1945, not under German fire, but under the weight of a single British field marshal’s ambition, as three American generals drafted resignation letters that would have shattered the Allied command structure on the eve of the Rhine crossing. … Read more
LONDON — The most humiliating moment of Bernard Montgomery’s war did not come at the hands of a German panzer commander, but from a colonial general he had spent three years trying to bury. In February 1945, on the frozen approaches to the Rhine, Britain’s most celebrated field marshal was forced to hand his finest … Read more
The family of Adolf Eichmann, the chief logistics officer of the Holocaust, vanished into a quiet suburban life in Buenos Aires under a false name for fifteen years before Israeli agents seized him from a street corner on May 11, 1960, tearing apart a household that had been built on one of history’s most carefully … Read more
Joachim Peiper, the notorious Waffen-SS colonel convicted of the Malmedy massacre, was killed in his sleep on the night of July 13-14, 1976, when his home in the quiet French village of Traves was firebombed by unknown assailants, ending a 30-year manhunt that formal courts could never complete. French authorities confirmed the charred remains found … Read more
The four children of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust known as the Butcher of Prague, spent their lives navigating a world that would never let them forget their father’s crimes, and newly examined records reveal how they survived on stolen property, defended by a mother who denied the atrocities to her dying … Read more
A woman of the Tudor era was executed by a method so rare and so brutal that it has survived in historical memory as one of the most horrifying judicial killings ever carried out on English soil. She was pressed to death beneath the weight of her own door, a punishment reserved for those who … Read more
A woman of the Tudor era was executed by a method so rare and so brutal that it has survived in historical memory as one of the most horrifying judicial killings ever carried out on English soil. She was pressed to death beneath the weight of her own door, a punishment reserved for those who … Read more