Pamela Beryl Digby was born on March 20, 1920, at Farnborough in Hampshire, the eldest daughter of a family whose blood was old and whose money was thin. Her father, Edward Kenelm Digby, was the 11th Baron Digby, master of Minterne, a handsome house set in the green folds of Dorset. It was the picture … Read more
NUREMBERG — Alfred Jodl, the German general who served as Adolf Hitler’s chief military adviser and signed the orders that sent countless soldiers and civilians to their deaths, was hanged here today after the International Military Tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was 56 years old. The … Read more
Paul Vario died on May 3, 1988, in a federal prison medical ward in Fort Worth, Texas. He was 73 years old, his lungs destroyed by a lifetime of Chesterfield cigarettes. Half a country away from the Brooklyn streets he once controlled, the man federal prosecutors called one of the most violent and dangerous career … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was ending. The U.S. Third Army was pushing through Bavaria, liberating concentration camps as it advanced. Near the town of Dachau, General George S. Patton's forces discovered a nightmare made real. The gates were open and the prisoners were free, but freedom did not erase what had been … Read more
In April 1939, an Albanian car hastily converted into an ambulance carried a woman who was the queen of the country she was being driven out of. She was 23 years old, had given birth to her first child just two days earlier, was still bleeding from childbirth, still feverish, and still unable to sit … Read more
One of the most sadistic perpetrators of the Holocaust, a Soviet prisoner of war turned SS auxiliary guard known to survivors as “Ivan the Terrible,” personally tortured, mutilated and murdered thousands of Jewish men, women and children at the Treblinka extermination camp before vanishing without ever facing justice for his crimes. Ivan Marchenko, born on … Read more
In September 1944, in a village in Lorraine in eastern France, the Germans had been gone for three days. They had pulled back quickly, the way they were pulling back everywhere that autumn. Trucks, columns, dust on the road to the east, and then silence. The village of Vieilleville-sur-Flenne had been occupied since 1940. For … Read more
Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager whose diary became the conscience of the Holocaust, was murdered by the Nazi regime not in a single act of violence but through a calculated system of starvation, disease and neglect that consumed her in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, only weeks before British forces liberated the site. … Read more
Inside a radio tent at Third Army headquarters in January 1945, the static cut through air that felt as brittle as broken glass. Corporal Leo Stern, 22 years old, sat hunched over a brass telegraph key. His fingers were stiff with cold, and his eyes stayed fixed on a distress log resting beside his elbow. … Read more
Corvus Hailey spent his entire life within a 50-mile radius of a specific stretch of trail known as the Hollow Corridor. A trained observer, he served as a backcountry ranger in the central Appalachian range, where he documented a series of acoustic anomalies, compass deviations, and unexplained disappearances. In 1931, two years after he vanished, … Read more