On March 15, 1939, six months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in violation of the Munich Agreement. Adolf Hitler arrived in Prague, and on March 16 he established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by proclamation from Prague Castle. Konstantin von Neurath, … Read more
In September 1943, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies who had landed in Sicily weeks earlier. Germany responded by pouring troops into central and northern Italy, occupying cities, disarming Italian soldiers, and restoring control by force. As the fascist government collapsed, resistance grew. Italian partisans, many of them former soldiers, communists, and ordinary civilians, … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was over. Inside a secret Allied interrogation center known as Ashcan, the highest-ranking survivors of the Third Reich were gathered. Field marshals, generals, and the architects of the German war machine sat in simple chairs, stripped of their power and smoking American cigarettes. An American intelligence officer walked … Read more
On November 6, 1895, an 18-year-old girl was led down the aisle of St. Thomas Church in New York with red rims around her eyes. She had been locked in a room for weeks, her mother had threatened murder to break her will, and she had wept so long that the carriage was held outside … Read more
Charles Spencer released a document on Thursday morning that did what three decades of palace public relations could not: it proved that the accepted story of Princess Diana and Princess Anne was wrong. Not partially wrong, or missing a few details, but fundamentally the opposite of what actually happened. The timing of the revelation, the … Read more
When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the attack came months after the start of the Second World War. German bombers struck military airfields and barracks around The Hague as part of the assault. Adolf Hitler justified the attack with the false claim that Britain and France were planning to invade Germany … Read more
Prince Philip stood beside the British throne for more than seventy years. To the public, he was a decorated war hero, a man of duty, and the Queen's loyal husband. Before Buckingham Palace turned him into the perfect sidekick, he was a displaced prince, abandoned by nearly every member of his family before the age … Read more
On May 10, 1945, a single photograph landed on the desk of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces looked at it, and according to the account, his blood ran cold. The image did not show a battlefield or the horrors of a concentration camp. It showed a captured German field … Read more
When Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor on January 30, 1933, the Nazi regime moved quickly to strip civil and human rights from Jews and others deemed enemies of the state. The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened near Munich. Among those arrested were not only Jews and political prisoners but also thousands of homosexual men, … Read more
In 2019, a historian examining a collection of Civil War-era photographs at an auction house in Richmond, Virginia, noticed something unusual about a portrait of three young Black women. The image, dated 1863, showed the sisters in elegant silk gowns with their hands arranged in distinct positions on their laps. What appeared to be a … Read more