On the evening of January 30, 1933, in Berlin, just hours after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, his supporters marched through the Brandenburg Gate carrying torches. Within six months, every rival political party had been banned or dissolved, and Germany had become a one-party dictatorship. The Nazis promised more than a new political … Read more
One of the most notorious concentration camps established within the borders of Nazi Germany has once again become the focus of historical scrutiny as newly compiled documentation and survivor testimony shed fresh light on the systematic brutality that claimed the lives of more than 56,000 people at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945. The camp, established … Read more
Luxemburg. Fünf Minuten absoluter Stille. Kein Gebet, keine Bewegung, nur der Blick auf ein weißes Marmorkreuz. Am 28. September 1946 stand General Dwight D. Eisenhower auf dem amerikanischen Soldatenfriedhof in Luxemburg so lange regungslos vor dem Grab von General George S. Patton Jr. , dass die mitgereisten Fotografen unruhig wurden. Andere Generäle wechselten das Gewicht … Read more
Forty men stood outside a building on West 116th Street at midnight, waiting silently for a man they had come to confront. By the time dawn broke, the men were gone, and one man walked out of the building alone. The encounter in October 1952 became a defining moment in Harlem’s history, though the man … Read more
On June 20, 2011, the FBI did something it had never done for a top 10 fugitive. It stopped hunting James "Whitey" Bulger directly. Instead, it bought airtime on daytime television in 14 cities to run the photograph of a 60-year-old woman named Katherine Greig. There was a $100,000 reward attached. It was not for … Read more
The mound at Sorrel Bend sits on the west bank of Bayou Sorrel, at the point where the water makes its widest slow bend to the west before turning south again toward Lake Verret. It is a natural shell rise, packed oyster and clam built up by coastal peoples over thousands of years, standing about … Read more
On May 23, 1994, a Belgian-born diamond dealer stood at a Catholic altar on Park Avenue and read a Greek poem over Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. America called it the gentlest love story of her life. He was another woman's husband that morning, and had been for 45 years. Her will left him one item by … Read more
OSWIECIM, Poland — A brick building tucked inside the main Auschwitz compound served as the Nazi regime’s most feared instrument of interrogation and punishment, where prisoners were tortured with iron swings, suffocated in standing cells barely a square yard wide, and shot by the thousands against a concrete wall that still stands today. Block 11, … Read more
For more than fifty years, former Secret Service agent Clint Hill rarely spoke publicly about the emotions he carried from his years protecting Jacqueline Kennedy. When he finally began sharing his experiences through interviews and memoirs, audiences discovered a story very different from the glamorous image often associated with Camelot. His memories were not about … Read more
He was 20 years old. He had a fifth-grade education. He had never fired a shot in anger before Salerno. And on the morning of February 1, 1944, in a frozen wheat field about 6,000 meters from the Pennsylvania woods where his father taught him to hunt deer, Private First Class Alton Warren Knappenberger was … Read more