Adolf Hitler walked out of Landsberg prison in December 1924 and returned to Munich to find his Nazi Party in chaos. The Bavarian government had banned him from public speaking, the tool he had used most effectively as an orator and demagogue. For a man who built his appeal on his voice, the restriction was … Read more
Eva Braun first met Adolf Hitler in 1929, when she was 17 years old and working for a Nazi party photographer. She was 23 years younger than him. Braun had been Hitler's mistress for 14 years, but the relationship was kept hidden from the German people. Hitler wanted to remain attractive to his female admirers, … Read more
In the autumn of 1944, in a shattered valley in Northwestern Europe, an SS sniper fired a single shot that killed an unarmed American medic. The medic had been crouched over a wounded rifleman, trying to apply a tourniquet to a leg destroyed by shrapnel. His helmet was clearly marked with a red cross. The … Read more
On April 28, 1945, Berlin was a bombed-out, burning ruin. The Red Army had reached the city's eastern suburbs on Hitler's last birthday, April 20, and had spent the past eight days steadily surrounding Berlin and fighting toward its center. The government quarter was still heavily defended. Some 5,000 SS troops held the massive official … Read more
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, became one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern era. The death of a young, democratically elected and deeply beloved president ignited decades of speculation about who was really responsible. Countless books, movies, and investigations have tried to uncover whether a hidden cabal … Read more
Adolf Hitler never trusted or liked most of his generals and field marshals. The reasons ranged from class envy to a deep disdain for the traditional German general staff system. Many of Germany's senior officers came from aristocratic families, a fact reflected in the noble "von" that preceded so many surnames. Hitler, by contrast, had … Read more
LETHBRIDGE, Alberta — In June 1940, a German soldier named Franz Wesper stood at the edge of a Canadian prisoner-of-war camp and stared at the horizon, searching for the fence that was not there. There was no barbed wire. There were no guard towers. There were no machine guns pointed down at him from above. … Read more
For the ordinary soldier in World War II, the paycheck was rarely the point. Armies provided food and shelter for obvious reasons, so a private's real wage was whatever he could send home or spend on cigarettes, entertainment, personal items, and civilian clothes. This look at five Allied and participating nations ranks the base pay … Read more
World War II was enormously expensive for the nations that fought it, and unmistakably profitable for the arms companies that supplied them. Equipping entire armies was a vast logistical and financial burden. One useful way to measure that burden is to look at a single item: the standard infantry rifle. What did it cost a … Read more
On the morning of November 8, 1965, a hairdresser let himself into a Manhattan townhouse and walked into a scene the world would soon call an accident. Lying in a bed she famously hated, in a room she had not slept in for years, was Dorothy Kilgallen. She was cold and stiff. She was wearing … Read more