In photographs of Germany's senior military commanders during World War II, one object appears again and again in their hands. It is not a pistol or a map case, but a short, heavily decorated baton gleaming with gold and silver fittings. It was not a weapon and had no practical use in combat. This was … Read more
On December 22, 1944, a 19-year-old soldier from a small town outside Worcester, Massachusetts, sat on the running board of a supply truck on a frozen road in southern Belgium. He had not eaten a hot meal in three days. His hands were cracked at the knuckles, and his boots were wet through. He did … Read more
For more than a decade, millions of Koreans believed Seo Taiji, one of the country’s biggest music icons, had never married. Then in 2011, a legal case revealed something nearly unbelievable: he had secretly married actress Lee Ji-ah years earlier in the United States, lived as her husband, separated, and divorced without the public knowing … Read more
Lauri Törni was born on May 28, 1919, in the town of Viipuri, then part of independent Finland and today the Russian city of Vyborg. His father, Hjalmar Törni, was a ship captain, while his mother, Rosa Maria (Kosonen), managed the household. He had two younger sisters, Salmi and Kaija. The family was stable and … Read more
In the history of the Wild West, Billy the Kid remains the figure most people remember. Yet behind the famous gunman stood companions whose stories are often overlooked. One of them was Tom O'Folliard, a close friend of Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War. Thomas "Bigfoot" O'Folliard was a notorious outlaw who served … Read more
Josef Kramer was born on November 10, 1906, in Munich, then part of the German Empire. He joined the Nazi Party in December 1931 and the SS in 1932. From 1934 until the end of the war, he worked in various concentration camps, including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen. When the Nazis established Auschwitz in 1940, … Read more
In 1933, the German city of Nuremberg was given over entirely to spectacle. For four days, between August 30 and September 3, thousands of uniformed men marched, saluted, and cheered beneath enormous banners bearing the swastika. Torchlight processions filled the nights, and the sound of massed crowds filled the days. It was the first Nuremberg … Read more
Gerhard Palitzsch was born on June 17, 1913, in the village of Grossopitz near Dresden, then part of the German Empire. A farmer by profession, he joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933. His career in the concentration camp system began the same year, when he became a guard at the Oranienburg and … Read more
In March 1939, just months after the seizure of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich Agreement. German forces occupied Bohemia and Moravia, turning the region into a puppet state under the protectorate system. Adolf Hitler arrived in Prague, and German authority was installed from Prague Castle. At … Read more
Yakov Dzhugashvili was born on March 31, 1907, in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. He was the son of Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze, a young Georgian woman, and Joseph Dzhugashvili, a revolutionary activist who would later become Joseph Stalin. At the time of Yakov's birth, Stalin was still a rising Bolshevik involved in underground … Read more