Herta Ehlert was one of the 45 male and female Nazi SS guards who faced justice in 1945 during the Belsen trials for crimes committed during World War II in brutal Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Ehlert was born on March 26, 1905, in Berlin. Before the war, she worked as a … Read more
In August 1966, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a 60-year-old Harlem figure with a failing heart, walked into a darkened garage on the city’s West Side where 12 armed members of a biker gang were holding his daughter, Elisha, hostage. He carried a single katana. The confrontation lasted 72 minutes and would end in a scene of … Read more
BAVARIA, Germany — The laughter echoing from Interrogation Room 4 stopped exactly thirty seconds after Gen. George S. Patton walked through the door, and the silence that followed would haunt German Maj. Gen. Heinrich Kessler for the rest of his life. It was April 1945, and the Third Reich was collapsing. Kessler, commander of the … Read more
Karl Hermann Frank rose through blood and treachery to become the Nazi overlord of Czechoslovakia. Known as the "bloody dog," he served as secretary of state and chief of police. In that role, Frank controlled the Nazi police apparatus in the protectorate. This included the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany. It was Frank … Read more
In 1948, Harlem was a kingdom, and its king was Bumpy Johnson. His reign was built on respect, fear, and an understanding of the unwritten rules that governed New York’s underworld. But that year, a Brooklyn mobster named Tony Delucci decided to test the king. He kidnapped Bumpy’s pregnant wife. It was a move he … Read more
On March 14, 1952, Bumpy Johnson faced a 48-hour ultimatum: surrender Harlem or watch it burn. Forty men in hoods were ready. One man—Red Carter—was chained in a Queens basement. Bumpy ended the conflict without firing a single shot. His plan began ten days earlier, on March 4, when the Northern Order delivered its threat. … Read more
Before dawn on November 19, 1875, a dying man waded into the Rio Grande. The water was cold and rose past his waist. Behind him in the darkness, a few dozen young men followed the sound of his coughing across the river, out of Texas and into another country. The country on the far bank … Read more
Third Army headquarters received the message on a March morning in 1945, and the instruction it carried was, by any conventional measure, entirely reasonable. Bypass Trier. The city would require four divisions to capture. Do not commit forces to the assault. Continue the advance. The logic was sound in the abstract. Trier was a significant … Read more
Henry VIII’s reign is remembered for his six marriages, but it was his first, to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, that lasted the longest and set the stage for the turmoil that followed. Katherine of Aragon was born on December 16, 1485, the youngest child of Spain’s Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II … Read more
In 1987, a crew in Queens, New York, was pulling in $200,000 a day. Then their leader went to prison. Most crews fall apart when the boss goes down. This one got more dangerous. The man who stepped up was not a businessman or a negotiator. He was the type to walk into a room … Read more