World War II began on September 1, 1939, after Nazi Germany launched a retaliatory campaign against Poland based on a false accusation that Poles had attacked a German radio station. Poland soon found itself fighting on two fronts when the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans … Read more
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was born on July 18, 1887, in Fyresdal in southern Norway. His father, Jon Lauritz Qvisling, was a Lutheran pastor and genealogist, while his mother, Anna Caroline Bang, came from a wealthy family in the Norwegian town of Grimstad. In 1905, the eighteen-year-old Quisling entered military college. Out of 250 … Read more
The Waffen SS was the elite of the German army during the Second World War, with a reputation for carrying out extremely daring operations. The armed forces of the SS were present from the invasion of Poland to the fall of Berlin into the hands of the Red Army. Accused of committing countless war crimes, … Read more
In 1927, 38-year-old sawmill operator Silas Cormac lived alone in a two-room cabin deep in the Appalachian Mountains, where he had run his family’s timber business for 15 years following his father’s death. The mill had been his entire world, and the solitude suited him. That October, everything changed. The leaves turned wrong colors, the … Read more
Among the senior figures of the Nazi regime, Ernst Kaltenbrunner stood out quite literally. He was six feet four inches tall and heavily scarred on the face. Born in Austria in October 1903, the son of a lawyer, he became one of the most feared men in the Third Reich and, from 1942, Heinrich Himmler's … Read more
When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, roughly 900,000 Waffen SS troops fell into Allied hands. They were not men lining up to face justice. They were scrambling to disappear. Contemporary photographs show them tearing insignia off their uniforms with bare fingers and claiming to be regular Wehrmacht soldiers. They blended into columns of refugees … Read more
Among the senior Nazis, one man stood out quite literally. Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was six feet four inches tall and heavily scarred, and from 1942 he served as Heinrich Himmler's second in command. Born in Austria in October 1903, the son of a lawyer, he was a childhood friend of the future war criminal Adolf … Read more
The story of Hermann Fegelein, as recorded in most history books and documentaries, is a simple one. Fegelein, the SS liaison officer to Himmler at the Führer's headquarters, was an arrogant and corrupt careerist who abandoned his post in the Führerbunker out of fear of falling into Soviet hands or dying in the Battle of … Read more
A 1861 daguerreotype that hung in a Charleston museum for 17 years as a standard example of an antebellum Southern family portrait has been revealed to contain a hidden message encoded by an enslaved woman in the background. The photograph depicts James Whitfield, his wife Catherine, and their four-year-old daughter Caroline posed elegantly in their … Read more
Lina Heydrich was born Lina Mathilde von Osten on June 14, 1911, in Fehmarn, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Jürgen, was an impoverished German nobleman of Danish origin who worked as a rural teacher, while her mother was a homemaker. The von Osten family was strongly right-wing, and Lina showed herself from … Read more