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Adolf Hitler called him the man with the iron heart. Reinhard Heydrich never commanded an army and never held a crowd at Nuremberg. He is not the face most people picture when they picture the Third Reich. Yet of all the men who served it, he may have been the most dangerous. He did not … Read more

The morning of August 15, 1944, found a supply convoy rolling through the newly cleared roads of Brittany, France. For two months, the Americans had been pushing the Germans east, Patton’s Third Army advancing at a pace that sometimes reached fifty miles a day. The route this convoy traveled had been swept of the enemy … Read more

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II. After the Polish Army was defeated, the Germans launched a brutal campaign of suppression against the Polish people, whom they considered racially inferior. In the weeks that followed, SS police and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including members of the nobility, … Read more

On the evening of May 23, 1945, Heinrich Himmler—Reichsführer of the SS, architect of the Holocaust, and by then perhaps the most hunted man in Europe—lay dead in a British interrogation center in the northern German town of Lüneburg. The official story was simple: Himmler, captured the day before while trying to slip through a … Read more

On August 25, 1942, a Sunderland flying boat emerged from low cloud over a barren Scottish hillside and struck the ground at full power. Fourteen men died. One man crawled from the tail of the wreckage and walked through the night, then spent the next 35 years refusing to say what he knew. Among the … Read more

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the most powerful weapon in human history erased the center of a Japanese city. For the next 31 hours, Japanese radio did not say a single word about it. The Americans in a position to notice were sitting in a converted farmhouse on the eastern edge of Portland, … Read more

In the summer of 1864, the newspapers of the North were filled with long columns of fine print—lists of the dead and missing. City by city, family by family, people bent close to the pages, searching for a name they prayed they would not find. As those names accumulated week after week, a single word … Read more

The morning of May 19, 1836, began quietly for nine-year-old Cynthia Anne Parker. She was playing near the open gate of Fort Parker, a small stockade of split-timber walls on the Navasota River in central Texas, when the horizon changed. A line of dust, then a line of horses, then a line of warriors painted … Read more

On the first of February 1908, an open carriage carrying the royal family of Portugal rolled through the Terreiro do Paço on the Lisbon riverfront. There was no significant security detail. Two Republican agitators, Alfredo Luís da Costa and Manuel Buíça, stepped forward and opened fire with rifles. King Carlos I was killed instantly. His … Read more

Carwood Lipton was not looking for war when he found it. In 1942, he was a young man from Huntington, West Virginia, supporting his family after a car accident had killed his father and left his mother paralyzed. He had put aside his studies at Marshall University after just one year, taking a job in … Read more