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HOUFFALIZE, Belgium — A captured German sniper stood barefoot in blood-stained snow at a frozen crossroads outside this shattered Ardennes town today after Gen. George S. Patton Jr. personally ordered the confiscation of insulated American paratrooper boots the prisoner had stripped from a murdered U. S. Army medic, according to sworn accounts from soldiers who … Read more

On March 14, 1935, in Harlem, New York, a mafia boss crossed a line that could not be uncrossed. He struck the sister of Bumpy Johnson inside a neighborhood store. Nine days later, the man was still alive. But he had vanished from New York permanently. It was not revenge in the usual sense. It … Read more

Cold wind swept through broken stone arches in the German city of Trier in March 1945. Eight-year-old Martha stood bent in the shadow of a collapsed brick wall, clutching a battered blue metal cup with paint worn away at the rim. Inside the pocket of her oversized wool coat was a faded wooden doll that … Read more

The question of what happened to Adolf Hitler after World War II has refused to die quietly for nearly eighty years. Was he truly the man who perished in a concrete bunker beneath the ruins of Berlin on April 30, 1945? Or did he somehow vanish into the chaos of a collapsing empire, slip aboard … Read more

In October 1944, near Nancy, France, General George S. Patton Jr. entered a damp, abandoned chateau and found something that shook even him. On a mahogany desk lay high-detail German situation maps from the OKW, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. They were not maps of German defenses. They were maps of Patton's own Third Army. Patton … Read more

Croatia is a place that few people could find on a map even today, yet this corner of the former Yugoslavia ended up as one of Hitler's staunchest allies. As Germany swallowed up Europe between 1939 and 1941, the Nazis sought allies from among the conquered peoples and found many who shared their racial and … Read more

TRier, Germany — A white West Point lieutenant who deliberately refused to salute a Black colonel on a gravel path at Third Army headquarters in March 1945 learned within hours that his pedigree would not shield him from the wrath of Gen. George S. Patton. The confrontation, witnessed by roughly 200 soldiers in the headquarters … Read more