One of the last surviving members of the Edelweiss Pirates, a group of rebellious teenagers from western Germany who formed a resistance network against the Nazis, has died aged 82:
Jean Jülich [more inside]
posted by Mister Bijou
on Feb 7, 2012 -
19 comments
From 1935 to 1951, Time Magazine bridged the gap between print & radio news reporting and the new visual medium of film, with
March of Time: award-winning newsreel reports that were a combination of objective documentary, dramatized fiction and pro-American, anti-totalitarian propaganda. They “often
tackled subjects and themes that audiences weren’t used to seeing —
foreign affairs,
social trends, public-health issues — and did so with a combination of panache and subterfuge that today seems either absurd or visionary.”
(Previous two links have autoplaying video.) By 1937, the short films were being seen by as many as 26 million people every month and
may have helped steer public opinion on numerous issues,
including (
eventually) America’s
entry to WWII. Video samples are available at
Time.com, the
March of Time Facebook page and the entire collection is available online,
(free registration required) at
HBO Archives. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Aug 22, 2011 -
8 comments
Early 1940: British police listening for radio transmissions from German spies within the UK pick up weird signals, and pass them to
Bletchley Park, the United Kingdom's main decryption establishment in WWII. The source of these German messages is an unknown machine, which the Brits dub
Tunny (10 minute video with
Tony Sale describing the Tunny). August 30, 1941: German operators send two very similar messages with the same key, providing insight into the encryption scheme. By January 1942, British cryptographers deduced the workings of the German code machines, sight unseen. The British were able to create their own Tunny emulators to decrypt messages sent by German High Command. After the war, these and other British code-breaking and emulating machines were demolished and/or recycled for parts and their blueprints destroyed, leaving a hole in the history of the British WWII code breaking. Efforts to rebuild the British Tunny emulator started in the 1990s, and quite recently
a Tunny emulator replica was completed.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 30, 2011 -
12 comments
802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 13, 2011 -
30 comments
Robert F. Gallagher served in the United States Army's 815th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion (Third Army) in the European Theater during WWII. He has posted his memoir online:
"Scratch One Messerschmitt," told from numerous photos he took during the war and the detailed notes he made shortly afterwards.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 23, 2010 -
7 comments
In the scale of its intensity, its destructiveness and its horror, Stalingrad has no parallel. It engaged the full strength of the two biggest armies in Europe and could fit into no lesser framework than that of a life-and-death conflict which encompasses the earth. - The New York Times, February 4, 1943
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Oct 27, 2010 -
61 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 23, 2010 -
9 comments
Though the
B-2 Spirit is perhaps the best-known of the
flying wing designs, its creation came almost 50 years after the earliest attempts at creating fixed-wing aircraft with no definite fuselage. The first prototypes of Frenchman
Charles Fauvel's flying wings followed the patent on his formula for the flying wing in 1929. Jack Northrop's newly formed Northrop Aircraft Co. created the first flying wing for the United States in 1940, dubbed
Northrom N-1M "Jeep". But it was the
Horten Brothers, German aircraft pilots and enthusiasts, who created the first fully-functional stealth flying wing: the
Horten Ho IX.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 24, 2009 -
32 comments
"When you’re on your own in that pit with the bomb in the middle of a city, it’s strange how everything suddenly goes totally quiet..."
Interview with one of Germany's most experienced bomb disposal experts as he retires.
Photogallery.
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on Oct 17, 2008 -
19 comments
Secret agent Huub Lauwers was
parachuted into occupied Holland in 1941 to relay intelligence back to London. His capture by the Germans marked the beginning of the
Englandspiel, a deadly game of cat-and-mouse intelligence that cost the lives of over fifty agents. Lauwers frantically tried to inform the
SOE that he had been caught, but the
Baker Street Irregulars just didn't get it. Or
did they? [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Aug 6, 2006 -
16 comments
He has
cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW] and
covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but
Jürgen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank".
Teller's first solo show in Paris is entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of
a sequence of images (annoying Flash site, sorry) taken at the infamous
Zeppelintribune parade ground,
site of Nazi propaganda rallies, which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over several months,
Teller (.pdf) has photographed the monument, the podium and the steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not. "It wasn't really maintained, but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be mysteriously replaced with a new one."
Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers and lichen [NSFW] that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany, there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that events will eventually be forgotten".
posted by matteo
on Mar 22, 2006 -
19 comments
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis,
Adam Czerniaków was made
head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders
in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 --
Tisha B'Av, the "
saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that
all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the
most prominent Holocaust
scholars,
Raul Hilberg. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 17, 2006 -
23 comments
The London Cage. Kensington Palace Gardens is
one of the most exclusive addresses in the world. Between July 1940 and September 1948 three magnificent houses there were home to one of Great Britain'smost secret military establishments: the London office of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, known colloquially as the London Cage. It was run by
MI19, the section of the War Office responsible for
gleaning information from enemy prisoners of war, and few outside this organisation knew exactly what went on beyond the single barbed-wire fence that separated the three houses from the busy streets and grand parks of west London.
The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. A number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Nov 12, 2005 -
12 comments
The Edelweiss Pirates - Not all German kids joined the Hitler Youth in the 1930's and 40's. A loosely-knit group of thousands of
working-class teenagers called
the Edelweiss Pirates existed in Cologne and nearby towns. Growing out of a
youth hiking group (rather than
swing dancing), they created their own anti-Nazi subculture through clothing and protest music. Many were arrested for tagging the city with anti-Nazi graffiti and working with the Underground--and they eventually killed the head of the
Cologne Gestapo in 1944. Orders to root them out came from Himmler himself, and
some were hung in the streets or killed in the camps. Their story is now being told in
a film playing at
film festivals around the world, including its European premiere in
Berlin a few weeks ago. But the surviving members' criminal records officially remain on the books in Germany.
posted by Asparagirl
on Mar 9, 2005 -
42 comments
The mystery of Stefan Mart and the 'Tales of the Nations'. "The Tales of Nations" was not an ordinary book that you could buy in a book store, and it's mysterious narrator/illustrator disappeared into the darkness of Hitler's Germany, seemingly without a trace. Learn the background, read the stories, and view all 150 fabulous colour illustrations — "small in size, but strong in expression, each a microcosm packed with action, each a feast for the eyes like a beautifully set jewel".
posted by taz
on Jan 9, 2005 -
20 comments
What do you do with an eyesore built by a madman? [Geocities site, caress lovingly before clicking] During WWII, Hitler built several Flakbunkers around the city of Hamburg, to act as self-contained civilian shelters and defensive posts. After the war, the British tried to blow them up. And failed, on two accounts. The buildings still stand today, squat and romanesque remnants of a horrible period in the city's history. So, in a show of Hanseatic League moxie, the citizens of Hamburg have converted one of them into a
disco. [warning: Flash, and starts with music]. There are better pictures of the truly hideous exterior
here and
here. A timely reminder, this Tuesday morning, that poor decisions can have long-reaching and unintended consequences. What will your grandchildren have to turn into a disco?
posted by condour75
on Nov 5, 2002 -
40 comments
Amazing Photo of real hand to hand combat. The page is in Greek but the (600K) picture on top is, I think, worth your while. This is a photo taken by a British liaison officer to the partisans in the Greek island of Crete during WWII (named John Eberson or Emberson), as a group of guerillas confronts a German patrol. What is amazing is the fact that Emberson reached for his camera instead of his gun... This is the closest view of a combat situation
I've ever seen captured on film - does anyone know of anything similar on the web? Caption translation inside this thread's comments.
posted by talos
on May 25, 2001 -
11 comments
![cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW]](http://www.kunsthallewien.at/downloads/presse/Teller/09)Louis%20XV%20no.%203.jpg){kind=link}