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
"One thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own."
For Sophia Goldberg (98), Holocaust survivor, change has meant the end of a way of life.
posted by zarq
on Dec 1, 2011 -
34 comments
Dissolve my Nobel Prize! Fast! It's 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen. They are literally marching through the streets, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear.
posted by sweetkid
on Oct 3, 2011 -
70 comments
The Ropes at Disney's - 1943 Employee Handbook. The good old days when women got twice as much sick leave, the Penthouse club was accessible by "men only! - sorry gals...", and a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act could get you fired.
posted by madamjujujive
on Sep 26, 2011 -
52 comments
Nearly seventy years ago, 10,000 Japanse Americans were forcibly relocated to
Heart Mountain, just outside Cody, Wyoming; they were part of a larger group of more than 120,000 men, women, and children
incarcerated in War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps due solely to their ancestry. This past weekend, about 100 survivors of the camp -- led by the delightfully named
Bacon Sakatini -- returned to this remote corner of Wyoming to celebrate the grand opening of the
Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center.
Of the ten WRA camps, Heart Mountain had the only
organized resisters movement, which was started in 1944 by seven men who formed the
Fair Play Committee to protest the drafting of Japanse American men while their families remained imprisoned -- leading to the largest draft resistance trial in U.S. history.
posted by scody
on Aug 25, 2011 -
43 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
A Holocaust survivor raised a fist to death. 'Leon Weinstein survived the Warsaw Ghetto. But it is the story of the little girl that he wants to tell.' 'He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us. Walking away, he could hear her whimper, but forced himself not to look back until he crossed the street. Then he turned and saw a man step out of the apartment. The man read Weinstein's note. He puzzled over the baby. Cradling Natalie in his arms, the man walked half a block to a police station and disappeared inside.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Aug 5, 2011 -
29 comments
While most Westerners are familiar with the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes, fewer Westerners know much about the war crimes committed by the Japanese military throughout Asia, particularly the human medical experiments conducted by
Unit 731. [more inside]
posted by The ____ of Justice
on Jun 7, 2011 -
95 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
WWII German soldiers speak about their experiences. 'The myth that the Nazi-era German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, was not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war. Now two German researchers have destroyed it once and for all. Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide.''What already seems hardly feasible for current military operations like the war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible when it comes to an event that happened so long ago as World War II. Nevertheless, two German historians have managed to produce precisely such a documentary of perceptions of the war using live historical recordings.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Apr 10, 2011 -
41 comments
Last year, the unofficial Dean of the White House Press Corps,
Helen Thomas, spoke about the State of Israel on camera.
(Previously) Her
replies:
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jews
"can go home" to
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," sparked media
outrage, prompted her to issue an apology and
retire. After months of being out of the the public spotlight, she has now given
her first long-form interview, which will appear in the April issue of Playboy Magazine. In it, she explains what she meant, tells us how she would like to be remembered and expands upon her positions regarding Israel, Jewish political influence, Presidents Bush and Obama, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
posted by zarq
on Mar 22, 2011 -
224 comments
Richard Sullivan has
posted the 16mm color footage his father shot of the "spontaneous celebrations that broke out upon first hearing news of the Japanese surrender" on Kalakaua Ave in Waikiki on August 14th, 1945.
posted by zzazazz
on Feb 11, 2011 -
44 comments
Rediscovering WWII's female "computers". While researching a documentary in Philadelphia, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson came across two women with a story she'd never heard before: thousands of women with advanced mathematical skills employed as "computers", working day and night during WWII to supply soldiers in the field with precise ballistics algorithms. Some of those women also went on to program
ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer (
previously). Erickson turned their stories into
Top Secret Rosies, a documentary released to theaters last year and to DVD this month. One of those programmers, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik,
spoke at length to the Computing History Museum in 2008. [youtube, 1:07:19] [
via]
posted by Errant
on Feb 8, 2011 -
32 comments
"Just months before the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union, they had nothing better to do than to obsess about this dog." Introducing Jackie, the
Finnish dog that
infuriated the Nazis.
posted by naju
on Jan 7, 2011 -
69 comments
The House of Sharing is a place for the Halmoni to to live together and heal the wounds of the past while educating the future generations of the suffering they survived.
The View From Over Here details her visit to the House of Sharing, a therapeutic group home and museum for surviving "comfort women", who were systematically raped by the Japanese military during World War II. The museum displays art for and by the survivors. Via
Ask a Korean.
[more inside]
posted by ignignokt
on Dec 17, 2010 -
5 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
Mr. Vonnegut talked about my dad a lot and put him into a lot of his books. Sometimes he was Dad, and sometimes he was just a character Mr. Vonnegut made up. So what I would say to any of you who are wondering is this: My dad was what people called a real character, which always made us laugh because it was so literally true owing to his association with a famous fiction writer. He could also get pretty obnoxious. But he was a good man. And he definitely wasn’t crazy. At least not until the brain tumor.
Kurt Vonnegut Didn't Know Doodly-Squat About Writing: Finally, Literary Analysis Worth Reading by Bernard V. O'Hare, with an introduction by Meghan O'Hare.
posted by shakespeherian
on Nov 3, 2010 -
49 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
