Nazi Germany

A German federal court has charged a 95-year-old man for being partially responsible for the deaths of thousands of people during the Second World War. The individual, who has been identified only by his first name and surname initial (Hans H) for legal reasons, served as an SS guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria. […]

Xinjiang, China—A play from the Nazi playbook or an honest effort to deal with extremism? The Chinese government has just legalized the use of concentration camps for Uighur Muslims. The camps have been erected in Xinjiang, a western region in China. Human rights organizations report that detainees are forced to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to […]

By September of 1943, World War II was not going well for Nazi Germany. The Russians had routed the German attack at Kursk and had the strategic initiative. The German Afrika Korps had been pushed across and out of North Africa. German cities were routinely being bombed by American bombers during the day and British […]

While economically struggling, Russia has a long history of deriving national pride from military parades celebrating past victories. Last Thursday, Russian forces participated in just such an event: a parade commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Kursk. In 1943, some 1.9 million Soviet soldiers alongside more than 5,000 tanks participated in what would […]

This January I made a big change: I left sunny (and financially ruined) Greece to live in the U.K., specifically, the city of Cambridge. The city is beautiful and very different to what I’ve been use to. Nature surrounds you here: ten minutes outside of the city center and you see foxes and deer. In the […]

In telling the stories of war, we have a natural inclination to focus on the action, the drama of the front lines. Heroes, villains, and violence unlike most people have ever seen has a unique way of grabbing at the human attention span, luring us in with via own aspirations of heroism, or our own […]

On April 12, the world remembers the millions who died in the Holocaust during World War II at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers. In the state of Israel, it is known as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, where it is observed as Israel’s day of commemoration for the […]

The picture above was taken on April 5, 1935, exactly 83 years ago today. One look at this picture and one can already surmise the difficulties Germany may have had after the fall of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler — just because the military and political infrastructure were defeated did not mean that all […]

Warsaw, Poland — Poland’s President, Andrzej Duda, has signed a bill outlawing speech that blames Poland for Nazi Germany’s war crimes against the Polish in WWII. Though Duda has already signed it, it still has to pass Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal before it can take effect. The law permits authorities to imprison anyone for up to three […]

World War II got off to a bad start for the British. About two weeks after Poland surrendered to Germany at the end of September — succumbing to a month of the Nazi blitzkrieg — the British battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a U-boat, claiming more than 800 British sailors. That was followed in short […]

The events of November 9-10, 1938 in Germany sealed the fate of the Jewish population in Germany and set the stage for the horrible, unspeakable events that were to follow in what we now call the Holocaust. Hitler’s henchmen all had a deep-seated hatred of the Jews and on the flimsiest of pretenses, they organized […]

The topic of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and the debate surrounding them has come up frequently over the course of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The era of perpetual conflict we find ourselves in has led to an unprecedented and rapid growth of military technology and tactics. But the urge to make the warfighter […]