♥ 6
→ 09 May 13 at 4 am
→ 09 May 13 at 4 am
“Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II” by Stephen Fritz (p 225- 226). (via derwolfsmantel)
Law of War
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. - Elie Wiesel
"Alfrons Heck puzzled that “a civilized, humane people had allowed ourselves to become indifferent to brutality committed by our own government.” Yet in the end his analysis verged on self-pity: “I developed a harsh resentment toward our elders, especially our educators. Not only had they allowed themselves to be deceived, they had delivered us, their children, into the cruel power of a new God.” Heck concluded that despite their enthusiastic support for Hitler, his generation filled the role of victim surely as those cruelly murdered by Nazi aggression: “Tragically, now, we are the other part of the Holocaust, the generation burdened with the enormity of Auschwitz. That is our life sentence, for we became the enthusiastic victims of our Führer.” Similarly, though confessing that, “I and with me millions of Germans turned to Hitler as the Führer, willingly fought and died honorably for him.”
♥ 6
→ 04 May 13 at 9 pm
→ 04 May 13 at 9 pm
The map of the Third Reich is being dramatically redrawn.
Thirteen years ago, when he started digging into the past to document the number and nature of Nazi-era ghettos and camps, scholar Geoffrey Megargee expected to identify perhaps 7,000 sites. He vastly underestimated his task. More than 42,200 sites will be named in the planned seven-volume encyclopedia that he is editing: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945.
(Source: kriegsrecht)
♥ 5
→ 12 Mar 13 at 5 pm
→ 12 Mar 13 at 5 pm
Almost half the musicians in the Vienna Philharmonic during World War II were members of the Nazi party, new research has revealed.
Today in WWII, on 12 March 1938. The “Anschluss”- the union between Nazi Germany and Austria took place- as German troops marched in to Austria.
♥ 43
→ 10 Jan 13 at 6 am
→ 10 Jan 13 at 6 am
I watched Jon Stewart’s bit on gun violence solutions today and something struck me as funny. There were a number of jerks parading across the screen claiming that Hitler banned guns during his run as der Fuhrer.
Now that I’ve studied Germany somewhat extensively from its unification in 1871 to present (most research I’ve done is WWII and GDR) I just couldn’t remember anything about a seizure of guns.
Well there wasn’t one. This is a good article about the fraudulent claim.
I wish more people were smart enough to at least find out for themselves.
(via gentleman-blackbird)
♥ 17
→ 18 Dec 12 at 5 pm
→ 18 Dec 12 at 5 pm
Read on, and you will discover why. This time of year, I always focus on members of the Greatest Generation. I think that is because of the observance of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and thoughts of the generation of men and women who lived through the greatest depression in our country’s history and the following events of World War II, which took so many lives and separated so many families for years at a time. I am a child of parents who lived those experiences, and I know that there is so much to learn from them. All you have to do is ask. History repeats itself, so why not prepare yourself for the future.
(Source: greatestgeneration)
♥ 152851
→ 08 Dec 12 at 3 am
→ 08 Dec 12 at 3 am
Seth Tara has shot an inspiring series for the History Channel entitled, “Know Where You Stand.” The set depicts modern people revisiting historic landmarks, with a black and white layer from the past.
History Channel Photos Series Shows Our Interaction With the Past
♥ 5
→ 21 Nov 12 at 2 pm
→ 21 Nov 12 at 2 pm
It was part of a very special air service crucial to the D-Day landings, but a carrier pigeon dispatched by the invasion force to relay secret messages back across the Channel never made it home to its base.
Instead the bird got stuck in a chimney only to be discovered 70 years later, it’s…
(via ifveniceissinking)
"For the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
♥ 14
→ 09 Nov 12 at 12 pm
→ 09 Nov 12 at 12 pm
The memorial on the site of the Old Synagogue in Wrocław (then Breslau).
Translation:
They have cast fire into thy sanctuary, they have defiled by casting down the dwelling place of thy name to the ground. Psalm 74:7
On this site on 9 November 1938, the biggest synagogue of Breslau’s Jewish community was burnt to the ground by Nazis. With this act of destruction began the death of Breslau’s Jewish children, women, and men. Honor their memory!
Sometimes I feel like the national motto of Poland is “on this site”.
(via gedenkenbrauchtwissen)
♥ 39
→ 08 Nov 12 at 11 pm
→ 08 Nov 12 at 11 pm
This Day In History: Munich Beer Hall Putsch
In 1923, Adolph Hitler attempted to bring the relatively new NSDAP to prominence in the German political scene. He attempted this by planning mass meetings throughout Germany in September of 1923, but these were all shut down by State Commissioner Gustov von Kahr, whom had been appointed after the Bavarian Prime Minister put the country in a state of emergency.
Following Mussolini’s example with his “March on Rome,” Hitler and the NSDAP party decided to start a revolution in Munich and begin to take control of Germany from there. On the evening of November 8th, 1923, Hitler and a detachment of 600 SA, along with Herman Goering and Rudolf Hess, surrounded Burgerbraukeller, a Munich beer hall where von Kahr was giving a speech in front of 3000 people.
Hitler marched in and fired a shot into the ceiling, announcing “The National Revolution has begun!” He ordered that nobody was to leave, and told von Kahr that the Bavarian government was no more. He announced the formation of a new government with him and WWI General Ludendorff. Threatening the Bavarian trimuvir government at gun point, von Kahr conceded and told of his support of the new governement.
Later that evening, Hitler let the leaders go and left the beer hall himself. The next morning, while the putsch was going nowhere, General Ludendorff and Hitler led a march as a show of strength. By that point, the Bavarian government had been able to mobilize themselves and quickly shut the revolution down.
Adolf Hitler was charged with treason and received the minimum sentence, during which time he wrote the infamous book “Mein Kampf.”
(via gentleman-blackbird)
Today in WWII on 10 Oct 1941: German Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau issued the “Severity Order” in which he ordered the annihilation Bolshevism and the extermination of Jews.
(Source: wwii-in-photographs)
♥ 462
→ 03 Oct 12 at 10 pm
→ 03 Oct 12 at 10 pm
October 3, 1942: The V-2 rocket becomes the first man-made object to reach space.
At the time of this launch, the V-2 was called the A-4 (Aggregat-4), the fourth and most successful design of Nazi Germany’s “Aggregate” set of rockets. All of this - the V-2 and Germany’s rocket program - was largely the creation of one Wernher von Braun, who, like many other German scientists, made enormous and indispensable contributions to the United States’s own space program. Although von Braun later stated that he had been “interested solely in exploring outer space”, the V-2’s intended purpose by his higher-ups was destruction (later in the war, it was renamed “V-2”, for “Vengeance Weapon 2”). A missile that could reach space could also potentially reach a city like London, which it eventually did, although the rocket’s potential for destruction was severely limited by its inaccuracy and unreliability.
Three test launches of the V-2 failed before the successful fourth, which was conducted at the Test Stand VII facility along the Baltic Sea. The rocket reached a height of around 90 to 100 km, or just enough to cross the boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere into outer space. Dr. Walter Dornberger, another leading figure in Germany’s rocket program, called that day “the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel…”. Perhaps he was correct in saying so, but the rocket was to fulfill its role as a weapon of war first. As a weapon, it was incredibly inefficient, despite the fact that its supersonic speed and high trajectory made it almost impossible to touch. In fact, more people were killed building the rockets than by any bombings conducted with them. For this reason and because these bombings began in the summer of 1944, this purported “miracle weapon” had a negligible effect on the actual course of the war.
After the war, the Allies (mostly the United States and Soviet Union) absorbed German rocket technology as well as the scientists who had developed it, and based much of their own rocket technology on the V-2. For this reason, the V-2 can be described as “the progenitor of all modern rockets”, serving as the model upon which the Redstone rockets (which took Alan Shepard into space) were based.
(via wwii-in-photographs)
♥ 77
→ 30 Sep 12 at 4 pm
→ 30 Sep 12 at 4 pm
Nazi death masks: Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), Erwin Rommel (1891-1944) and Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945).
♥ 17
→ 30 Sep 12 at 4 pm
→ 30 Sep 12 at 4 pm
This photograph of André Leducq, one of the Tour de France most iconic images, was used as a model by sculptor Arno Breker for his most famous work The Wounded Warrior (1940).
Early in the Second World War, Leducq was arrested by Germans for reasons unknown . The rider recounted after the war that things were not going his way while under detention and he began to have very grave worries about his safety - but then, he was saved by an unlikely hero: a high-ranking German officer, who had been watching him, suddenly said, “I know you - you’re Leducq” and let him go.
(via vorgestern)
