WWII history

Heinrich Himmler: How a fake stamp led to the Nazi SS leader's capture

A document vital to the capture of top Nazi Heinrich Himmler has been unearthed in the UK 75 years after his death. The items belonging to the SS leader, found in the possessions of a judge, are now due to go on display.

On 22 May 1945, a trio of odd-looking men were spotted by a patrol near a checkpoint in Bremervörde, northern Germany.

It was just a few weeks after World War Two had ended but many Nazis were still at large and there were fears some might try to regroup or escape.

Two of the men, wearing smart long green overcoats, were walking ahead of a third man. The trailing figure, sporting an eye patch, looked broken and dishevelled. The pair in front kept glancing back as if to make sure he was still there.

They were taken to a checkpoint where British soldiers asked to see their papers. They handed over the A4-sized identity document German soldiers were given at the end of the conflict which listed their name, rank, date of birth and other information. The third man's papers said he was a sergeant named Heinrich Hizinger.

WWII history

Last Nazi message decoded by Britain revealed to mark VE Day

The last recorded Nazi message intercepted and decoded by Britain in World War II has been revealed for the first time to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day.
This note, written by GCHQ Analysts at BletchleyPark in WWII, shows the final message from the German BROWN network: "Closing down for ever -- all the best -- goodbye."
The message -- released by the UK's intelligence and security organization Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- shows the final words broadcast by a German lieutenant just before surrendering to British forces outside his building on Germany's northern coastal town of Cuxhaven.
On May 7 1945, the lieutenant named "Kunkel" sent colleagues a final farewell message at 7:35 a.m. before closing their communication network "forever."
"British troops entered Cuxhaven at 14:00 on 6 May -- from now on all radio traffic will cease -- wishing you all the best. Lt Kunkel," the message read. "Closing down for ever -- all the best -- goodbye."

WWII history

Albert Einstein's atomic bomb warning letter that 'stopped Hitler winning WW2' revealed

On the eve of the 75th anniversary since the Allies formally accepted Nazi Germany’s surrender in World War 2 – known as Victory in Europe Day – it’s easy to forget just how close Adolf Hitler came to overtaking the world with his fascist Nazi philosophy. Today, nuclear weapons are just another part of the huge military arsenal possessed by nations across the world as a constant deterrent against military conflict, but in 1939 the idea of a nuclear bomb was alien. But, a year earlier, in December 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch made the startling discovery of nuclear fusion in a Berlin laboratory that would immediately revolutionise nuclear physics and lead to the atomic bomb.

Fears among scientists who were refugees in Germany soon became heightened over the possibility of Hitler getting his hands on the breakthrough and so, in August 1939, Hungarian-born physicists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner drafted a letter that would change the course of history.

The document read: "In the course of the last four months it has been made probable – through the work of [Frederic] Joliot in France as well as [Enrico] Fermi and [Leo] Szilard in America – that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. 

WWII history

The man who stopped the war: 97-year-old recalls VE Day coded message

“I finished it,” says Gregory Melikian, 97, “but my heroes are the guys that hit the beaches, so many of whom never came back.”

Seventy-five years ago, in the early hours of 7 May 1945, the supreme allied commander Gen Dwight Eisenhower selected Sgt Melikian, then a 20-year-old radio operator, to send the coded message to army groups and allied capitals announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Of the three operators working in the Reims school that housed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Melikian was the youngest, an enlisted Illinois University student shipped to France just the year before, and that made him first choice for the US general.

“We were across the hall from the war room [where the German surrender was signed by the German general Alfred Jodl],” says Melikian. “There was a guy from Texas aged 36, another guy from South Carolina, 27 or 28, and yours truly. Eisenhower’s exact words were: ‘I want Melikian to send this coded message and talk about it for the rest of his life.’ It was 74 words to the world saying that tomorrow, 8 May, at 11.01pm, hostilities will cease and that we will stop shooting at each other.

WWII history

Stalin, FDR, Project Zebra and a crash everyone tried to pretend never happened

An aircraft on a secret mission for the Russians crashed into the Pasquotank River near Elizabeth City almost 75 years ago.

For decades it was kept secret.

Elizabeth City locals knew little to nothing about it.

The flight was part of a collaboration between President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet Union premier Joseph Stalin called Project Zebra.

The United States entered a lend-lease agreement to supply the Soviet Union with a modified version of the PBY Catalina, a seaplane with a primary mission of bombing submarines.

That Russian model, known as the PBN-1 Nomad, featured more fuel capacity and a longer range.

The Navy produced 185 of the large aircraft at a shipyard in Philadelphia, according to a book by M.G. Crisci.

WWII history

How Methamphetamine Became a Key Part of Nazi Military Strategy

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that speed is “the essence of war.” While he of course did not have amphetamines in mind, he would no doubt have been impressed by their powerful war-facilitating psychoactive effects. Amphetamines—often called “pep pills,” “go pills,” “uppers” or “speed”—are a group of synthetic drugs that stimulate the central nervous system, reducing fatigue and appetite and increasing wakefulness and a sense of well-being. The quintessential drug of the modern industrial age, amphetamines arrived relatively late in the history of mind-altering substances—commercialized just in time for mass consumption during World War II by the leading industrial powers. That war was not only the most destructive war in human history but also the most pharmacologically enhanced. It was literally sped up by speed.

Few drugs have received a bigger stimulus from war. As Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom wrote in their classic 1975 study The Speed Culture, “World War II probably gave the greatest impetus to date to legal medically authorized as well as illicit black market abuse of these pills on a worldwide scale.”

WWII history

Nazi Germany's King Tiger Heavy Tank: Super Weapon or Super Flop?

Nazi Germany's Tiger is arguably the most famous tank of World War II. With its thick armor and devastating 88-millimeter gun, the Mark VI—or Tiger I—soon earned a devastating reputation on the battlefield.

Designed as a breakthrough tank for breaching enemy defenses, and allocated to a handful of special heavy tank battalions, the sixty-ton Tiger I seemed to have it all: firepower, armor and for an early 1940s vehicle that weighed as much as today's M-1 Abrams, it was fairly agile. With its square, castle-like shape and long cannon, the Tiger I even looked deadly. But Hitler's generals and weapons designers were not satisfied. With Teutonic perfectionism, they complained that the Tiger I's KwK 36 gun was not the most powerful version of the 88-millimeter cannon (not that Allied tankers would have noticed the difference). Even before the Tiger I debuted on the battlefield (floundering in the swamps near Leningrad in an ill-advised attack in September 1942), work had begun on a successor.

Enter the Tiger II, or Konigstiger (King Tiger). At seventy-five tons, it was bigger than its predecessor. Its longer-barreled (and thus higher velocity) KwK 43 88-millimeter cannon could penetrate five inches of armor at a range of two kilometers (1.2 miles). With Sherman and T-34 crews having about two inches of frontal armor between them and eternity, no wonder a supersized Tiger must have seemed the devil on treads.

WWII history

Singapore's hidden military secrets

Inside the dimly lit underground bunker, 12 military commanders are about to trigger the largest capitulation in British military history.

At 9:45 a.m. on February 15, 1942, Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival and 11 other senior officers agreed to surrender the British Empire's forces, numbering more than 120,000 in Malaysia and Singapore, to the Japanese, whose troops numbered under half that.

They made that decision from within "the Battlebox," a secret and heavily fortified underground military bunker that's been turned into a museum at Fort Canning Hill in Singapore.

After 70 days of brutal jungle warfare, Percival's crew was short on ammunition, food and water.

"The primary defense of the British Empire rested on the defense of Singapore. From there, Britain could span her entire empire in Asia," explains Battlebox director Jeya Ayadurai. But surrender soon became the only option.

Percival's decision would not just open the darkest chapter in Singapore's modern history -- it also sparked the unraveling of the British Empire.

WWII history

The Battle of the Bulge: German deception and advanced weapons couldn't turn the tide of the war

The last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front has become known as the "Battle of the Bulge" for the thrust into the Allied lines.

For the Americans, this was to be the largest and bloodiest single engagement of the Second World War, and also the third deadliest campaign in American history.

It began 75 years ago on Dec. 16, 1944, and while it caught the Allied forces off guard, in the end, the German Army failed to meet its objectives and the battle essentially exhausted the Germans of their resources.          

Despite its failure, for the Germans, the battle is notable for several reasons. It highlighted that even in the late stages of the war the German military was able to mount such an offensive, but also that the Germans were able to utilize deception in a way the Allies hadn't expected. Moreover, the German military was also rolling out advanced military hardware – including small arms that would influence weapons development to this day.

WWII history

This Is How Volkswagen Aided Nazi Germany's World War II Effort

The Volkswagen, or “People’s Car,” that so many millions have known for more than half a century had its genesis in Nazi Germany. Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the Volkswagen, had to share the concept with none other than Adolf Hitler. And though the Volkswagen may have first been intended for use as a civilian recreational vehicle, it was quickly transformed into three basic military iterations: the Kommandeurswagen (commander’s car), Kubelwagen (bucket car), and Schwimmwagen (amphibious car). The VW’s transformation into a military vehicle was a rapid metamorphosis over which Porsche had no control.

...When Hitler took power, Porsche announced his concept of a small, inexpensive car at the 1933 Berlin Auto Show. At the show, Hitler promised to transform Germany into a truly motorized nation. Porsche and Hitler met in May 1934 to discuss plans for the “People’s Car.” Porsche outlined the specs he had in mind. The car would have a one-liter displacement air-cooled motor, producing approximately 25-brake horsepower at 3,500 RPM, weigh less than 1,500 pounds, with four-wheel independent suspension to reach a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour. Hitler added specs according to his own vision: the car was to be a four-seater, get 100 kilometers per seven liters of gasoline, and maintain 100 kilometers per hour. Porsche proposed that the car be priced at around 1,550 marks ($620 at 1934 exchange rate).

WWII history

Collective burial of Nazi-era anatomical specimens

On May 13, 2019, the Department of Anatomy, Berlin Charité University Hospital, Berlin, Germany, buried more than 300 microscopic slides discovered on a property that formerly belonged to anatomist Hermann Stieve.

1

 Although not stated,

1

 the slides are presumed to derive from Stieve's research at the Anatomical Institute, Berlin University, Berlin, Germany, during World War 2, on the effects of stress on female reproductive organs.

Some of the slides had names of the victims from whom the sample was taken. These names should have been made public to honour them, and details should have been disclosed concerning the unnamed slides and the wider victim group.

Since 1990, medical institutions in Germany have been burying their scientific specimens in anonymous collective burials, and the most recent slide burial is an example of an ongoing denial of the identity of research victims during World War 2.

One alleged reason for anonymising the slides is to honour the wishes of the victims' descendants, which stems from a bioethical position that the present has primacy over the past. This raises the question as to whether collective anonymisation can be reasonably justified on what might be the imputed doubts of just a single descendant? Such rationale for anonymisation and concealing the details of a victim's identity (from when the specimen was taken to the present day) occurs routinely in Germany. Should honouring the victim not take primacy (as is the case in Holocaust history)? Giving living relatives primacy transposes a wartime atrocity into the sphere of normal clinical ethics.

This normalisation is highly problematic. Stieve's research victims included Mildred Harnack and Libertas Schulze-Boysen from the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) resistance group.

2

 Stieve's full list

2

 of 174 women and eight men is available, but the failure to disclose the names on slides and the names of the wider group of people who were included in the research disconnects the burial from the historic list.

WWII history

The Untold Story of the Secret Mission to Seize Nazi Map Data

The fighting for Aachen was fierce. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands.

Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Army Maj. Floyd W. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Hough had a degree in civil engineering from Cornell, and before the war he led surveying expeditions in the American West for the U.S. government and charted the rainforests of South America for oil companies. Now he was the leader of a military intelligence team wielding special blue passes, issued by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, that allowed Hough and his team to move freely in the combat zone. Their mission was such a closely guarded secret that one member later recalled he was told not to open the envelope containing his orders until two hours after his plane departed for Europe.

In Aachen, their target was a library.

HOUGHTEAM, as the unit was known, was made up of 19 carefully selected individuals. Four were highly educated civilians: an engineer, a geographer who had worked as a map curator at the University of Chicago, a linguist who spoke five languages, and the dapper son of an prominent Kentucky family who’d grown up mostly in Europe as the son of a brigadier general posted to various capitals as a military attaché...

WWII history

Nazi intelligence documents for Adolf Hitler's Operation Sea Lion plan to invade and conquer Britain go up for auction for £7,000

Nazi intelligence documents which would have been used to support Hitler's Operation Sea Lion, a plan to invade and conquer the UK, are to be put up for auction today.

The original documents, which are valued together at around £7,000, contain detailed information on the UK that was so sensitive, copies of the documents were initially seized by British intelligence after their existence became known.

Now, almost 80 years later, their pages will be made available to one discerning buyer.

According to information made available by the Henry Aldridge auction house, the plans were first gathered by SS General Walter Schellenberg who prepared this book for the Gestapo to be distributed to any arriving occupation forces.

It represented an incredible snapshot of how the Nazis saw Great Britain and her Empires. 

But most chillingly, it was a literal blueprint for the occupation of Britain after a proposed invasion by Nazi Germany.

WWII history

The Lies About World War II

In the aftermath of a war, history cannot be written. The losing side has no one to speak for it.  Historians on the winning side are constrained by years of war propaganda that demonized the enemy while obscuring the crimes of the righteous victors.  People want to enjoy and feel good about their victory, not learn that their side was responsible for the war or that the war could have been avoided except for the hidden agendas of their own leaders. Historians are also constrained by the unavailability of information. To hide mistakes, corruption, and crimes, governments lock up documents for decades.  Memoirs of participants are not yet written.  Diaries are lost or withheld from fear of retribution.  It is expensive and time consuming to locate witnesses, especially those on the losing side, and to convince them to answer questions.  Any account that challenges the “happy account” requires a great deal of confirmation from official documents, interviews, letters, diaries, and memoirs, and even that won’t be enough.  For the history of World War II in Europe, these documents can be spread from New Zealand and Australia across Canada and the US through Great Britain and Europe and into Russia.  A historian on the track of the truth faces long years of strenuous investigation and development of the acumen to judge and assimilate the evidence he uncovers into a truthful picture of what transpired. The truth is always immensely different from the victor’s war propaganda.

WWII history

Why a Nazi Nuclear Bomb Never Happened (And the World Was Saved)

The most nightmarish of World War II alternative history scenarios is the one in which Nazi Germany acquires atomic weapons. In fact, by the spring of 1945, when America’s massive nuclear program was reaching its culmination, the Nazi atomic program consisted of one experimental reactor in a cave in southern Germany, operated by scientists who lacked a clear conception of how to build an atomic weapon.

Even if the German scientists had known what they were doing, they still lacked suitable radioactive material to produce a weapon. One of World War II’s most remarkable and controversial stories is just how the Nazi atomic program came to this sorry pass.

The potential power of atomic energy is a corollary of Einstein’s famous Theory of Relativity equation, E = MC2. Simply put, the equation means that all matter is energy. To determine the energy contained in any bit of matter, one need only multiply its mass times the square of the speed of light. As the speed of light is somewhere in excess of 186,000 miles per second, the resulting number is correspondingly huge.

Early in the 20th century, physicists realized that if it was possible to release the atomic energy in a piece of matter, say a brick, they could create a doomsday weapon. Fortunately, the atoms in bricks, and in almost all ordinary matter, are quite stable and not likely to erupt in an atomic chain reaction. However, by the mid-1930s, experiments with the unstable element uranium revealed the potential to tap into its store of nuclear energy and create machines of awesome power.

WWII history

How a Nazi Submarine Somehow Sneaked into a Royal Navy Base and Sunk a Battleship

World War II had been in progress for six weeks when on the evening of October 12, 1939, the German submarine U-47 surfaced off the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. While the officers standing in the conning tower observed the twinkling lights ashore to the west, only the captain, Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, knew the purpose of their mission. Security surrounding it had been so tight that only now, with the climax approaching, would it be possible to tell his men the reason for so daring a foray into enemy waters.

Following a night of observation, U-47 submerged and withdrew eastward. As it settled on the bottom, the motors were cut and Prien ordered the crew to assemble in the forward mess. The time had come to reveal to these young men—average age of 20—that the following day, they would be entering Scapa Flow.

A Symbolic Mission

Scapa Flow had a special significance to the officers and men of Germany’s Kriegsmarine. It was at Scapa Flow that the pride of Germany during World War I, the High Seas Fleet, with which it had sought to challenge the Royal Navy for control of the seas, had been scuttled, laid to rest in a final defiant act following the defeat of its armies in northern France and Flanders. There, its ships lay as they still do, in 15 fathoms of water. The superb natural harbor provided ample protection for large numbers of British warships and a perfect position from which to intercept German vessels attempting to escape into the North Atlantic. Prien was proposing an extraordinary act.

WWII history

There Was a Spy Inside Hitler's SS. Here's What He Did to Stop the Nazis

On June 8, 1942, with the Second World War at its height, a Nazi officer in civilian uniform entered the Institute of Hygiene in Berlin and was shown into the office of Major Kurt Gerstein. The visitor brought an order from his superior, Adolf Eichmann, of the Reich Security Main Office: Gerstein was to collect a large quantity of a special gas from a secret factory and deliver it to a location in Poland.

The gas was Zyklon B, a variant of hydrocyanic or prussic acid, which released deadly fumes on contact with the air. Its use was not discussed.

Gerstein already knew. Earlier that year he had received a briefing document about the creation of “necessary” buildings in an occupied Poland “for the gassing of the Jews.” Gerstein suspected that Zyklon B was the means by which the mass murder would be accelerated.

WWII history

CIA Document Makes Explosive (If Outlandish) Claim: Hitler Survived World War II

The Soviets and then the Russian Federation claimed for years to have some remains of Hitler, though the bodies of both he and Eva Braun, his longtime lover turned wife, were hastily cremated. Still, Moscow claims they recovered partial remains.
A document on the Central Intelligence Agency’s website makes an explosive, if outlandish, claim: Adolf Hitler survived World War II.

“CIMELODY-3 [a code name] was contacted on 29 September 1955 by a trusted friend who served under his command in Europe and who is presently residing in Maracaibo,” the acting intelligence chief in Caracas, Venezuela sent to his supervisor days later, on October 3, 1955. “CIMELODY-3's friend stated that during the latter part of September 1955, Phillip CITROEN, former German SS trooper, stated to him confidentially that Adolph HITLER is still alive." It continued, “CITROEN commented that inasmuch as ten years have passed since the end of World War II, the Allies could no longer prosecute HITLER as a criminal of war.”

“The source thought it worthy of sending up to HQ which is notable,” a source in the Department of Defense tells me. “Even at the time, those guys had to do a lot of separating the wheat from the chaff.”

WWII history

July 5 marks 75 years since start of history’s largest armor battle

July 5, 2018, marks 75 years since the beginning a landmark operation of World War II, the Battle of the Kursk Salient. Historian Alexei Issayev has prepared this comment for TASS regarding the combat operation has gone down in the military history of the world as the largest-ever battle of armored troops.

By April 1943, the impulse for the offensive, which the Red Army received after the crushing defeat of Nazi forces near Stalingrad at the beginning of the same year was largely warn out and the Soviet troops went over to defensive operations at the recommendation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Armed Forces, Marshal Georgy Zhukov.

Switching over to the defensive tactics seemed to be only correct decision. For the first time since the beginning of the war on the Soviet front, the Soviet military commanders received the data on the enemy’s plans. The German forces were preparing for an offensive under a plan codenamed Zitadelle [Citadel] that envisioned the leveling of a bulge in the German-held areas near the city of Kursk [530 km to the south of Moscow], the encirclement of Soviet troops there and a further breakthrough deep into the Soviet territory.

WWII history

Come Aboard the Bismarck: Nazi Germany's Deadly Battleship

In May 1941, Admiral Sir John C. Tovey, commander of the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, was ordered to attack the German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen that had just been spotted in the Denmark Strait. Tovey’s fleet consisted of two new battleships, King George V and Prince of Wales, the battlecruisers Hood and Repulse, and the aircraft carrier Victorious, plus many additional cruisers and destroyers. Also hurrying north to join him was the older battleship Rodney, mounting nine 16-inch guns, the largest caliber in the fleet.

Of all the German surface warships, the British feared Bismarck the most. Her size, speed, and firepower made her a definite threat to Allied shipping in the Atlantic, and it was imperative that she be neutralized.

On May 21, 1941, Hood and Prince of Wales left Scapa Flow with six destroyers under the command of Admiral Lancelot Holland flying his flag in Hood, their mission to provide heavy support to the cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk covering the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland––one of the likely routes the German naval squadron would take to reach the North Atlantic. The rest of the fleet was gathering to cover the area between Iceland and the Orkney Islands.