Mystery surrounds crashed WWII bomber
[2005-12-29] [thecouriermail]
It’s one of the largest aircraft to crash in Australia and up to 10 lives could have been lost when it hit the waters off Cape York during World War II. But no one knows the identity or country of origin of the massive bomber, discovered in 6m of water off the northern tip of Australia. “It would be easily the biggest aircraft, or as big as the biggest aircraft, ever to have crashed in Australia.”
850-page collection of excerpts from the Nazi leader’s speeches and proclamations
[2005-12-29] [chicagotribune]
Publishers are putting the finishing touches on their manuscript for a one-volume, 850-page collection of excerpts from the Nazi leader’s speeches and proclamations. The work, which will be marketed to the general public, is a distillation of a four-volume, 3,400-page collection of Hitler speeches that the firm has published in installments since 1990. At $39.95, the single book will be nearly $700 less expensive than the full scholarly set.
US judge orders Nazi death camp guard to be deported to native Ukraine
[2005-12-29] [guardian]
Three decades of attempts to deliver justice to a man accused of being a guard in Nazi concentration camps took a new twist yesterday when a US judge ordered the deportation of John Demjanjuk, an 85-year-old retired car factory worker. The judge ordered Mr Demjanjuk sent back to his native Ukraine, rejecting defence claims that he would face torture there. Mr Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002 after a court accepted documentary evidence that he had been a guard at several death or forced labour camps.
Professor on Hitler’s hit-list dies aged 106
[2005-12-29] [icnorthwales]
A leading North Wales academic, thought to be the last surviving Allied soldier captured on the Western Front during World War I, has died aged 106. In World War II he became a target of Adolf Hitler - who wanted him dead. Secret papers captured in France showed his name was on a Nazi “hit list” of intellectuals - basically a death sentence if the Germans ever invaded. By the time World War II broke out, was asked to speak to troops and spies about France. It was for this work his name found its way onto Hitler’s ‘hit list’.
POWs recall bizarre journey
[2005-12-29] [theadvocate]
In early 1945, Allied prisoners of Stalag Luft IV knew something big was about to happen. The Soviet army was closing in. “We knew we were going to get overrun, and we thought we’d be liberated.” Their German captors had other plans. After shipping out the weakest on train cars, the remaining 6,000 prisoners – the vast majority US airmen – were marched out of the camp. The temperature was 10 below zero. In a bizarre journey the prisoners were forced on foot for hundreds of miles through a crumbling Third Reich before finally being liberated by American forces in late April and early May. “I thought I’d died and went to hell,” Moreland said.
Allied forces held off the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge
[2005-12-28] [chicagotribune]
Retired Lt. Gen. Harry W.O. Kinnard remembers a place called Bastogne in Belgium, in the winter of 1944, the winter the boys would not come home for Christmas. “It was bitterly, bitterly cold,” Kinnard says. “The snow came up to our belly.” Paris was liberated. Berlin was on the horizon. Victory over Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich was only a matter of time. But Hitler gambled, launched a surprise offensive on Dec. 16, 1944, a fight that would be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans punched west with 200,000 troops and 600 tanks, creating a “bulge” in the American lines.
WWII: Creation of Synthetic Rubber Plant Was Exciting
[2005-12-28] [redorbit]
Nearly 65 years ago I was practicing a little chemical engineering to help start a large rubber plant in early 1943. Few of us at the time realized how important this plant was for the American economy and the war effort. The program created a huge industry in an unbelievably short period. It was the outstanding chemical engineering project in WWII. Without its success, the war would not have been won. When Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942, the US and its allies lost 95% of their source of natural rubber.
Germany’s Population Problems No Longer Taboo
[2005-12-28] [Deutsche Welle ]
The German government wants to combat the falling birth rate with better family policies. Tainted by controversial associations during the Nazi era, the issue was all but taboo until a few years ago. What remains indisputable is that pursuing an active population policy in Germany was frowned upon after WWII and the end of the Nazi regime. Nazi past had loaded the topic with terms like race research, race ideology and that’s why there was a great reluctance to even deal with the issue after World War II.
German held over ‘Chile torture’
[2005-12-28] [bbc]
A German doctor is in custody after allegedly admitting she tortured a number of children at Colonia Dignidad, a secretive religious colony in Chile. She was ordered to do so by the group’s ex-leader, Paul Schaefer, who said they were possessed. Mr Schaefer, a former Nazi and Baptist preacher, he established the 13,000-hectare (32,000-acre) colony in southern Chile in 1961, after fleeing Germany to escape child abuse charges.
No Smokers Need Apply
[2005-12-28] [charleston]
The World Health Organization wants to help tobacco users quit. It just doesn’t want to hire them until they do. Under WHO’s policy, if Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler applied for a job, only Hitler, the sole nonsmoker in the group (and someone who would not allow anyone to smoke near him), would be eligible for consideration.
Churchill wanted to sent Hitler to the electric chair
[2005-12-27] [thesun]
Churchill would have sent German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler to the electric chair if he was captured, and senior Nazis should be shot without trial. The documents consist of notes taken by Deputy Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook. At one meeting in Dec 1942, Churchill said: “Contemplate that if Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death.” and “This man is the mainspring of evil.” In April 1945, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison said that a “mock trial” for Nazi leaders would be “objectionable”. He said: “Better to declare that we shall put them to death.” Churchill agreed that a trial for Hitler would be “a farce”.
Dissecting Hitler - The Hitler Book
[2005-12-27] [moscowtimes]
Stalin felt betrayed by Hitler, but the German dictator also fascinated him. Why else would Stalin have commissioned a detailed study of the man who was his greatest enemy? The Hitler Book, officially titled “Affair No. 1-G-23: Concerning Hitler and his Associates”, purports to be a special study of Adolf Hitler prepared by security-police researchers at the behest of Josef Stalin, who sought to better understand the mind of his defeated foe. Based largely on information obtained from Hitler’s associates.
Repost: The man who succeeded Hitler
[2005-12-27] [bbc]
The man took over the Third Reich after Hitler committed suicide on 30 April, was not Field Marshal Hermann Goering, or SS chief Heinrich Himmler, but the head of the navy, Karl Doenitz. He did not last long in the job. He authorised the German surrender one week later, and was arrested by British forces on 23 May. Hitler and Doenitz became particularly close from the beginning of 1945. This was partly because Doenitz promised Hitler a “revolution at sea” to be achieved by new U-boats capable of remaining submerged for long periods.
Inside Hitler’s bunker - “I had to get something”
[2005-12-26] [zanesvilletimes]
When Lester Hurst was stationed in Berlin after WWII, he took the opportunity to visit Hitler’s bunker, the place where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. It was in the Russian occupation zone and they had strict rules for the visitors: No photographs, no souvenirs. “I had to get something,” Hurst said. “We were wearing these big overcoats, so I sort of ‘stumbled’ and grabbed a rock I had spotted.” Hurst was selected to be one of the honor guard at the Allied commanders meetings, including Gens. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and Russian and French generals - “I couldn’t pronounce their names,” Hurst chuckled.
Man recalls his teen years among the Nazis - not a typical war story
[2005-12-26] [heraldnet]
It begins simply: “Jan Makkreel spent his teen years in the Netherlands during the Nazi invasion and occupation of WWII.” A couple of pages later he drops a bomb: “I was labeled a teenage Nazi collaborator.” His uncle joined the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, to fight the Russians. His uncle had a friend who became part of the Gestapo, the secret police in Nazi Germany. Although his uncle asked him to join the Youth Storm in Holland, a group similar to Hitler Youth, “that military stuff was not for me,” Makkreel said… In spring 1945, even after his uncle had been shot and killed by a Dutch farmer, Makkreel remained a target of scorn, as he was labeled “Nazi lover”.
Couple relives bombing of Pearl Harbor
[2005-12-26] [6NEWS]
They remember exactly where they were when the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor put the U.S. in the Second World War. But they remember better than others because they were living in Honolulu near Allen’s duty station at Pearl Harbor. The start of the war coincided almost exactly with the start of their marriage. The Japanese sneak attack lasted nearly two hours, coming in two waves. When it was over, 2,400 Americans were dead, the U.S. Pacific fleet was crippled and the world had changed forever. Allen left immediately for his ship and arrived before the bombing was over. He came under fire at the gate to the harbor and later while taking a launch to his ship.
Nazis tried to steal Christmas as a part of re-paganize program
[2005-12-25] [Tribune-Herald writer]
The plan to take Christ out of Christmas was part of an overall program to re-paganize the German people during the rise of the Third Reich, in keeping with notions of Nazi “racial purity.” The religion of Hitler’s state was a “kind of murky pantheism,” a thinly veiled attempt to overlay paganized, nationalistic fervor over Christianity. Traditional Christianity was seen as “foreign” and suspect to the sovereignty of the Third Reich. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said he wished to do away with celebrations of Weinachten (Christmas) altogether.
Israel to seek cash for pre-WWII investments in Palestine
[2005-12-25] [afp]
Israel has passed a law to compensate relatives of Holocaust victims who bought property in British-mandated Palestine before World War II. Many European and American Jews bought property in British-mandated Palestine in the first half of the 20th century in keeping with their Zionist ideology aimed at setting up a permanent state in Biblical Israel. Thousands of Palestinians were forced or chose to flee their homes ahead of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
How would today’s media cover WWII?
[2005-12-25] [sun-sentinel]
In 1944, FDR’s official war aim of unconditional Nazi surrender was opposed by some who instead wanted to end the war with a negotiated surrender. The German goal was to capture Antwerp and split the Allied lines in half, a move that would have prolonged it for America, cost more lives, and increased the pressure for a negotiated peace that would have left the Third Reich in charge of Germany. Would our modern press have emphasized the failure of intelligence (missing the offensive), harped on the casualties, and declared unconditional surrender to be unachievable?
Hitler’s Third Reich in the News
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Hitler’s Third Reich in the News is a daily edited review of Third Reich and World War Two related news and articles.
