Category Archives: Second world war

‘Treasure trove’ of unseen letters sent by Charles de Gaulle up for auction

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Lot includes ‘very unusual’ correspondence between celebrated general and American singer Josephine Baker

A stash of never-before-seen correspondence and artefacts belonging to the former French president Charles de Gaulle, including coded letters he wrote to his mother while he was a German prisoner in the first world war and messages from the American singer Josephine Baker, is to go on sale after its unexpected discovery earlier this year.

The correspondence is part of a “treasure trove” of documents and personal belongings belonging to de Gaulle, found in a safe in a bank vault, that will be auctioned in Paris next month.

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Gulag History Museum in Moscow temporarily closed ‘for safety reasons’

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Kremlin critics fear move is part of Russia’s efforts to whitewash Soviet past and shut independent cultural institutions

Moscow’s award-winning Gulag History Museum announced its surprise closure on Thursday, a move critics attribute to the Kremlin’s efforts to whitewash Russia’s Soviet past.

The closure was officially put down to alleged violations of fire safety regulations but comes amid an intense campaign by Russian officials against independent civil society and those who question the state’s interpretation of history.

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Starmer to join Macron on Armistice Day in Paris to show European solidarity

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British and French leaders will discuss Ukraine and defence amid fears for future of Nato after Trump’s re-election

Keir Starmer will join Emmanual Macron in Paris for the French Armistice Day service in a pointed show of European solidarity days after Donald Trump’s re-election, with Ukraine and defence on the agenda for private talks between the two leaders.

The visit will have a symbolic element with Starmer becoming the first UK leader to attend France’s national commemoration event since Winston Churchill in 1944.

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Families seek to clear names of men who refused to fight for former Dutch colony

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Conscientious objectors refused to take part in military campaign against Indonesian independence in 1940s

Families of 20 men who were jailed for refusing to fight to preserve the former Dutch colony in Indonesia have formally asked for their names to be cleared, arguing that instead of “deserters, traitors and cowards” their relatives deserve to be recognised as having been on the right side of history.

An official investigation into the period when Dutch colonies asserted their independence after the second world war found a failed military campaign in Indonesia had systematically used “excessive violence” and massacred hundreds of innocent villagers, whose families eventually won compensation.

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Hospitals evacuated in Cologne after discovery of second world war bomb

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1,000kg US ordnance to be defused at building site after complex evacuation that also included thousands of homes

Authorities in the German city of Cologne have evacuated three hospitals and thousands of homes after the discovery of an unexploded second world war bomb during construction work on a new medical campus.

The 1,000kg US aerial bomb, equipped with a front and rear impact detonator, is due to be defused on Friday.

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Buried US second world war bomb explodes at Japanese airport

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Unexpected blast at Miyazaki airport makes crater in taxiway and leads to grounding of 80 flights but no injuries

A US bomb from the second world war that had been buried at a Japanese airport has exploded, causing a large crater in a taxiway and the cancellation of more than 80 flights but no injuries, Japanese officials said.

Land and transport ministry officials said there were no aircraft nearby when the bomb exploded at Miyazaki airport in south-western Japan on Wednesday.

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Show shines light on overlooked artist who made UK’s first Holocaust memorial

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Work of German-Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis, who fled Nazis in 1930s, is subject of exhibition in London

The work of an overlooked German-Jewish artist who created the UK’s first memorial to victims of Nazi persecution is to be the focus of an exhibition that shines light on the unreported aspects of his life.

Fred Kormis, who fled Germany in the 1930s and later became a British citizen, was described by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London as a forgotten émigré artist who played a unique role in Weimar culture and 20th-century British art.

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Dutch row over which victims of Nazis get ‘stumbling stone’ plaques

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Commemorations of 45 people ‘experimentally’ gassed reveal dark moments in the Netherlands’ history

They call them stumbling stones – little brass plaques in the pavement marking addresses where Holocaust victims once lived.

As the Netherlands marks 80 years of liberation, a row has sprung up about placing Stolpersteine for 45 Dutch political prisoners – Jewish activists, communists, critical Christians – who were “experimentally” gassed by the Nazis at the Bernburg psychiatric clinic in Germany in 1942.

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Foreign Office officials said Rishi Sunak should attend D-day event, book reveals

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Department twice provided written advice to No 10 before mistake that came to define Sunak’s election campaign

Senior officials at the Foreign Office repeatedly warned No 10 that Rishi Sunak should not leave June’s D-day commemoration in Normandy early, according to new revelations in a book about the Tories’ 14 years in power.

The department passed on two messages to Downing Street in the weeks leading up to the event, which were then ignored in what has gone down as the worst election campaign blunder of the last 14 years.

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More than 200 unexploded second world war shells found near Solomon Islands school

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Police dug up and removed the rust-caked projectiles, which belonged to US troops during the second world war

Workers at a school in Solomon Islands discovered a buried stockpile of the second world war munitions as they “dug a hole for sewage”, police said.

More than 200 rust-caked projectiles – which once belonged to US troops – have been dug up and removed after they were found near a school staff member’s house, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force said.

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German court rejects appeal by ex-Nazi secretary over role in 10,500 murders

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Irmgard Furchner, 99, was found guilty in 2022 of being an accessory to killings at Stutthof concentration camp

A German court has rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,500 murders during her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the second world war.

The federal court of justice upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 by a state court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

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Sheffield war memorial caretaker hails ‘marvellous’ response after tools stolen

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Tony Foulds, who maintains shrine to airmen he saw die in 1944, to have kit replaced after TV’s Dan Walker steps in

Tony Foulds and his friends had gone to the local field to fight some kids from a rival primary school when he heard a noise overhead.

It was 1944 and he was used to the sound of German aircraft over the skies near Sheffield. But this was an aircraft he’d never seen before. It was a B-17 Flying Fortress, an American heavy bomber, and it was on fire.

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Einstein letter warning FDR of threat of Nazi nuclear bomb set to fetch $4m

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Two-page letter written by physicist and fellow scientist, for sale at Christie’s, urged US government to invest in research

A two-page letter written by Albert Einstein warning Franklin D Roosevelt – then the president of the US – that Nazi Germany might harness nuclear research to invent an atomic bomb is going up for sale at Christie’s auctioneers in September with an estimate value of $4m.

Einstein’s letter – one of two the theoretical physicist drafted in a cabin on the north shore of New York’s Long Island with a fellow scientist, Leo Szilard – warned that the German government was actively supporting nuclear research and could make “extremely powerful bombs” like the kind that were eventually deployed by the US at the end of the second world war.

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Oldest ever US organ donor believed to be 98-year-old man

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Orville Allen, second world war and Korean war veteran, died on 29 May and his liver was successfully transplanted

Orville Allen lived a lifetime of service, and when he died at age 98 he had one last thing to give: his liver.

Allen, a veteran of both second world war and the Korean war and a longtime educator in rural south-eastern Missouri, is the oldest American to ever donate an organ, transplant organizations said. He died on 29 May and his liver was successfully transplanted to a 72-year-old woman, according to Mid-America Transplant.

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Biden and Macron use D-day event to emphasise support for Ukraine

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Leaders rally behind Zelenskiy to make clear to Putin that, as in 1944, freedom in Europe is worth fighting for

Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron have marked the 80th anniversary of D-day with a rallying cry for support for Ukraine as Volodymyr Zelenskiy was embraced by western leaders in Normandy.

The US president used his address at the American commemorative event to send a message to Moscow that the US and its allies “will not bow down” and will “stand for freedom”.

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D-day: Biden calls for supporting Ukraine in struggle against ‘dark forces’

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President warns at 80th anniversary that democracy is under greater threat than at any time since second world war

Joe Biden has marked the 80th anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy with an impassioned call to western allies to continue supporting Ukraine in the face of the “unending struggle between dictatorship and freedom”.

Speaking on Thursday at a ceremony at the Normandy American cemetery attended by his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and dozens of surviving veterans from the second world war, Biden drew parallels between the Allied troops who fought to free Europe and the alliance of nations that came together to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression.

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D-day 80th anniversary: ‘let us have their courage,’ says Macron of veterans as he warns of war returning to Europe – as it happened

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World leaders attend international commemorative ceremony as French president draws comparisons with Ukraine conflict

The British prime minister Rishi Sunak will miss the major international ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day but the Labour leader Keir Starmer will attend alongside world leaders at the Omaha Beach event.

Sunak is attending events in Normandy including speaking at the major British ceremony, but he will not be present alongside leaders including Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden at the international gathering.

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D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness

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As grim memory of world war fades, many people are anxious amid rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric

Twenty-two British D-day veterans, the youngest nearly 100, crossed the Channel on Tuesday to mark this week’s 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy, representing a thinning thread to the heroics of two or three generations ago when about 150,000 allied soldiers began a seaborne invasion of western Europe that helped end the second world war.

Ron Hayward, a tank trooper who lost his legs fighting in France three weeks after D-day, told crowds assembled in Portsmouth on Wednesday why he and other soldiers were there: “I represent the men and women who put their lives on hold to go and fight for democracy and this country. I am here to honour their memory and their legacy, and to ensure that their story is never forgotten.”

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‘Courage and solidarity’: King Charles pays tribute to veterans of D-day

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Royals, politicians and military leaders begin two days of events to mark 80th anniversary of Normandy landings

The king has paid tribute to D-day veterans at a commemorative event in Portsmouth marking the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings.

Charles said their “stories of courage, resilience and solidarity” move, inspire and “remind us of what we owe to that great wartime generation – now, tragically, dwindling to so few”.

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Canadian D-day veteran, 100, dies day before return to France for anniversary

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William Cameron was an anti-aircraft gunner on a ship protecting American barges during the largest amphibious invasion in history

A 100-year old Canadian second world war veteran has died one day before he was to return to France for the 80th anniversary of D-day and the Battle of Normandy.

William Cameron’s death on Sunday was announced on Twitter by Canada’s veterans affairs ministry. He had been scheduled to fly to France as part of a Canadian delegation attending ceremonies this week.

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