Category Archives: Second world war

‘Crush the fascist vermin’: Belarus opposition summons wartime spirit

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Partisan tactics once used to fight the Nazis have been turned against Alexander Lukashenko’s brutally repressive regime

In Minsk, what people here call the Great Patriotic War is never far away. Monuments, street names and museums venerate the memory of the awful years from 1941 to 1945, when the Soviet Union was at war with Nazi Germany.

Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has used the years of partisan resistance against the Nazi occupation of the country, and the eventual victory by the Red Army, as the basis for a neo-Soviet, Belarusian identity.

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Stop blowing up bombs on sea floor, say whale campaigners

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Wartime relics need to be cleared for wind farms but explosions can kill cetaceans

The detonation of wartime bombs left on the seafloor around the UK must end to stop the deaths of whales and dolphins, campaigners say.

The offshore wind industry is expanding rapidly and this may lead to a sharp rise in such explosions as the seafloor is cleared before construction. A quieter “burning” technique is already available, say the campaigners.

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Kazakh-American group claims Borat Subsequent Moviefilm ‘incites violence’

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The Kazakh American Association has released a letter on social media accusing Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest Borat film of ‘justifying harassment’

A group of Kazakh-Americans has demanded that Amazon withdraw Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen’s new satirical comedy which – like its 2006 predecessor Borat – identifies Kazakhstan as the home country of its fictional journalist character Borat Sagdiyev.

In a letter published on social media shortly before the film’s official launch, addressed to three senior Amazon executives, the Kazakh American Association says that Borat Subsequent Moviefilm “may cause irreparable harm to to Kazakhstan’s national image and people as its comedic nature may justify ethnicity-based harassment”. It adds: “This film incites violence against a highly vulnerable and under-represented minority ethnic group.”

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Dutch war museums tighten security after raids on Nazi items

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SS uniforms, firearms, parachutes among Nazi memorabilia targeted in apparent thefts to order

War museums across the Netherlands are scrambling to tighten their security after raids by highly organised thieves targeting memorabilia linked to Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS and other parts of the Nazi regime.

Amid huge global demand for second world war memorabilia, museums in Ossendrecht, in north Brabant, and in Beek, Limburg, have been ransacked in recent days and months.

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Holocaust survivor’s daughter sues historian over claim of lesbian liaison with Nazi guard

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Warwick University academic ‘broke German court ruling that protected dead woman’s reputation’

The daughter of a Holocaust survivor has begun a legal battle to protect her deceased mother’s reputation from allegations that she had a lesbian relationship with an SS guard.

Earlier this year, a German court ruled that Dr Anna Hájková, associate professor of modern continental European history at Warwick University, had violated the woman’s postmortem personality rights by publicly claiming that she had a sexual relationship with the Nazi guard while imprisoned in concentration camps.

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Nazi shipwreck found off Poland may solve Amber Room mystery

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Polish divers locate Karlsruhe, which they hope holds treasure Nazis looted from Russia

Polish divers say they have found the wreck of a German second world war ship that may help solve a decades-old mystery about the whereabouts of the Amber Room, an ornate chamber that the Nazis looted from a tsarist palace in Russia.

Decorated with amber and gold, the room was part of the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg. It was last seen in Königsberg, then a Baltic port city in Germany but now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

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Asylum seekers and lessons from history | Letters

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Paul Secher on the refugees housed in an army barracks on the outskirts of Sandwich in 1939, Rachel A Elliott on the judge who stopped the expulsion of 20 asylum seekers on a charter flight, and David Edwards Hulme on the origins of the boat name Speedwell

There is an interesting parallel to the proposal to house 400 asylum seekers in a disused army barracks in Folkestone, about which the local Conservative MP, Damian Collins, and district councillors have registered their protest with the home secretary (Former Kent barracks to house asylum seekers who arrived by boat, 15 September).

In the summer of 1939, some 4,000 refugees, also mainly men in their 20s and 30s (including my father and uncle), were housed in the derelict Kitchener Camp army barracks on the outskirts of nearby Sandwich. Similar objections were raised by some local politicians to the imminent arrival of so many foreigners, mainly from Germany and Austria. While the influx could have overwhelmed the small Kentish town with a population of just 3,500, they were largely welcomed – to the benefit of both the refugees and the local community.
Paul Secher
London

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Nearly two-thirds of US adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust – study

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According to survey of adults 18-39, 23% said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

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Australia has never been good at acknowledging its troops have been guilty of acts of inhumanity | Paul Daley

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Australia’s telling of the Pacific war story is correctly replete with Japanese atrocities. But crimes against Japanese prisoners do not feature prominently

Seventy-five years after the end of the second world war in the Pacific, the human suffering of millions of combatants and civilians is easily overlooked in a binary focus on allied victory and Japanese surrender.

Three-quarters of a century later, Japanese humiliation still simmers in politics and among families of the surrendered or dead. On the other side, meanwhile, countless were the returned soldiers and their families who have long harboured seething hatred for the Japanese.

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Holocaust denial graffitied at site of Nazi massacre in France

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Justice minister vows to ‘find and judge’ vandals who defaced Oradour-sur-Glane

Vandals have scrawled graffiti denying the Holocaust on a wall in the village that was the site of the Nazis’ biggest massacre of civilians in France during the second world war.

The justice minister vowed on Saturday to bring those responsible to justice.

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Hunt is on for rightful owner of Nazi-looted French painting

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Sign hangs next to Nicolas Rousseau artwork in Verdun asking public for information

A 19th-century oil painting stolen from Nazi-occupied France during the second world war has gone on display in an attempt to trace its rightful owners, after being returned by the son of the German soldier who was ordered to take it.

After 76 years in Germany, the small untitled artwork by the French painter Nicolas Rousseau is back in France and being exhibited at the World Centre for Peace, Liberty and Human Rights in the north-eastern town of Verdun.

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Royal family marks VJ Day anniversary in the UK – video

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The royal family leads the UK’s commemorations on the 75th anniversary of VJ Day – the day the second world war ended with Japan’s surrender.

Prince Charles led a two-minute silence at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, as part of a service of remembrance. The prime minister also spoke at the event.

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William Norways: a prisoner of war’s sketches on the Thai-Burma railway – in pictures

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British soldier Bill Norways was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore and forced to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. During his time as a PoW he created sketches and artworks under appalling conditions

• Families of British prisoner and Japanese guard united by poem 70 years on

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Letters to a lost son: ‘The war didn’t end for everyone in 1945’ | Erica Cervini

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Writing to her missing son was an act of longing and hope, but the years of silence took their toll on my great-great grandmother

Seventy-five years ago on 15 August 1945 Japan surrendered, bringing the second world war to an end. My great-aunt Faye, who was 23 at the time and living in Melbourne, described how the day unfolded in an exercise book she used as a diary:

“Soon after I started work the announcement of the end of the war was made so we were given the rest of the day off and tomorrow as well. This is the moment we waited almost six years for and we thank God and our wonderful allied combined forces for its successful conclusion and hope for a permanent and happy peace.

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Japan PM sparks anger with near-identical speeches in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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‘It’s the same every year. He talks gibberish and leaves,’ says one survivor after plagiarism app detects 93% match in speeches given days apart

Survivors of the atomic bombings of 75 years ago have accused Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, of making light of their concerns after he delivered two near-identical speeches to mark the anniversaries of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A plagiarism detection app found that Abe’s speech in Nagasaki on Sunday duplicated 93% of a speech he had given in Hiroshima three days earlier, the Mainichi Shimbun reported.

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Letters reveal British objections to plot of Bridge on the River Kwai

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War Office feared war movie would ‘not go down well with British public’

The adventure war film The Bridge on the River Kwai may have swept the board of awards and attracted acclaim as one best films of the 20th century, but the War Office was very nervous “it would not go down well with the British public”, documents reveal.

Letters between the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel and the UK War Office, from whom he was seeking permission for RAF cooperation in making the 1957 film, show tensions over how its plot depicted the conduct of British officers.

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