German chancellor pledges further €60m donation to Auschwitz Foundation
Angela Merkel has for the first time visited the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, site of one of the most notorious atrocities Adolf Hitler’s regime inflicted on Europe.
The German chancellor also pledged a donation of €60m (£51m) towards a fund to conserve the physical remnants of the site of the barracks, watchtowers and personal items of those who died, such as shoes and suitcases.
Continue reading...Field Marshal Lord Bramall, who has died aged 95, was chief of the defence staff from 1982 until 1985, the pinnacle of a long military career that began just in time to land him on the beaches of Normandy as a freshly minted second lieutenant in the D-day invasion of June 1944.
But in March 2015 he was drawn into the saga of claims of historical paedophilia and child abuse in high places that began with the unmasking of Jimmy Savile in 2012. Bramall’s cottage in a village near Farnham, Surrey, was raided by police as part of a co-ordinated initiative that also included the homes of Lord (Leon) Brittan, the former home secretary, who died in January 2015. All this was part of Operation Midland, set up by the Metropolitan police in response to allegations against a number of notable public figures.
Continue reading...Alexis Dudden’s opinion piece presents an argument on the rising sun flag based on the misunderstanding of Japan’s sincere dealings with the past (Japan’s rising sun flag has a history of horror. It must be banned at the Tokyo Olympics, 1 November).
Looking at Prime Minister Abe’s statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war – issued by cabinet consensus – it is clear that Japan has squarely faced the facts of history and repeatedly expressed feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology for its actions during the war, which this opinion piece fails to recognise.
Continue reading...Ghostly remains of ‘Maid of Harlech’ occasionally visible in the sand
The skeletal remains of an American fighter plane that crashed during the second world war off the Welsh coast, and occasionally emerge ghost-like from the seabed, have been given protected status.
Welsh government officials say the resting place of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, nicknamed the Maid of Harlech, is the first military aircraft crash site in the UK to be protected for its historic and archaeological interest.
Continue reading...As Britain unites to honour its war dead, a campaign to ensure Remembrance Sunday can be celebrated by everyone “irrespective of nationality, creed or colour” has been backed by MPs, and faith community and former military leaders. Called “remember together” and coordinated by the Royal British Legion and thinktank British Future, it encourages people from different backgrounds to commemorate their shared history 75 years after major battles such as D-Day.
The initiative comes as Labour and the Conservatives use Sunday to launch competing pledges to help veterans. Jeremy Corbyn announced that Labour’s manifesto, to be released later this month, will include “a new social contract” for former armed forces personnel, including reserved homes for rough sleepers alongside free education and training.
Continue reading...Schoolteacher helped Jewish people hide and survived Nazi concentration camps
Yvette Lundy, a heroine of the French resistance who survived detention in German concentration camps, has died aged 103.
The schoolteacher supplied fake papers to Jewish people and others being rounded up by the Gestapo and sent them to hide at her older brother Georges’ farm.
Continue reading...Polish resistance fighter who escaped Stutthof will face Bruno Dey, accused of being accessory to murder of 5,230 people
It was when the guards began burning piles of bodies in the open because the crematorium could not keep up with the task that Marek Dunin-Wąsowicz realised he was being held in a camp whose purpose was not just to “concentrate”, but systematically to murder thousands of people.
In the autumn of 1944, the 17-year-old Pole saw trainloads of Jews, most of them from Hungary, being taken straight to the gas chambers at Stutthof. Others were gassed inside an adapted railway carriage, set on tracks to trick prisoners into believing that they were being transported to another destination.
Continue reading...Bruno Dey, 93, tells trial he heard screaming but did not know killings were taking place
A 93-year-old former guard at the Nazi Stutthof concentration camp has testified at his trial that he once saw people being led into the gas chamber, followed by screaming and banging sounds behind the locked door.
Bruno Dey, a former SS private, went on trial on 17 October at the Hamburg state court where he stands accused of having been an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people while he was deployed at Stutthof from 1944 to 1945.
Continue reading...Roland Berger held up his father, Georg, as a role model – but the real story is darker
It was an inspirational tale: after watching the horror of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, a German man tore up his Nazi party membership card in protest and turned against the regime.
His Christian-based principles led to him being hounded by the Gestapo, sent off briefly to Dachau concentration camp and eventually dispatched to the eastern front.
Continue reading...Marine archaeologists discuss what they believe to be the wreck of the Akagi Japanese aircraft carrier, which was sunk during the second world war battle of Midway
Man, 93, accused as accessory to murder of 5,230 people in what could be one of last such cases
A former guard at Stutthof concentration camp will go on trial in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday, in what could be one of the last criminal cases of an individual charged over the Holocaust.
The 93-year-old man, named in the German media as Bruno D, in keeping with the country’s press code, was 17 when he joined the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion), which manned the watchtowers at the concentration camp east of what is now the city of Gdańsk, in Poland.
Continue reading...Oswald Dixon served in RAF in second world war and died at care home in Salford
A care home is inviting members of the public to attend the funeral of a second world war veteran from Jamaica with no family in the UK.
Oswald Dixon died on 25 September aged 100 after living his last four years at a home for retired service personnel in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Continue reading...Visitors have been asked not to share photographs of exhibits including Arno Breker statue
An exhibition of Nazi design has opened in the Netherlands to protests and a request for visitors to the museum not to take and share photographs for fear of the exhibits being glorified on social media.
The Museum of Design in Den Bosch is showcasing sculpture by Adolf Hitler’s favourite artist, Arno Breker, a 1943 VW Beetle, photos and Leni Riefenstahl films from the era, in what is being billed as the first great exposition of the “Design of the Third Reich”.
Continue reading...European leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, marked the 80th anniversary of the start of the second world war in Warsaw on Sunday.
But Donald Trump – who cancelled on his Polish hosts at the last minute last week, citing concerns over a hurricane barrelling towards Florida – was due to spend the day at his golf club in Virginia.
Continue reading...Monument has become focus of a row between the Czech capital and its Russian embassy
A statue of a second world war Red Army general repeatedly targeted by vandals has been covered with a tarpaulin amid an escalating row between Czech officials and Russia’s embassy in Prague over its status.
Authorities in the Czech capital’s Bubeneč district put the imposing monument honouring Marshal Ivan Konev under cover after saying they were no longer prepared to keep cleaning it following repeated paint and graffiti attacks.
Continue reading...Frank-Walter Steinmeier makes speech at Warsaw event to mark 80 years since start of war
The German president vowed his country would never forget the atrocities of the Nazi period on Sunday as he asked forgiveness from Poland during a series of commemorative events to mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war.
“In no other square in Europe do I find it more difficult to speak, and to address you in my native language of German ... I ask for forgiveness for Germany’s historical guilt and I recognise our enduring responsibility,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at a ceremony in Piłsudski Square in Warsaw.
Continue reading...On the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of WW2, the Observer’s chief political commentator reflects on how the United Nations was created out of its ashes
Into the storm: Neal Ascherson on the horror of the conflict
At the end of the second world war there was no guarantee that it would not be followed swiftly by a third. Six years of the most intensely murderous and geographically spread conflict in the history of the human species had left unprecedented devastation. From Normandy to Ukraine, vast areas of Europe had been pulverised by aerial bombing and ravaged by savage ground fighting. The landscape was a ruination of flattened homes, wrecked factories and fallow farms.
Great swathes of Asia, especially China, had suffered appallingly. Up to 85 million souls had lost their lives; more millions had been displaced. France and Italy appeared to be on the brink of revolution. Japan’s militarists had been answered with atomic attack and fire bombing by the US. A devastated Germany was starving. The UK had introduced bread rationing, a privation it had managed to avoid during the tribulations of the war. The emergent global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, started to glower at each other across a Europe divided by an iron curtain. The guns of one conflict had barely fallen silent before peoples and their leaders were trembling in anticipation of another.
Continue reading...As we mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the second world war, with liberal democracies again under siege, Britain should be leading the fight against extremism
Eighty years ago, the start of the second world war saw Nazi Germany invading Poland. Six years later, up to 85 million people were dead. I’m in Poland this weekend to commemorate the start of the bloodiest war in human history.
An entire generation of brave men and women around the globe sacrificed everything to defeat the singular evil of Nazism and fascism.
Continue reading...As leaders gather for commemoration in Poland, nationalists exploit the events of 1939
Shortly before 5am on 1 September 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired at a garrison of Polish soldiers stationed on the Westerplatte peninsula, part of what was then the internationally administered city of Danzig, now Polish Gdańsk. The attack marked the start of a war that would eventually kill millions and go down as the most appalling conflict in the history of humanity.
As the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war approaches on Sunday and European leaders head to Poland for commemorations, the bloody events of 80 years ago are being politicised and exploited more than ever across the continent.
Continue reading...Kindergarten to join other businesses operating inside Staro Sajmište, in Belgrade, Serbia, as long-planned Holocaust memorial remains unbuilt
The greying, box-like building that houses the Savsko Obdanište kindergarten has had many uses over the years.
At one point it was a restaurant; when you step through the front doors you find yourself surrounded by musty, brown 1970s-style dining furniture.
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