Diaries, believed to be genuine, chronicle 139 pre-war meetings between antisemitic aristocrat and Nazi leader
The diaries of an antisemitic British socialite who was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and struck up a personal relationship with the Nazi leader have been discovered, according to the Daily Mail.
The leather-bound journals, which had been lost to historians and unseen for eight decades, appear to reveal the extent of Unity Mitford’s relationship with the dictator.
Continue reading...Some descendants are apprehensive but a historian says making 30m pages of records public is ‘important step’
For 80 years, details of their ancestors’ collaboration with the Nazis have been buried in spotless rows of filing cabinets in The Hague. But thousands of Dutch families face having their relatives’ history laid bare later this week when an archive opens on 425,000 people accused of siding with the occupier during the second world war.
On Thursday, the central archives of the special jurisdiction courts (CABR), established after the allies liberated the Netherlands to bring collaborators to justice, will open under national archive rules.
Continue reading...Gregor Formanek is charged with aiding and abetting 3,322 murders at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
German authorities are pressing for a 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to face trial almost 80 years after the end of the second world war.
The higher regional court in Frankfurt said on Tuesday it had overturned a decision by a lower court under which the suspect had been deemed unfit to stand trial.
Continue reading...Michael Visontay discovered that a ‘crime against history’ in the book world set off a chain of events that led to his family’s delicatessen in 1950s Sydney
It was a brazen act of extreme literary vandalism that desecrated one of the world’s most valuable books. But it also allowed a family of Holocaust survivors to forge a new life in Australia.
The extraordinary tale was uncovered by the author and journalist Michael Visontay while researching his family history during Covid lockdown and has now been published as a book, Noble Fragments.
Continue reading...App planned for public to find emergency shelter in places including underground train stations and car parks
Germany is drawing up a list of bunkers that could provide emergency shelter for civilians, the interior ministry has said, at a time of rising tensions with Russia.
The list would include underground train stations and car parks as well as state buildings and private properties, a ministry spokesperson said.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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