Bloomfield Auctions rejects accusations it is acting immorally and insulting the memory of Nazis’ victims
A Northern Ireland auction house is going ahead with the sale of Adolf Hitler memorabilia despite an outcry from Jewish leaders.
The managing director of Bloomfield Auctions, Karl Bennett, rebuffed accusations on Wednesday that the sale was immoral and would insult the memory of those murdered by the Nazis.
Continue reading...Leading art museums are reassessing their works after a Belgian journalist traced how a fascist sympathiser acquired a Jewish dealer’s collection
In August 1940, Samuel Hartveld and his wife, Clara Meiboom, boarded the SS Exeter ocean liner in Lisbon, bound for New York. Aged 62, Hartveld, a successful Jewish art dealer, left a world behind. The couple had fled their home city of Antwerp not long before the Nazi invasion of Belgium in May 1940, parting with their 23-year-old son, Adelin, who had decided to join the resistance.
Hartveld also said goodbye to a flourishing gallery in a fine art deco building in the Flemish capital, a rich library and more than 60 paintings. The couple survived the war, but Adelin was killed in January 1942. Hartveld was never reunited with his paintings, which were snapped up at a bargain-basement price by a Nazi sympathiser and today are scattered throughout galleries in north-western Europe, including Tate Britain.
Continue reading...Russian city will now be known as Królewiec in official documents, its name in the 15th and 16th centuries
The Kremlin has described Poland’s decision to rename the Russian city of Kaliningrad in its official documents as a “hostile act”, as ties continue to fray over the Ukraine war.
Kaliningrad, which sits in an exclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic coast, was known by the German name of Königsberg until after the second world war, when it was annexed by the Soviet Union and renamed to honour politician Mikhail Kalinin.
Continue reading...Ommeren became hive of activity after Dutch National Archive unveiled map featuring a red ‘X’ in January
A Dutch village that became the focus of a frenzied treasure hunt after a map allegedly showed Nazi loot buried there during the second world war has declared the search over – and said nothing was found.
The small hamlet of Ommeren did conclude that there had indeed been treasure buried there, but that it was removed after the war.
Continue reading...Governor of region 400 miles from border latest to cancel over ‘safety concerns’ in glaring admission of vulnerability
At least six Russian regions have scrapped 9 May Victory Day parades that mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany amid fears over Ukrainian strikes, with a region 400 miles from the border being the latest to cancel.
The governor of Saratov announced the parade there would not go ahead because of “safety concerns”, adding to a string of cancellations that are a glaring admission of the country’s military vulnerability more than 14 months into the war.
Continue reading...Lou Conter, 101, is now final survivor of ship on which 1,177 were killed when Japanese attack brought US into second world war
Ken Potts, one of the last two survivors of the USS Arizona battleship, which sank during the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 102.
Howard Kenton Potts died on Friday at the home in Provo, Utah, that he shared with his wife of 66 years, according to Randy Stratton, whose late father, Donald Stratton, was Potts’s Arizona shipmate and friend.
Continue reading...About 1,060 WWII prisoners died when the ship, which has now been found in the South China Sea, was sunk by an American missile in 1942
The wreck of a ship caught up in Australia’s worst ever maritime disaster has been found 4,000 metres under the sea, 80 years after it was torpedoed by an American submarine.
The Montevideo Maru, discovered off the coast of the Philippines, sank with about 980 Australian troops and civilians on board – almost twice as many Australians killed than during the Vietnam war.
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Continue reading...Frank-Walter Steinmeier becomes his country’s first head of state to speak at Warsaw commemorations
Germany’s president has asked for forgiveness for the crimes his country committed in the second world war, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the first German president to speak at the commemorations in Poland’s capital, joined his Polish and Israeli counterparts to mark 80 years since Jewish insurgents’ doomed uprising against Nazi occupiers.
Continue reading...Charles and Camilla also remembered the Kindertransport children, during a state visit to Germany
King Charles and Germany’s president have lain wreaths in remembrance of the victims of the second world war, in the ruins of a bombed-out church in Hamburg.
The monarch joined President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the mayor of Hamburg, Peter Tschentscher, to leave floral tributes at St Nikolai memorial church, whose spire was a landmark used by bomber crews during the conflict 80 years ago and has since become a monument against war.
Continue reading...Planned visit to St Nikolai memorial in Hamburg contrasts with approach taken by his mother
King Charles will this week become the first British monarch to lay a wreath to the German victims of allied air raids in the second world war.
The move is a departure from his mother’s handling of the historically sensitive subject on previous royal visits to the country.
Continue reading...MPs and ministers support campaign to locate relatives of Peter Brown, who died alone in London aged 96
A search is under way to find the family of one of the RAF’s last black second world war veterans, who died recently.
Peter Brown, a retired flight sergeant, died alone aged 96 in Maida Vale, west London. Without any known family, Westminster council and the RAF are attempting to locate any relatives of Brown to pay tribute to him at Mortlake Crematorium on 29 March.
Continue reading...Fiction and essays tackled subjects including militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and trauma
Kenzaburo Oe, a giant of Japanese writing and winner of the Nobel prize in literature, has died aged 88.
Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.
Continue reading...Lafrenz was arrested twice by the Gestapo and eventually liberated in April 1945 and settled in the US
The last surviving member of the White Rose resistance movement, which urged Germans to stand up against Nazi tyranny during the second world war, has died, according to the group’s historical foundation.
Traute Lafrenz died at her home in South Carolina on Monday at the age of 103, the group said in a statement on Thursday, paying tribute to her “courageous resistance and lasting testimony”.
Continue reading...No one hurt in ‘unplanned’ explosion of 250kg device found in Norfolk town, police say
A 250kg second world war bomb has exploded unexpectedly in Great Yarmouth, police have said.
Emergency services and agencies declared a major incident following the discovery of the large unexploded device at a river crossing in the Norfolk town on Tuesday, and had been working to disarm it.
Continue reading...Images found in attic taken by Polish firefighter who risked life to record how Jewish Poles fought the Nazis despite impossible odds
The photographs are blurry, composed hastily and taken surreptitiously, sometimes with heads or objects in the foreground obscuring part of the view.
But Holocaust historians say the imperfect pictures, discovered last month in a Polish attic decades after their creator died, are nonetheless priceless. They are the only known photographs from inside the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising not to be taken by Germans.
Continue reading...Second world war document revealing a stash of coins and jewels hidden by German soldiers is put online by Dutch archivists
As the Nazis fled occupied Europe in the final days of the second world war, four German soldiers buried a hoard of gold coins and jewels in the middle of nowhere in the Dutch countryside. Nearly 80 years later, hopes of finding the buried loot have been raised after the National Archives of the Netherlands released a trove of documents – and a map to the treasure where X marks the spot.
The treasure – four ammunition cases laden with coins, watches, jewellery, diamonds and other gemstones – is thought to have been worth at least 2m or 3m Dutch guilder in 1945, the equivalent of around £15.85m in today’s money.
Continue reading...Berlin insists all financial claims have been settled as Warsaw seeks £1.2tn for war losses
Germany has rebuffed the latest push by Poland’s nationalist government for vast reparations over the second world war, saying in response to a diplomatic note that the issue was closed, according to the foreign ministry in Warsaw.
Poland estimates its losses in the second world war caused by Germany at 6.2tn złotys (£1.2tn) and has demanded reparations, but Berlin has repeatedly said all financial claims related to the war have been settled.
Continue reading...Liliana Segre, 92, has been subjected to racist attacks, and fears the Holocaust will become a footnote in the history books
An Italian senator who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and this year found herself witnessing a far-right government take power again in Rome has said her “personal nightmare” is that the Holocaust will all but vanish from history books.
Liliana Segre, 92, was the only one of her relatives to survive the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews as part of Nazi Germany’s second world war campaign to obliterate the Jewish population in Europe.
Continue reading...Irmgard Furchner, 97, who worked at Stutthof concentration camp during the second world war, is given a two-year suspended sentence
A 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 10,500 people imprisoned there, and handed a two-year suspended sentence.
Irmgard Furchner, who has been on trial in the northern German town of Itzehoe for more than a year, spoke to the court on one occasion earlier this month to say she was sorry for what had happened, but stopped short of admitting her guilt.
Continue reading...US welcomes doubling of military spending but critics express unease over abandoning seven decades of pacifism
Japan has approved its biggest military buildup since the second world war, warning that China poses the “greatest strategic challenge ever” and outlining plans to develop a counterstrike capability funded by record defence spending.
The plans, announced by the government on Friday, reflect growing alarm over a more assertive Chinese military and a North Korean regime that continues to improve its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.
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