On the morning of 7 May 1945 and as the Third Reich collapsed, soldiers of Combat Command A (CCA), U.S. 9th Armored Division mounted up their vehicles and resumed their advance eastward further into north-western Czechoslovakia. Temporarily attached to the 1st Infantry Division, CCA’s mission was to liberate the Czech city of Karlovy Vary. CCA’s task forces rolled forward against negligible German resistance. Nevertheless, after only a couple hours, higher headquarters radioed orders for CCA to halt its forces in place.
On May 12, 2012 the iconic first step in the Olympics began in Greece at the Temple of Hera in Olympia; with the first leg of the famous torch relay. On Friday, July 27th the world will watch as the final torch bearer completes their run through London, enters the Olympic Stadium, and lights the Olympic flame. However, what many don't know is that this well-regarded tradition actually began in 1936 at the direction of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich on behalf of the Berlin Olympics.
Now there is no question that the ancient Greeks ran relay races using flames, but this was not done as an integral
This final part in our series on the human cost of the Second World War in Europe will look at the nation most responsible for plunging humanity into global warfare: Germany. Though in the United States of America the Second World War is often cast today as the last "good war", in reality there were few nation's that participated in the war, willingly or not, and emerged from the war with entirely clean hands.
I make this observation because the people of Germany were both the perpetrators and, in some cases, victims of the violence Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime unleashed across all of
World War Two Vehicles has posted some production figures for German aircraft. Though well known, in perusing through them once more one of the items that stands out is, of course, the sheer size of the JU-88 production program - with roughly 15,000-16,000 such aircraft produced by the Third Reich.
Austria, nestled between Germany and Italy, possessed a long history as a dominant European power. However, after the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been dissolved with Austria remaining as a small, central European state; a shadow of its former imposing Imperial greatness. Austria therefore represented a ripe target for a predator such as Hitler.
In February 1938, Hitler coerced Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg into placing Nazi sympathizers in important government positions. Hitler also laid the groundwork for an Anschluss, political union, through delivering a series
Though the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942 is often remembered as the seminal planning event of the Third Reich's genocidal strategic goals; in reality it represented a part of a much larger and horrific plan for mass murder. For on June 21, 1941, Heinrich Himmler had ordered planning to begin for a massive demographic reorganization of Eastern Europe, including the territories of the western Soviet Union. Professor Konrad Meyer authored this plan; labeled Generalplan Ost. Meyer’s genocidal plan went far beyond eliminating Europe’s Jews.
If in 1919 the question arose regarding which of the Great European Powers stood destined to drive Europe’s twentieth century fortunes, few candidates would have stood out as more unlikely than the Soviet Union. Russia had not only been forced into the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk, but had been occupied by a foreign power from 1917-1921, was in the throes of a Civil War that would kill between three and five million Russian citizens, and had foreign armies again fighting on its soil far beyond the First World War’s end. Then, in 1922 Josef Stalin.
