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+12 +1
Forgotten heroes of the Enigma story
Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale. Alan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers.
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WWII Bombe operator Ruth Bourne: I'd never heard of Enigma until long after the war
92-year-old Wren tells us about life cracking German codes
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Paris to build memorial for WWI animal heroes
After heroically delivering a message in World War I, French pigeon Le Vaillant died of gas poisoning. A century later, it looks as though he and the thousands of other animals killed in the conflict will now be remembered with a monument in Paris. An estimated 11 million horses, donkeys and mules were requisitioned during World War I, as well as 100,000 dogs and 200,000 pigeons (including Le Vaillant).
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French hero who saved hundreds of Jewish children dies aged 108
French Resistance hero Georges Loinger, who used his ingenuity and athletic prowess to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish children during World War II, has died at the age of 108. A talented athlete and cousin of the famous mime artist and fellow Resistance member Marcel Marceau, the Jewish Loinger would smuggle the children in small groups across the Franco-Swiss border. One ruse involved dressing children up as mourners and taking them to a cemetery whose wall abutted the French side of the border.
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Hitler deputy conspiracy theory quashed
An enduring conspiracy theory that the Nazi war criminal, Rudolf Hess, had been replaced by a double in jail has finally been put to rest. A DNA test carried out by Austrian scientists has shown that the man imprisoned in Berlin's Spandau Prison had indeed been Hitler's deputy. Hess was captured after flying to Scotland in 1941 and sentenced to life in prison at the Nuremberg trials. He was found hanged in the Berlin jail in 1987 at the age of 93.
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Looking back on 100 years, Holocaust survivor sees a life of 'miracles'
Olga Perlmutter was in her mid-20s when the Nazi regime captured her family, killed her siblings and forced her into slave labour at Auschwitz. Yet, looking back over the past century, she sees a life full of blessings. "All my life, I have had miracles," she said, surrounded by her devoted friends who all survived the same concentration camp and now visit her Côte Saint-Luc condo to play cards four times a week.
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The Holocaust Survivor Who Deciphered Nazi Doublespeak
The personal papers of one of World War II’s earliest historians reveals an obsession with how Nazis distorted the German language.
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Thomas Mann's War Against Hitler
IN FEBRUARY 1938, Thomas Mann and his family sailed from Cherbourg, France to New York, where they were greeted by a throng of reporters and a film crew from the Paramount News Corporation. Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and appeared on the cover of Time in 1934, decried British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and correctly predicted that Hitler would annex Austria forthwith. Later that day, Mann, after being asked whether he found exile a lonely state of affairs, responded,
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How Chagall’s Daughter Smuggled His Work out of Nazi-Occupied Europe
Ida Chagall’s heroic effort to salvage her father’s work from being lost to the war helped secure the Jewish artist’s legacy.
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Extinction Rebellion founder’s Holocaust remarks spark fury
A co-founder of Extinction Rebellion has sparked anger in Germany after referring to the Holocaust as “just another fuckery in human history”. Roger Hallam has been accused of downplaying the Nazis’ genocide of 6 million Jews by arguing in an interview that the significance of the Holocaust has been overplayed.
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Why the U.S. Sent Librarians Undercover to Gather Intelligence During World War II
No one had a well-defined plan to send microfilm specialists to war when Franklin Roosevelt agreed to established the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC). The agency initially struggled to gain traction. yet over the course of the war, the IDC developed an extensive operation to provide printed sources for intelligence purposes.
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The Deadliest Marksman’s Cold, Brave Stand
The war was nearly over on March 6, 1940. The enemy, propagandized as an unstoppable fighting machine, was indeed overwhelming the army of the country they’d invaded. Six days later, the aggressors would finally force an armistice, and soon grab control of much of the land they’d coveted. It had taken longer than the two weeks they’d anticipated, but conditions were harsh, the defenders far more resolute than expected.
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The teenage Dutch girls who seduced and killed Nazis
During World War Two, the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands turned three teenage girls into fierce resistance fighters. Truus Oversteegen, Freddie Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft have been remembered for their technique of luring collaborators into the forest for them to be executed.
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+15 +1
Sunken German World War Two warship found off Norway
The wreckage of a major German warship has been discovered off the coast of Norway some 80 years after it was sunk in a World War Two battle, Norwegian power grid operator Statnett and a maritime archaeologist said.
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Germany's World War I Debt Was So Crushing It Took 92 Years to Pay Off
After the Treaty of Versailles called for punishing reparations, economic collapse and another world war thwarted Germany's ability to pay.
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The Last Ones – best drama screenplay at the Los Angeles Film Awards
Another client of THGM Writing Services strikes gold. C.D. Peterson's WWII-era screenplay The Last Ones wins "Best Drama Screenplay" at the Los Angeles Film Awards (LAFA).It's always exciting wh
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Astonishing story of teenage boy who killed a Nazi, escaped the Holocaust and led secret life in UK revealed by his son
When British man John Carr learned that his father was not a Polish Catholic who had settled in Britain after the war but was in fact a Jew who had escaped from the Łódź ghetto when he was just 13 years old, he had no idea that the shocking revelation would take him on a journey of discovery into the darkest corners of modern history.
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Bell stolen by Nazis to be returned to Poland
A church bell that dates back to 1555 will be returned to its home in Poland, 77 years after it was plundered by the Nazis in World War Two. Parishioners at Slawiecice in southern Poland began searching for the church's old bell two years ago. They were in luck because, as the Münster diocese in Germany explained, the Nazis melted down some 80,000 bells to make weapons or ammunition.
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Christianity in Nazi Germany
It is estimated that at the beginning of the 20th century about 67% of the population in Germany were Protestants. However, the Catholics were strong in some areas such as in Bavaria. The Jews formed just under 1 per cent of the total population of Germany.
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Transfer of Stasi records agency closes a chapter of East German history
The Stasi Records Agency is a legacy of the peaceful revolution in the GDR. Now its name is disappearing, but its spirit is to live on elsewhere.
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