world war ii

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From the Anne Frank House channel on YouTube…

Here’s the clip’s description…

July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor.

This would have been about a year before Anne and her family went into hiding....

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In April of 1945, during the final days of the European theater and with the approaching rumble of Soviet tanks heralding the collapse of his “Thousand Year Reich”, Adolf Hitler is said to have committed suicide within his Berlin bunker. His longtime mistress Eva Braun also joined him in death, rather than be captured alive. They took cyanide and then shot themselves. And according to surviving accounts, Hitler’s aides took the bodies outside the bunker, doused them with gasoline and set them ablaze: an attempt to ensure that the Soviets could not make a trophy of the Fuhrer’s remains.

But a year later, bones and skull fragments with bullet holes were found at the site by Russian forces. They were assumed to be all that was left of Adolf Hitler. The fragments sat in Moscow throughout the Cold War, and only in recent years have they finally come under the ...

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If Ridley Scott wants to make a Monopoly movie so bad, he should scrap his plans for a straight adaptation of the board game and film this instead: the ingeniously crazy and TRUE tale of how British soldiers in German POW camps during World War II used Monopoly to escape from prison. Historians are now saying that thousands of British military personnel could have literally gotten “out of jail free” and safely out of Nazi clutches… with a little help from Parker Brothers.

During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country’s secret service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board game Monopoly.

It was the perfect accomplice.

Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it

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Ahhh, Labor Day. The holiday consecrated to the common working stiff. The traditional end of another summer. The start of the final stretch of the year. And as most people know it’s also the occasion of the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Two things I’m compelled to say from the getgo: first, Jerry Lewis is one of the all-time greatest performers of stage and screen. And second, the Muscular Dystrophy Association is one of the finest charitable groups in the land. All of the money that’s raised locally remains local and helps people in your own area. MDA has some of the least overhead of any organization of its kind. I’ve had a number of friends over the years that MDA has been there for, and has allowed them to know opportunities that they otherwise might never have enjoyed. So if you’ve some ...

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Early on the morning of September 1st, 1939, a squadron of Nazi German Luftwaffe attacked the Polish town of Wieluń. More than twelve hundred people were killed. Minutes later a German battleship opened fire on the military depot at Danzig. In the hours that followed dozens of motorized German divisions stormed into Poland along three fronts.

World War II had begun.

Nothing more to say here, other than to remember history… and a prayer that we may be mindful of lessons that are all too often only paid for at the highest of cost....

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On June 6th 1944, Allied forces commenced on the largest amphibious invasion and assault in recorded history as more than 160,000 personnel landed on five beaches of the Normandy coast in the opening assault on Hitler’s supposedly impregnable Festung Europa.

The liberation of western Europe had begun.

Here’s the link to the Wikipedia entry, even though there’s no way that an encyclopedic article could possibly convey the full scope of Operation Overlord: something that had never been done before and Lord willing, will never be needed again.

But to those who did, who waded ashore on Normandy so that others might be free – and especially to those among them who never came back home – this blogger can only give the most reverent of respects....

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German prosecutors have thrown not just the book, but several hefty volumes of ’em, at John Demjanjuk. For his time as a prison guard at the Nazi concentration camp at Sobibor in Poland during World War II, Demjanjuk has been charged with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Demjanjuk is currently 88 and lives in Cleveland. The courts in Germany are trying to have the United States extradite him for trial. If that happens, it could very well be the end of an era. I can’t see any further war crimes trials of former Nazis taking place....

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As clever as Erwin Rommel was, I can’t remember him ever pulling off what Will Foster of Flint, Michigan has done: build a working Panzer tank (albeit one-half sized) from scratch…

The Kettering University engineering student’s mini-Panzer can go up to 20 miles per hour with its three-cylinder diesel engine, is quite maneuverable and the turret can rotate 360 degrees to fire empty Red Bull cans from its air-compressed cannon powered by a SCUBA tank. Foster said that he built the tank to use in paintball competitions, after seeing some people drive “tanks” that were really golf carts.

Aim your targeting reticle here to read more about Foster’s creation. And here’s a YouTube video of the tank in action…

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The U.S.S. Grunion, a submarine that was last heard from on July 30th, 1942, has been discovered on the floor of the Bering Sea.

From the story…

The mangled remains of a World War II submarine were found in the Bering Sea on Wednesday night, more than six decades after the U.S. Navy vessel disappeared with a crew of 70 off the Aleutian Island of Kiska.

The discovery of the USS Grunion culminates a five-year search led by the sons of its commander, Mannert Abele, and may finally shine a light on the mysterious last moments of the vessel.

“Obviously, this is a very big thing,” the oldest son, Bruce Abele, said Thursday from his home in Newton, Mass. “I told my wife about it when she was still in bed and she practically went up to the ceiling.”

A remotely operated vehicle snapped pictures and captured three hours

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For one person to escape from a Nazi concentration camp was daring.

For three to escape was incredible.

For three hundred to escape was impossible.

Nothing is impossible.

So read the tagline of the full-page ad in the April 12th, 1987 issue of Parade that promoted that night’s broadcast on CBS of Escape from Sobibor, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer.

Twenty years ago tonight came the premiere of what is perhaps the greatest movie about the Holocaust ever made. Escape from Sobibor is about the only thing of its kind that ever occurred during World War II: a mass escape by Jewish prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp. Sobibor was one of the primary extermination facilities in eastern Poland, with estimates ranging from as low as 250,000 to as high (according to one Sobibor survivor) as one million who were gassed to death there. On October 14 in ...

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