In 1943 the German National Socialists that occupied the Netherlands instituted a draft to scoop up as many able-bodied young men as possible, so that they could be carted off as slave-laborers for the German war machine. Thousands of Dutch…
Johannes Bogaard of Niew Vennep, the Netherlands, had only two years of formal education, and that was in elementary school. After the age of eight, he worked full time on his family farm. That was the only life he knew,…
In the summer of 1940, the little Baltic nation of Lithuania was being flooded by Jewish refugees from Poland. Lithuania had its own considerable Jewish population, and all were concerned not only about the Soviet take-over of the little country,…
You find heroes in the strangest places. They are not always soldiers fighting incredible odds, or people in the medical profession discovering breakthrough cures. Sometimes they are obscure government workers, overlooked by most people, but still there quietly doing the…
When the National Socialist armies of Germany overran most of Western Europe in 1940 they did not immediately round up Jews and send them off to death camps. The Nazis used a slow, methodical approach of discrimination at first, followed…
Crimea is a beautiful peninsula on the Black Sea with a long and rich history. For hundreds of years, Muslim Tatars lived there as fishermen, farmers, and ranchers. During World War II the Nazis conquered that part of the Soviet…
Thousands of Polish army officers were captured by the Soviet Red army in 1939 and were sent to prison camps near Smolensk Russia. Once the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 (breaking their “Non-Aggression Pact”), the British and the…
August 23, 1939 is another date that should live in infamy. On that day, an agreement was made between Hitler and Stalin that sealed the fate of the 35 million free people of Poland. The Soviet Union (Communist-occupied Russia) was…
From 1932-1933 the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Marxist-socialist dictator Joseph Stalin, orchestrated one of the greatest famines in modern history. Most famines happen due to changing weather or some other natural phenomenon. This famine was created by a…
From 1936-1938 Joseph Stalin arranged to have a whole host of “enemies” brought to trial and executed. The accused were not innocent until proven guilty. They were automatically guilty of whatever the paranoid Stalin accused them of (or rather, whatever…