Military History

For some time prior to his resignation in January 1938, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the Reich Defense Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the German Armed Forces, had been attempting to create an armed forces high command. In this effort he had the full backing of Adolf Hitler and of his own subordinates in the Defense Ministry, General Wi...

The Gestapo was the Nazi-instituted German secret police organization which, together with the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the SS (Schutzstaffel) formed the basic apparatus of repression in the Third Reich. Unlike the SA and the SS, the Gestapo was not created until the Nazis had come to power. Originally operating in the state of Prussia, it receiv...

When the occupation of Germany was completed by the Allied forces, there began the formidable task of bringing to some form of justice the vast number of war criminals. It was a task that would last until 1948, when the German courts were authorized to take over this responsible act of retribution. There were many legal and moral problems involv...

Spandau Prison in West Berlin housed seven Nazi war criminals who were sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials. Built in 1876, the red brick prison was located in the municipality of Spandau and designed to hold 500 to 600 prisoners. During the Third Reich, the National Socialists used it as a way station for political prisoners being deported to conc...

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – in German) is also known by its abbreviation NSDAP. On the 7th of March 1918, Anton Drexler, a Munich locksmith, established a Committee of Independent Workers in order to develop a nationalist viewpoint among working-class Germans. This led to the fou...

The saga of Rudolf Hess is strange indeed. A devoted follower of Hitler from the very beginning, Hess had a tremendous future in the Nazi Party. In 1941 he threw it all away by flying to Scotland in a cockeyed attempt to work out an unauthorized peace treaty. The stunt landed him in prison for the rest of his life.

Eichmann was a German-Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (Senior Assault Unit Leader) who was Head of the Gestapo’s Section IV BG, the Department of Jewish Affairs. After the Wannsee Conference (January 1942) this department was put in charge to execute the "Final Solution" what meant to extermination of all Jews. On the 1st of July 1943, Eich...

Masaharu Homma was a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Homma commanded the Japanese 14th Army, which invaded the Philippines and perpetrated the Bataan Death March. Homma was born on Sado Island, in the Sea of Japan, off Niigata Prefecture and entered the military at an early age.