Military History

During World War II, the German army established work detachments, or Arbeitskommandos, to detain prisoners of war who were put to work in factories, farms, mines, and other industries. Under the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention (Articles 27 to 34), countries at war were permitted to utilize the labor of prisoners of war so long as that labor...

Auschwitz (in German) or Oświęcim (in Polish) was the largest and most notorious German concentration camp during World War II. It was one of the so called combined camps (concentration and extermination camp) like the Majdanek concentration camp. Originally built as a military barracks, Auschwitz I received its first prisoners in June 1940 with...

On the 18th of April 1942, 16 American medium bombers commanded by Colonel James Harold Doolittle took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo. The Doolittle Raid (Tokyo Raid) was a great success in propaganda terms, but eight of the pilots fell into Japanese hands.

From the 4th February to the 11th of February 1945 the three major Allied leaders, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Winston Churchill of Great Britain and Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union, debated the outstanding questions of war and peace at Yalta in the Crimea. Although not the key issue, one subject for discussion was the treatment...

Held in Washington from the 22nd of December 1941, to the 14th of January 1942, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill proposed the conference to discuss long-range war issues after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill was accompanied by the British Chiefs of Staff, his Minister of Supply (Lord Beaverbrook) and other top-level adv...

Göring's position as second only to Adolf Hitler in the establishment and maintenance of the Nazi regime is unquestionable, although his influence diminished after 1942. His close and jealous rivals were Joseph Goebbels and, in the later years of the war, Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann. But none received, as Göring did in 1939, when Hitler ...

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...