Conduct

It was the nefarious, insidious Huns and Japs against the gallant, valorous Allied heroes. But hold on for a minute! Perhaps things were not so black and white – might they even be the other way around?

Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz: Last President of a United Germany

On the afternoon of 30 April 1945, with Berlin engulfed in flames and besieged by the Russians, the Hero of the Second World War[1] took his own life in his cement bunker beneath the chancellery complex. This courageous act, perhaps the ultimate act of courage, represented the termination of the heroic last stand of Western…

Failure at Nuremberg / Rudolf Hess

Failure at Nuremberg: An Analysis of the Trial, Evidence and Verdict, Institute for Historical Review (pb reprint) 42pp, $2.50, ISBN 0-939484-04-8. Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, by Ilse Hess and Rudolf Hess, translated from the German by Meyrick Booth, Ph.D. and edited by George Pile with a Foreword by Air-Commodore G.S. Oddie, D.F.C., A.F.C. (Royal…

Paris in the Third Reich

Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, 1940-1944 by David Pryce-Jones. New York: Holt, Rinehart &Winston, 1981, x + 294 pages, 116 photographs, $25.00, ISBN 0-03-045621-5. The claim that thousands of Parisians were members of the anti-Nazi “Resistance”[*] is an aspect of the Second World War that has come under increasing…

The Burning of Saint Malo

In August 1944 the historic walled city of Saint Malo, the brightest jewel of the Emerald Coast of Brittany, France, was almost totally destroyed by fire. This should not have happened. If the attacking U.S. forces had not believed a false report that there were thousands of Germans within the city it might have been…

Italian Fascism: An Interpretation

When the Grand Council of Fascism on 25 July 1943 removed Benito Mussolini from his position as head of government, fascism ended in Italy. Its ending was as surprising as its beginning, when, on 28 March 1922, some 300,000 Blackshirts under Mussolini's command seized the Italian state. The events between those dates can be chronicled….

The Miracle of Dunkirk Reconsidered

Dunkirk: The Patriotic Myth by Nicholas Harmon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. 271 pp. with appendices, maps, photographs, annotated bibliography, index. $12.95 ISBN: 0-671-25389-1 Forty one years ago nearly 340,000 British and French troops were evacuated from the besieged port of Dunkirk. At the time the event was portrayed by the British government and…

Human Smoke

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, 2008. 576 pp. bibliography, indexed. Nested near the end of Nicholson Baker’s first book, The Mezzanine, is an oddly memorable scene. Set apart from the novel’s famously annotated escalator ascent, the scene finds Howie…

Arsch, bitte!

Document 343-USSR, OKW Decree, 20 July 1942: All Soviet Prisoners of War Are to Be Tattooed for Identification Purposes. IMT Vol. 39, pp. 488-491 Document 343, OKW Decree, 20 July 1942: Photocopy of a mimeograph, certified by the Soviet prosecutors, in two parts. First page: 1 next to “Certified True Copy” at *; round stamp…

Hitler Spoils Stalin’s Surprise

Constantine Pleshakov. Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 2005, 312 pp. As the title of Constantine Pleshakov’s book implies, the author, a Russian historian,[1] holds Stalin personally responsible for the debacle that befell the Red Army at the outbreak…

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