WW2 Competitions

|   2 August 2010

Competition result – July

What is the name of this monastery, the site of a famous WW2 battle? That was the question subscribers were asked in July. And it proved a good deal easier than the question we posed the previous month, since lots of people gave the correct answer – Monte Cassino. The three lucky winners, drawn at […]

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WW2 Relevance

|   29 July 2010

Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps

Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. I was recently asked  what I thought was the single greatest confusion in the public consciousness about the Nazis and their policy of oppression. Not, I admit, a question that I am often asked. But, as it happened, it was one for which I had a ready answer, because I […]

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WW2 Anniversary

|   22 July 2010

The Nazis and the Madagascar Plan

The Nazis had a plan to send the Jews here, to Madagascar. This month marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most bizarre and potentially murderous Nazi ideas of them all – a plan to forcibly deport European Jews to the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. It isn’t an event of […]

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WW2 People

|   16 July 2010

Hitler and the unwanted gift.

The ‘Eagle’s nest’ – Hitler’s  tea-house perched on top of the Kehlstein mountain. I was recently on a research trip to Germany and took a few hours out to visit the ‘Eagle’s nest’ – the tea house built on the top of the Kehlstein mountain overlooking Berchtesgaden in Southern Bavaria. Hitler loved this area and […]

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WW2History.com News

|   12 July 2010

The Timeline

The interactive WW2History.com Timeline I just got back from a meeting with the brilliant Phil Draper of Sunday Publishing who has been working with me on making WW2History.com for 18 months now (though it seems like most of our lives!) We were going through all of the analytics showing how many people access what on […]

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WW2 People

|   9 July 2010

Stalin – the watchful monster.

Joseph Stalin – the quiet tyrant. I’ve just finished a long essay – more than 5,000 words – on Joseph Stalin for the Key Leaders section of the site. And writing it made me think once again of the people I’ve met who directly encountered Stalin, and of how their recollections were never quite what […]

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WW2 Competitions

|   1 July 2010

Who WAS this man?

This month’s competition proved much harder than I thought it would. But congratulations to Mr Pichardie who correctly identified this US Marine General as Lemeul Shepherd Junior. A signed copy of Michael Burleigh’s ‘Moral Combat’ is on its way to you. Shepherd had one of the toughest wars of any battlefield General and deserves to […]

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WW2 Anniversary

|   23 June 2010

The curse of hindsight

The Kremlin – where Stalin trembled in 1940. Seventy years ago this month, in his office in the Kremlin in Moscow, Joseph Stalin listened to a radio report of the German occupation of Paris. As he learnt of the Wehrmacht’s triumph, he turned almost in despair to his comrades and complained about the performance of […]

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WW2 Anniversary

|   16 June 2010

Germans in Paris

Seventy years ago today, German soldiers celebrated in Paris. They had achieved what many had thought impossible – they had captured the French capital. And it was only to be a matter of days before total victory in France was theirs. But what recent research has conclusively demonstrated is just how much of a risk […]

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WW2History.com News

|   11 June 2010

WELCOME AMERICA!

WW2History.com has just gone live in the United States of America. And since we have so many fine American historians on the site, and since all of my last documentary series were made in co-production with various American colleagues and friends, it’s a moment that I especially want to mark. One small way of recognizing […]

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