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You may be familiar with Claus von Stauffenberg, who conspired to kill Hitler with a bomb and whose plot was the basis for the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. But do you know about the many other attempts on Hitler’s life? One involved Georg Elser, who worked alone for a year on a plan to destroy the Fuhrer, with a bomb planted in a beer hall.
While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.
Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.
When the bomb finally went off, it killed eight people and injured 64 others -but Hitler was not one of them . Read the whole story at Past Imperfect. Link
Dino D-Day wants to show you what the hype is all about by letting you play for free until July 31st on Steam. The indie game has received lots of buzz over the last few months, not only because of its humorous subject matter (Nazi controlled dinosaurs), but also because the gameplay is fast paced and fun, and the graphics are quite good for such a low budget game. Now you have a chance to check it out for yourself and see if slaying Nazi dinosaurs satisfies your craving for virtual blood.
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In 1939, Adolf Hitler commissioned the Friedrich Krupp A.G. company of Essen, Germany to build a gun that would breach the French Maginot line. They responded with the “Gustav Gun,” the largest gun ever built.
Named after the head of the Krupp family, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the Gustav Gun weighed in at a massive 1344 tons, so heavy that even though it was attached to a rail car, it still had to be disassembled before moving so as to not destroy the twin set of tracks as it passed over. This 4-story behemoth stood 20 feet wide and 140 feet long. Its 500 man crew, commanded by a Major-General (that’s two stars), needed nearly three full days (54 hours, to be exact) to set it up and prep for firing. But when it did fire, whoowhee, hold on to your hat.
The description of this gun’s destructiveness is at Gizmodo. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: American Rifleman, February 1998)
The folks at Collector’s Weekly used to delete references to Nazi items from their forum, but then considered the question of why people collect such things. Not everyone who collects Nazi memorabilia is a Neo-Nazi or a Hitler fan. Some subscribe to the philosophy summed up in a George Santayana quote: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” They are also aware that some find any instance of the Nazi swastika offensive.
But for collectors like Kevin Mackey, Nazi memorabilia, particularly those bearing the swastika, are unambiguous reminders of this suffering. Though upsetting to many, Mackey believes these pieces have a place in any discussion of World War II. “To obliterate the symbols of Nazi Germany,” he says, “would be to obliterate that period from our knowledge, and to forget what took place. We need to be aware of what caused Nazi Germany, what happened, and how much horror came to this world because of it.”
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But you don’t have to look very far, Mackey says, to see what happens when history, however upsetting, is expunged from a culture or society. “We have a leader of Iran today who says the Holocaust did not take place. But even my youngest daughter knows better, and she’s in junior high school. So we should not remove these pieces from the public knowledge, from public view. I don’t see it as a glorification of Nazi military items. I’m a historian—these are pieces of history.”
Included in the post about Nazi memorabilia are the opinions of Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, author and sociology professor Stanislav Vysotsky, veterans, and other collectors. Link -Thanks, Ben Marks!
Adolf Hitler’s last surviving bodyguard, Rochus Misch, announced that he is no longer able to respond to his voluminous fan mail. Fan mail?
Rochus Misch is 93 and uses a walking frame to move around his apartment. He told the Berliner Kurier tabloid that, with most of the letters he receives asking for autographs, it was “no longer possible” to reply because of his age.
“They (letters) come from Korea, from Knoxville, Tennessee, from Finland and Iceland — and not one has a bad word to say,” said Misch, who is believed to be the last man alive to have seen Hitler and other top-ranking Nazis in the flesh.
Misch published his memoirs in 2008. Link -via Breakfast Links
The film Iron Sky has been in development for years. It’s a Finnish-German-Australian sci-fi parody involving Nazis -a premise that cannot fail!
Towards the end of World War II the Nazi scientists made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity. From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.
Now it’s 2018, and it’s the time for the first American Moon landing since the 70’s. Meanwhile the Nazi invasion, that has been over 70 years in the making, is on its way, and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom.
Filming is going on now in Germany and the process is documented for you to follow.
Link to website | Blog | Flickr stream -Thanks, Janos!
Colonel Landa has nothing on this guy!
Many Americans know the V-2 rocket mainly as the beginning of the space program. That was Wernher von Braun’s dream from the beginning, but the Nazi war machine saw it as a very important weapon. During World War II, the rockets were built at a concentration camp called Dora, where prisoners were used for slave labor.
The system of exploiting slave labor to assemble missiles began in 1943. It expanded dramatically after the August 1943 bombings of Peenemünde by the British Royal Air Force. The widespread destruction led the Nazi leadership and the missile staff to move underground and use forced labor. The chosen site was a mine/fuel depot near the town of Nordhausen in Thüringen. Slave laborers from the Buchenwald concentration camp came to extend the tunnels for an underground V–2 factory called Mittelwerk. The new concentration camp outside the tunnels was code named Dora and was later renamed Mittelbau. More than 60,000 prisoners were interred at Dora. Some of them built 6000 V–2 rockets between August 1943 and April 1945. They experienced squalid housing, starvation diets, and draconian discipline with frequent executions.
Tens of thousands of prisoners died at Dora. Others were sent off to death camps as their usefulness faded. When the US Army liberated Dora in 1945, they found 750 workers and 3,000 corpses.
Following combat units were teams associated with various American intelligence groups intent on capturing German technology and experts. The US Army collected parts of 100 V–2s from the underground factory and, under a larger program best known as Paperclip, brought more than 125 German V–2 missile engineers, scientists and technicians to America. The Army interrogated them to determine their involvement in Nazi organizations and war crimes. However the Army wanted their expertise for the Cold War, so officers sometimes consciously overlooked or buried incriminating information.
Similarly, the US–led Dora war crimes trial at Dachau in 1947 led to no heightened American understanding, in large part because the US media had lost interest in such trials. The Dachau proceeding tried guards, kapos and the Mittelwerk general director, but its convictions narrowly focused on individual cruelty to prisoners. US Army Ordnance shielded its German missile engineers from public scrutiny by preventing Wernher von Braun, the leader of the group, from traveling to Germany to testify. Afterwards the Army classified the trial records as secret to guard information about Mittelwerk.
The story of slave labor at Dora accompanies a photographic exhibit at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The extensive website also includes many links to outside sources. Warning: some photographs may be disturbing. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Walter Frentz)
Stefan Gatward has been wrestling with inner turmoil ever since the Birmingham city council began removing the apostrophes from the city’s signs this January.
Finally, his frustration was too much to bear, and Stefan took it upon himself to fix the signs. But he didn’t stop there …
He will not join the ‘five items or less’ queue at the supermarket, in protest that the sign should read ‘five items or fewer’.
He also gets annoyed when people-neglect the ‘Royal’ in ‘Royal Tunbridge Wells’, and was vexed when he saw a major chain store advertising sales with signs saying ‘until stocks last’ rather than ‘while stocks last’.
‘I fought for the preservation of our heritage and our language but some people seem happy to let that go. I’m not,’ he said.
From the Upcoming 
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The Nazis at Buchenwald concentration camp did it. And so did serial killer Ed Gein. Now, Andrew Krasnow is making sculptures and lampshades out of human skin, all in the name of art:
His works include human skin lampshades – a direct response to the belief that similar items made from the skin of Holocaust victims were found at Buchenwald concentration camp.
Using skins from white men who donated their bodies to medical science, he has created freak versions of mundane items including flags, boots and maps of America – in effect using skin like leather. His work, he says, is a commentary on human cruelty and America’s ethics and morality. [...]
Gallery owner Robert Devcic said Krasnow uses only white skin because much of the suffering in the Americas has been caused by white people. "He uses skin to make the point that suffering is universal," he said. "It is tanned using the same process that you’d use for an animal skin."
In a new book, an Argentine historian asserts that Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele is responsible for the astonishing rate of twins in Candido Godoi, Brazil. Jorge Camarasa makes the claim that Mengele ministered to both humans and livestock of the town during the 1960s under the name Rudolph Weiss in the book Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.
For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.
But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.
The normal rate of twin births is one out of every 80 pregnancies. Link -via Reddit
Sooner or Later is a Hungarian short film by István Madarász about a prisoner who volunteered for a daring experiment in the last days of World War II.
See what happened when Nazi scientists discovered a way to let a subject travel through time.
You won’t guess the ending: Link [embedded Flash video clip, 11 min.]
