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In the history of the cinema, the German director Veit Harlan occupies an especially ignominious position. It is his name that is attached to “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made, a box office success in Nazi Germany in 1940 that was so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS. But what motivated Harlan to write and direct such a film? Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or just a filmmaker too fearful of retribution to say no to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief? Those are some...

Here is a CNN video report that says Russian officials claim they burned the body of Adolf Hitler in 1970 and threw the ashes in an East German river. In newly released details, the Russians claim they buried the body of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun on an East German Base where they remained until 1970, when the Russians turned the base over to the East Germans. They did not trust the East Germans not to make a shrine out of the graves, so they dug the bodies up and disposed of them. That is the Russian version of...

Amazing collection of photos taken during the WW2 and nowadays. The WW2 photos were taken during the invasion of Normandy on and after D-Day.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of WWII Warsaw Ghetto uprising, died Friday in Warsaw at the age of 90. Paula Sawicka told The Associated Press that Edelman died at her family's home at 2 p.m. EDT (1800GMT) of old age. "He died at home, among friends, among his close people," Sawicka said.

Muriel Martin spent four years helping train fighter pilots as a Women's Airforce Service Pilot, or WASP, during WWII.Muriel Martin struggles these days to remember the years she spent as a World War II U.S. Army Air Force pilot. The dates have run together in her mind and the details of her training and experience long ago faded into the background of a life filled with child rearing and community service. But some days, the memories push through and she finds herself back in her 20s and in the cockpit again. “I was flying to Dallas earlier this year and...

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\ Photo: Seizo Yamada (7 km northeast of Hiroshima)

It’s hard for anyone under the age of at least 50 to say they truly understood Ted Kenna, except for his family and perhaps anyone who’s almost died in combat. And Ted was probably easier to understand than others famed or prominent among his World War II generation, a laconic, uncomplicated country guy who happened to have been given a medal called the Victoria Cross. Ted Kenna and his wife Marjorie For valour. It’s the highest honour you can get. But judging by the muted reaction to Ted’s death, at 90, a lot of people didn’t really get what he...

NEARLY 66 years ago, a flotilla of mini-submarines set off to sink or cripple the mighty German battleship Tirpitz. Among the men behind this attack was Max Shean from Perth, a volunteer for one of World War II's most daring and hazardous naval missions. Shean's courage in command of the X-craft submarines in Europe and the Pacific earned him an unrivalled reputation as a leader whose aggressive instincts were always tempered by concern for his crew. He died on June 15, aged 90. Born in July 1918, Shean was in his third year of an engineering degree when news of...

Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama includedIn his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation. This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. Both are impossible. The Americans didn’t free either Nazi death...

[Liberal econonomists now assume] that a huge fiscal stimulus, created out of the illusory elements of massive public borrowing and boundless money creation, will provide the ladder that allows us to climb out of today’s economic crisis. To listen to some prominent liberal economists who believe in Keynesian-style “demand management,” the only thing wrong with this confabulated ladder is that it should be even taller. And truly, if money is no object, why not build it right up to the sky? Why stop where we are now—with a federal deficit expected to reach 13.5 percent of GDP under the current...

John Rosenthal writing at Pajamas Media informs us that President Obama will probably make a stop at Dresden while on his second European trip that will climax with a speech in Normandy on June 6 marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Rosenthal points out a little misdirection from the administration in that they will also probably schedule a stop at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp that Obama believes his uncle helped liberate in 1945. The message Obama intends to send by visiting both sites is clear; while the Germans did bad things during World War II, they were also victims...

Last night, Barack Obama said he had recently read an article about Winston Churchill during the London blitz. "Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat," Obama said. "And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country." It was, perhaps, the most powerful anecdote of the night, and an apparently powerful moral condemnation of President Bush, an admitted admirer of Churchill who kept the...

ROANOKE, Va. - Elisha Ray Nance, the last survivor of a Virginia National Guard company that had high D-Day losses on Omaha Beach, has died. He was 94.

In the summer of 1944, when soldiers of Free France were still fighting alongside the British against the Nazis in Europe, the two colonial powers were engaged in a clandestine struggle in the Middle East. That summer, French intelligence scored a major coup over its British counterpart in the region. The French recruited a Syrian agent who had access to top-secret correspondence between Syrian leaders - among them President Shukri al-Quwatli and Foreign Minister Jamil Mardam (who later became prime minister) - and leaders of neighboring states. French intelligence also obtained reports sent by Syrian diplomats in London, Washington, Moscow,...

JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death. Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known...

CHARLESTON, S.C. - The rain fell steadily from an opaque sky, but the Marines stood ramrod straight, eyes fixed ahead. In the historic graveyard, the Rev. Peter Lanzillotta gazed down at the urn. "You served your country with a full measure of your devotion. We shall salute you and say hail and farewell, good and noble Marine."

A jewel in his collection is the German Panzer V Panther tank that the German army sank in a Polish river during World War II to keep it from the advancing Russians. The Panther sat submerged for decades, and Mr. Littlefield acquired it five years ago and began restoring it. "Restoration is very satisfying, especially with something like the Panther," Mr. Littlefield said in a 2007 interview with The Chronicle. "People say: 'You'll never get that thing running again.' Well, it was built once, and we can do it again."

This video series is titled “In Defense of World War II.” I didn’t realize we had to defend it, but regardless of that, here’s an education brought to you by Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens.

THE WHITE HOUSE Washington, D.C.IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- August 6, 1945STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against...