Five Shot In U.S. Congress
In March 1954 four Puerto Rican nationalists wanting independence from US rule, shot 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols from the balcony of the House of Representatives chamber in the United States Capitol. The nationalists unfurled...
Arab Republic of Egypt
In July 1952 the Egyptian Free Officers Movement, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein with General Muhammad Naguib as titular head, seized control of King Farouk’s government buildings, radio stations, and police stations in Cairo. The rule of Egypt passed to...
Riots in East Germany
In June 1953 a strike by construction workers in East Berlin against Soviet-inspired work standards, evolved into a series of demonstrations against declining living standards and unpopular Sovietization policies across the German Democratic Republic (East Germany)....
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Executed
https://youtu.be/iP56uHh-p5g In 1951 the American citizens Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg, were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. In June 1953 the Rosenbergs were both executed in the Sing Sing correctional...
Rosenbergs sentenced to death for espionage
https://youtu.be/5iUyF3YttgA Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and brought to trial on March 6, 1951; On March 29 they were found guilty, and on April 5,1951 the couple was sentenced to death. https://youtu.be/7lfJC5bx3Us...
Truman Assassination Attempt
https://youtu.be/upbvXCgHwJo In November 1950 two Puerto Rican pro-independence nationalists attempted to assassinate U.S. President Harry Truman. Both men were stopped before gaining entry to the house. One assassin and one police officer were killed by...
CIA Mind Control
https://youtu.be/NUW-frxo2X4 In 1950 the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence authorized Project BLUEBIRD to discover methods of: conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of informationcontrol of an individual by the application of special...
Nuclear Espionage
https://youtu.be/mxmsBePZwHY In January 1950, the German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, was arrested for passing key documents to the Soviets throughout WWII. Fuchs identified his courier as the...
Klaus Fuchs Atomic Spy
https://youtu.be/mqQ5_Na8DIc The German theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs helped develop the first effective atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the WWII Manhattan Project. German born, Fuchs fled Nazi Germany and became a British citizen in August 1942. As a long-time...
Alger Hiss
https://youtu.be/HvBpuPMNuaA In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, ex-communist and editor with Time magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Alger Hiss was a communist who had passed him top secret documents during his work in the...
Cardinal Mindszenty
https://youtu.be/IH7rFQWP0Lk In February 1949 Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty was convicted of treason by the Hungarian Communist People’s Court. The Cardinal had been an outspoken critic of the persecution of Jews by the Hungarian fascist government during WWII....
UN Mediator Assassinated
In September 1948 members of the Lehi militant organization (AKA the Stern gang) assassinated the Swedish UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in Palestine -- presumably for proposing an Arab administration for Jerusalem. The Lehi (Hebrew for "Fighters for the...
Jeju Uprising
Jeju Island is a 40km x 90km island province of South Korea 120 km south of the Korean Peninsula The Jeju uprising, which began on April 3, 1948, resulted in extreme suppression by the South Korean Army, police and right-wing paramilitary groups. The...
Mahatma Gandhi Assassinated
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 –1948) led Indians in a nonviolent independence movement from British colonization. Known worldwide by his honorific Sanskrit title Mahātmā (high-souled, venerable) he was also...
Hollywood Black List
In October 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee (created in 1938) re-convened in Washington D.C. for public hearings on alleged communist infiltration within the American motion picture industry. 50 top Hollywood executives decided to suspend those who...
Central Intelligence Agency
Shortly after the end of WWII, the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, was dissolved by presidential order. However, despite opposition from competing forces including the U.S. military, State Department and FBI, President Truman...
A-Bomb Morality
Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd The concept of a nuclear chain reaction reportedly came to the physicist Leó Szilárd as an epiphany while waiting to cross a London street in 1933. “...It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by...
Mussolini Executed
After being freed from an Italian prison by German special forces in 1943, Benito Mussolini established the Italian Social Republic in northern Italy. Although he claimed autonomy, the republic Mussolini ruled for 1 1/2 years as Head of State and Minister of...
Dietrich Bonhöffer Executed
Together with theologians Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhöffer was a founding member of the German Bekennende Kirche ( Confessing Church), a Protestant movement that opposed Nazi attempts to unify all Protestant churches into...
Execution of Pvt. Slovik
This haunting scene from the 1963 film The Victors depicts the Christmas Eve execution of a GI deserter modeled after Private Eddie Slovik. Private Eddie Slovik was the first American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for...
Easter in Nazi Germany
In a 1939 census of Nazi Germany (including annexed Austria), 54% of Germans considered themselves Protestant, 40% Catholic, 3.5% gottgläubig (non-sectarian believers in God) and 1.5% as non-religious. In the spring of 1936, Der Angriff, Berlin’s Nazi paper founded by...
U.S. Pilot Defects
For years a devotee of the ultra-conservative radio ministry of Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a 23 year-old USAAF P-38 pilot named Martin James Monti defected to the Axis powers in October 1944. Why a young American might actually defect to the Axis is hard to...
Fort Lawton Riot
In August 1944, a riot broke out at Fort Lawton, Washington between Italian POWs and U.S. African-American soldiers. Dozens of men were injured before military police intervened. The next morning, an Italian POW was found hanged. Interpretation of the riot and...
Operation Valkyrie
In July 1944, a group of high-level German military leaders attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler and stage a coup d’état, code-named Operation Valkyrie. Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, wounded veteran and chief of staff of the reserve...
Moe Berg
Morris “Moe” Berg was an amazing character. Fluent in several languages, he reportedly read ten newspapers a day and was a successful contestant on the radio quiz show Information, Please. After graduation from Princeton University and Columbia Law...