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
OSS 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...
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...
Norwegian Heavy Water Sabotage
In April 1940 Nazi Germany invaded Norway and, after a brief period of resistance, began an occupation that lasted until the end of the war. Norway subsequently became the most heavily fortified Axis-occupied country during the war with a ratio of one German soldier...
Batman
This 1943 movie featured the first screen appearance of Batman played by Lewis Wilson. With J. Carrol Naish playing the evil Japanese agent, the film is almost laughably crude and racist.
Die Weisse Rose
The White Rose (die Weiße Rose) was a resistance group in Nazi Germany established in June 1942. Led by a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich, the group distributed anonymous leaflets and painted graffiti opposed to the Nazi regime. Arrested...
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
In the summer of 1942, German SS and police units deported ~ 265,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to to the Treblinka killing center and ~11,600 to forced-labor camps. More than 10,000 Jews in the ghetto were murdered during these deportation operations. While...
Dietrich Bonhöffer
Dietrich Bonhöffer (1906 –1945) was a German Lutheran theologian and founding member of the Confessing Church that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to permeate German Protestant churches with Nazi doctrine. An outstanding academic theologian,...
Military Secrecy
Private Snafu, featured in a 1943-45 series of American military instructional cartoons, was often ironic and humorous1943.
WWII Pacifism
In the 1930s, the Great Depression and bitter memory of losses in WWI shifted American public opinion toward isolationism. However, support for isolationist groups such as the America First Committee rapidly declined with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,...