Seen here is an aerial black and white photo of the famous Cologne Cathedral during World War II. The cathedral suffered fourteen hits by aerial bombs during the war. It did not collapse, but stood tall in an otherwise flattened city. The twin spires are s…
This pciture is taken probably by the end of the war when really young and old citizens were enlisted for soldiers. Most likely a member of the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend" which sustained 43% casualties during the Normandy campaign. SS recruiter…
Translation: “Germany is victorious on all fronts”. The V stands for Victory. The Allied V-for-Victory cliché became so popular as a morale raiser that the enemy had to adopt to it, an easier task for the Italians, whose Vs displayed in public could be hel…
The information card attached to the mugshot says “looks around 32-34 years old″, it also says his ear shape is “6″. It has a separate paragraph for “race (if colored)”, for Stalin it’s vacant. The mugshot was taken in 1911, when he was arrested for the se…
Samuel Reshevsky learned chess when he was 4 years old. He became known as a child chess prodigy and was playing simultaneous games of chess against adults when he was 6 years of age. At age 8 he was playing chess against strong players. Following the even…
The Anschluss (German for “union”) was the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in March 1938. One of the Nazi's ideologies was to re-unite all Germans either born or living outside of the Reich in order to create an "all-German Reich". From the early b…
In 1936 Jesse Owens arrived in Berlin to compete for the United States in the Summer Olympics. Adolf Hitler was using the games to show the world a resurgent Nazi Germany. Nazi propaganda promoted concepts of "Aryan racial superiority" and depicted ethnic Af…
Maoris of 'C' Company, 28th Maori Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Division perform the 'Haka' (ancestral war dance) for the visit of King George II of Greece, his wife the Queen, his cousin Prince Peter and Major General Freyberg. The location was at an arm…
This bomb landed on a side road off Drury Lane blasting several buildings, including the office of the Daily Herald. Known as the Flying bomb, Buzz bomb or Doodlebug, V-1 was the first modern guided missile used in wartime and the forerunner of today's cru…
Adolph Hitler put Field Marshall Rommel in charge of the French Atlantic wall and the defense of Europe from an Allies cross-channel invasion in 1944. Rommel arrived, looked over the situation, and immediately ordered a tremendous upgrading of the fortific…
These photographs show the UB 110, a German submarine that was sunk and risen in 1918. The show the control room in the submarine, including the manhole to the periscope well, hand wheels for pressure gear, valve wheels for flooding and blowing and the air…
Vlasik’s off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide. This photo shows how human this “monster” was, like Hitler with his…
Many wartime photos of dramatic explosions, especially those with action like this one, are in fact staged after the fact. Maybe this one was as well. It may also be from a postwar film. Cameras were not light and handy like today, typically had slow expos…
After the German 2nd Panzer Division captured Athens, they raised the Nazi German flag above the Acropolis as a sign of victory. This flag, the symbol of Greece's occupation, would be taken down one month later in one of the first acts of the Greek Resista…
The hospital is running a drill to make sure that they can implement the procedures for poison gas and in this case the nurses are testing out infant gas-masks. The photo is part of the Imperial War Museum in London and the original caption reads: “Three n…
These soldiers are part of the Russian Fifth Army of World War One. They are preparing a chemical attack against the German positions in Ilukste area (modern Latvia). Chlorine gas was first introduced in the battlefield by the German Army in 1915. It was pio…
The Me 264 was designed from the beginning as part of the “Amerika bomber” project. It's goal was to be able to carry a small load to the United States but also to support U-boat operations far into the Atlantic. The Amerika Bomber was a project to obta…
The gun players are WH Murphy and his assistant, of the Protective Garment Corporation of New York. By 1923, the Protective Garment Corporation of New York manufactured a light weight vest for police use and they held a live demonstration in DC. The live d…
The immobility of the trench warfare characterizing the First World War led to a need for a device that would protect soldiers from enemy fire and could help them move on the extremely irregular terrain of battlefields. Apart from a few exceptional cases, …
When the people of the town of Hastings awoke one morning to see one of the Kaiser’s U-boats on their beach, it caused some shock. Thousands of visitors flocked to see the beached submarine. The Admiralty allowed the town clerk to charge a fee for people t…