These iconic photographs were taken in 1947 at Vienna’s Southern Railway Station, where photographer Ernst Haas witnessed the moving scenes of the return of the first 600 Austrian war prisoners from Eastern Europe. Haas’s images show the anticipation an…
These images are chilling, bordering on surreal: as World War II raged on December 18, 1941, Adolf Hitler presided over a Christmas party in Munich. The color-enhanced images were captured by Hugo Jaeger, one of Adolf Hitler's personal photographers. …
Soviet soldiers duck under passing tanks during an intensive training before the Battle of Kursk. The goal was to desensitize them to this experience and also to teach them the importance of digging trenches and holes strong enough to resist being driven o…
HMS Invincible was launched on 3 May 1977 as the seventh ship to carry the name. She saw action in the Falklands War when she was deployed with HMS Hermes and took over as flagship of the British fleet when Hermes was sold to India. On 25 February 1982,…
Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania for 21 years, earning a reputation as a brutal dictator. During his reign, he developed the largest network of spies in Eastern Europe, silenced his opposition with a secret police force known as the Securitate, and eventual…
On 6 October 1889, the Moulin Rouge (English: The Red Mill) opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Its creator Spaniard Joseph Oller and his manager Charles Zidler were formidable businessmen who understood the public's taste…
Between 1928 and 1932, two enormous wooden ships, which once belonged to Emperor Caligula, and had lain on the bottom of the Lake Nemi for over nineteen hundred years, were salvaged in what was perhaps the greatest underwater archaeological recovery ever a…
It's Friday, the 13th of April, 1945. A few miles northwest of Magdeburg there was a railroad siding in a wooded ravine not far from the Elbe River. Major Clarence L. Benjamin in a jeep was leading a small task force of two light tanks on a routine job …
The Battle of Verdun is considered by many the most blood-stained battlefield in world history. Never before or since has there been such a lengthy battle, involving so many men, situated on such a tiny piece of land. The battle, which lasted from 21 Fe…
This emotional picture shows a rather astonished little boy: he isn’t sure what’s happening, or how it’s happening. From a world of silence, he has suddenly been transported to a world of rich, vibrant sound. It is new, it is strange, and it’s also a li…
Conveying the officials in the photograph is a section of 30ft diameter steel penstock of the soon-to-be-completed Hoover Dam. In the same year, the pouring of the project's concrete had concluded - a total of 3.25million cubic yards. As the United Stat…
This interesting picture, taken in 1919, shows employees of the New York Central Railroad at a celebration in Victory Way, showing off a pyramid of recovered German helmets in front of Grand Central Terminal. There were over 12,000 German Pickelhaubes on t…
In January 1923 France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr, an industrial area of Germany bordering their own countries. The occupation of Ruhr was in response to the Weimar Republic's failure to continue its reparation payments in the aftermath of World War I. …
The men are practitioners of Kyudo, Japanese Zen archery. Their outfits and the way they hold their second arrows (Ya) between their fourth and fifth fingers give this away. The target is most likely 28m away from the men since they are shooting outdoors a…
Hidden for 100 years, the astonishing photos by a 16-year-old soldier show how his brothers-in-arms would forever be haunted by the specter of defeat. These photos were taken by Walter Kleinfeldt who joined a German gun crew in 1915 and fought at the Somme…
This picture shows the end of a brutal boxing match between Ray Campbell and Dick Hyland. Take a look at the condition of the two fighters, battered, bloodied, bruised, and staring down at each other at the end of the fight. Boxing in those days was …
The building in the picture is Palazzo Braschi in Rome, the headquarters of the Fascist Party Federation (the local one, not the national Party headquarters). It was not always covered up like that; this set-up was displayed for the 1934 elections, in w…
In October 1961, border disputes led to a standoff and for 16 hours the world was on the brink of war while Soviet and American tanks faced each other just 300 feet (100 meters) apart. In August 1961 Washington and its British and French allies had fail…
At 10:39 pm on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module. As he made his way down the lunar module’s ladder, a television camera attached to the craft recorded his progress and beamed the signal back to Earth, where hundreds of mil…
The photo shows Corporal Yukio Araki (age 17 years old) holding a puppy with four other young men (age 18 and 19 years old) of the 72nd Shinbu Corps. An Asahi Shimbun cameraman took this photo on the day before the departure of the 72nd Shinbu Corps fro…