Rudolf Hoess (Rudolf Höss) was the architect and commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz, whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil. On 1 May 1940, Hoess was appointed commandant of a …
On Sunday 24, February 1991, allied forces launched a combined ground, air, and sea assault which overwhelmed the Iraqi army within 100 hours. By 26 February, Iraq had announced it was withdrawing its forces from Kuwait, but still refused to accept all …
In the first decades of the 20th century, the Italian Cavalry School at Tor di Quinto near Rome was - along with the French Cavalry School at Saumur - the leading institution for horsemanship in the world. Tor di Quinto was probably the foremost academy fo…
The photo is taken during the division training at Neuhammer. The romantic notions that Himmler had about the Bosnian Muslims were probably significant in the division's genesis. He was personally fascinated by the Islamic faith and believed that Islam …
AP photojournalist Horst Faas took this iconic photo on June 18, 1965, during the Vietnam War with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Battalion on defense duty at Phouc Vinh airstrip in South Vietnam. The headband message “War is Hell” typified an acerbic attit…
A lone soldier surrounded by a mountain of empty shell cases, France. This lone British soldier up to his knees in spent shell cases offers a striking impression of the destruction that took place on the Western Front. However, this picture only tells h…
A nineteen-year-old and her two-year-old niece and goddaughter are hurled off a collapsing fire escape during an apartment fire on Marlborough Street. The two waited with firefighter Robert O’Neil for a rescue ladder to reach them. As the firefighter cl…
An American corporal aims a Colt M1895 atop a Sri Lankan elephant. The reason why the corporal is atop the elephant is a mystery but elephants were never a weapons platform adopted by the US Army. It’s probably a publicity picture, not something the arm…
This photo shows Marlene Dietrich passionately kissing an American soldier as he arrives home from World War II. It seems that the guy on the left holding her up is enjoying the view. It was first published in Life Magazine with the caption: “While sold…
In professional football, the only line of defense against head injury is the helmet. But the earliest football helmet looked more like a padded aviator cap than the high-tech crash-tested helmet used by today’s players. It is not certain who invented t…
The picture/poster shows five men representing five different cultural spheres: an American Indian, an Australian Aborigine, an African, an Asian, and a European. The European, standing in the center, dominates the scene and thus shows the Eurocentric w…
The photos on display here are taken by Hugo Jager, a former personal photographer of Adolf Hitler. He traveled with Hitler in the years leading up to power and throughout World War II. He was one of the few photographers who were using color photograph…
The Falling Soldier became famous for the way it seems to capture, with terrifying immediacy, the moment when a bullet fatally strikes a Spanish Loyalist militiaman; later, it became famous for allegations that the photograph was "faked", or at least (thou…
During the 1920s Paris had gained a reputation for the variety of its nighttime pleasures and for its free and easy attitude toward life in general. Within this climate of relative tolerance, many gay and lesbian nightclubs opened and flourished. Among …
Mankind's road to the stars had its unsung heroes. One of them was the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. His spaceflight on Soyuz 1 made him the first Soviet cosmonaut to fly into outer space more than once, and he became the first human to die on a sp…
Members of the French Resistance are photographed in the midst of a battle against German troops during the Liberation of Paris. We see a man in makeshift army fatigues to the left and a young man on the right. Then, most strikingly, we see a woman in s…
Japanese marines landed north and south of Shanghai. This picture may have been taken on the Jiangsu coast, which is north of the city. Despite the fact that chemical weapons were prohibited by international laws, the Imperial Japanese Army frequently u…
This photo is taken during the Bangladesh Liberation War. The atrocities of this war are little known to the Western. It lasted over a duration of nine months and witnessed large-scale atrocities. Also during the time cholera was rampant. This war resul…
Thatcher is surrounded by troops on a visit to Goose Green in January 1983, where the Parachute Regiment had secured a crucial victory seven months earlier. The war was a turning point in her premiership. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges called …
For decades, rumors circulated in Russia that Joseph Stalin had a “twin” who replaced him during certain situations. Decades after Stalin's death, the decoy finally decided to talk. Felix Dadaev, a former dancer and juggler, had been ordered to work to …