Until the end of the 1930s, the best women’s stockings were made from silk. This changed in the United States when DuPont began manufacturing nylon in 1939. Nylon stockings went on limited sale in October of that year followed by a national launch at selec…
Simo Häyhä, also known as "The White Death," was a Finnish sniper who is credited with killing 505 enemy troops within 100 days during the Winter War against the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1940. Simo Häyhä's involvement in the Winter War was very extraor…
The 1938-1939 German Expedition to Tibet was a May 1938 – August 1939 German scientific expedition led by German zoologist and SS officer Ernst Schäfer. Schäfer’s primary objective for the expedition was the creation of a complete scientific record of T…
An iron lung or as it is called officially a negative pressure ventilator is a form of medical ventilator that enables a person to breathe when normal muscle control has been lost or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. It creates lower p…
The Japanese treatment of prisoners of war in World War II was barbaric. The men shown in the above picture are part of the Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army. All of them are sitting in the traditional cross-legged prayer position. They’re probab…
Aleksandra Samusenko, born in 1922, was a member of the Soviet armed forces who fought during the Winter War in Finland and during the Great Patriotic War. After successfully finishing the tank academy, Samusenko received her Order of the Red Star when …
The Mangbetu people had a distinctive look and this was partly due to their elongated heads. At birth, the heads of babies’ were tightly wrapped with cloth in order to give their heads the elongated look. The custom of skull elongation called by the nat…
Panzer III design was composed of four sections – hull, turret, and front superstructure with the opening for the turret and rear superstructure with the engine deck. Each section was of a welded construction and all four were bolted together. The hull …
Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, strikes a pose for photographer Heinrich Hoffmann whilst rehearsing and listening to his recorded speech. The album, features black and white images of the Nazi leader in a series of poses, using expressive face a…
These two men are manumitted slaves. Manumission is the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves. They borrowed the clothes and the hats just for the picture. It's a posed photograph and a statement about being manumitted rather than a picture of …
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…
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…
Twenty graybeards sitting in a square played chess in Paris against a very small boy 8 years old, and Samuel Reshevsky beat them all. According to New York Times: on May 17, 1920, Reshevky faced 20 players in a simul in Paris and the boy “moved qu…
These photographs show SUB 110, a German submarine that was sunk and risen in 1918. We can see 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 air pre…
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was cheerful and without a care when he first met photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. In a close-up image, the Third Reich politician was caught off guard smiling at the League of Nations meeting in Geneva in Septem…
In May 1910, European royalty gathered in London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Among the mourners were nine reigning kings, who were photographed together in what very well may be the only photograph of nine reigning kings ever taken. Of the nine sov…
The picture was taken during the Battle of Verdun, one of the deadliest battles of the Great War. The concentration of so much fighting in such a small area devastated the land, resulting in miserable conditions for troops on both sides. The shells turn…
The Cathedral of Light was a main aesthetic feature of the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg starting in 1933. It consisted of 130 anti-aircraft searchlights, at intervals of 12 meters, aimed skyward to create a series of vertical bars surrounding the audien…
Although Adolf Hitler claimed the Germans were of a superior Aryan race of white, tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed individuals, he himself was of modest height, blue-eyed, and brown-haired. Traudl Junge, his last secretary often told in interviews, that peo…
A sixteen-year-old German anti-aircraft soldier of the Hitler Youth, Hans-Georg Henke, taken prisoner in the state of Hessen, Germany. He was a member of the Luftwaffe anti-air squad who burst into tears as his world crumbled around him. His father died…