Love him or hate him, Edwin Rommel screams class in every photo. Rommel was a gallant enemy. He didn’t order his men to execute troops. He didn’t set out to oppress Jewish populations. In fact, he is said to have ripped up an order from Hitler that orde…
At a time when censors used a heavy hand to keep the American public from knowing and seeing the carnage in the Pacific during World War II, this ground-breaking photograph of dead American soldiers confronted the American public for the first time with th…
Despite being targeted by law enforcement across the globe at the start of the 20th century, opium and opium dens were prevalent fixtures in east Asia, the United States, and Europe up until the mid-1950′s. In this photograph, opium smokers in Singapore…
These photos were taken between May and December 1944, and they show the officers and guards of Auschwitz relaxing and enjoying themselves — as countless people were being murdered and cremated at the nearby death camp. In some of the photos, SS officers c…
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…
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 …
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…
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 e…
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 a…
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…
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 Resi…
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. This gas mask was for children up to two years old and the design covered the whole of the …
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 case…
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 peopl…
An American tank crew stands beside Bernard Herzog - an American citizen who lived in the Philippines - after his liberation from the Santo Tomas internment camp run by the Japanese in the old University of Santo Tomas campus, Manila. As you can see, he…
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…
When Winston Churchill entered the Royal Military College (Sandhurst) few could foresee that he would become one of Great Britain’s greatest war leaders. He tried three times before passing the entrance exam; he applied to be trained for the cavalry rat…
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…
In the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, a large-scale, complex offensive against the Nazi invaders in Belarus, Poland and the Baltic republics. This vital Soviet offensive was launched just after Allied troops had landed in …