On this day, 78 years ago, on 18 February 1943, two very dark events in Germany’s darkest history coincided on this same day.
One was the arrest of siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, who as members of the White Rose resistance group at the university of Munich were distributing flyers, in which they harshly criticized the Nazi regime and
On this Day, 17 years ago, on 13 December 2003, the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was captured. He had disappeared from public view shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq in the Second (American) Gulf War entered its final stages. When US troops emarched into the capital Baghdad he was nowhere to be found.
The manhunt for Saddam Hussein, in the
On this day, 76 years ago, in the early hours of 21 July 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was summarily executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock building in Berlin, together with some of his co-conspirators.
Their plot, code-named “Operation Valkyrie”, had been to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his command post of Wolfschanze (‘wolf’s lair’) in what today is in north-eastern Poland (then German East Prussia).
Stauffenberg, thanks to his high rank in the military, had access to Hitler, and so it was decided that he would plant a bomb hidden in a briefcase near Hitler during a meeting at Wolfschanze. Stauffenberg was to leave the briefing early and