Resistance

  • Here is the UK cover of ‘The Nazi Ghost Train‘ which comes out next year. I love it! Thank you, Mirror Books. It’s an amazing true story of an act of resistance which saved the lives of hundreds of resisters, airmen and SOE agents. More about the book here.

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  • We have lost a WW2 legend: the wonderful Comet Line courier Andrée Dumon. She was 102. She survived Ravensbrück & Mauthausen. She was funny, kind and exceptionally brave. A regular at evasion line memorial events and still known by her wartime codename ‘Nadine’, Andrée was a lovely person, with time for everyone and a sparkling

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  • During the liberation of Chartres a Life magazine photographer spotted Simone Segouin and snapped a photograph, turning the 19-year-old into an icon of the French Resistance and the Liberation. Photographer Robert Capa and reporter Jack Belden had driven into the embattled city in August 1944 with soldiers from General George S. Patton’s Third Army. Intrigued

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  • This week Prague marks the 82nd anniversary of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the massacres which followed. I took these photos on a visit to the site a couple of years ago. On May 27, 1942, Heydrich’s car joined this road turning sharply to follow the main route towards the city centre. But the

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  • Defying Hitler

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  • In the summer of 1978 two former members of a B-17 crew met to discuss their escape from death in a raid on Kassel in Germany in 1943. Sitting on a porch in Tarrytown, New York, co-pilot Bohn Fawkes turned to his navigator Elmer “Benny” Bendiner and said: “You remember that we were hit with

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  • Major new review of Defying Hitler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, describing it as a “detailed new history of the people dedicated to stopping a fascist madman” which “sums it all up with an inventive weaving of key players and the steps they took to resist a monster.” Perry Munyon writes: “Drawing from the vast Nazi

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  • Finally getting a chance to round up some of the reviews and responses to Defying Hitler. USA Today made it one of their Five Books Not To Miss, noting that Publishers Weekly says the book is “an informative counterpoint to accounts of widespread German complicity with the Holocaust.” And the New York Post marked it as one

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  • November 11 1943 is, I understand, a well-remembered day for historians of the Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France. It was on that day that the Maquis paraded through the town of Oyonnax in an event designed as a show of strength, a morale boost for the local population. The town was chosen because there was no

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  • For those fascinated by this week’s tributes to Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst (all executed 76 years ago) this is the spot at which their fate was sealed. Sophie threw anti-Nazi leaflets from the balcony under the clock and into the hall below at Munich university. All these years later it is

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