The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II.
David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermensch" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass-rapes, child abductions and sexual slavery.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was a German SS officer and from May 1940 until November 1943 and again from May 1944 until January 1945 the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, he was convicted in Poland and executed for war crimes committed on the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp and for his role in the Holocaust.
Hans Kammler was an SS-Obergruppenführer responsible for Nazi civil engineering projects and its top secret V-weapons program. He oversaw the construction of various Nazi concentration camps before being put in charge of the V-2 rocket and Emergency Fighter Programs towards the end of World War II. Kammler disappeared in May 1945 during the final days of the war. There has been much conjecture regarding his fate.
ODESSA is an American codename coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as "ratlines". Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Horst Kopkow was a Nazi German SS major who worked for German Security police and, after the war, was concealed by British intelligence to use his knowledge during the Cold War.
Adolf Hitler, chancellor and dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, signed his political testament and his private will in the Führerbunker on 29 April 1945, the day before he committed suicide with his wife, Eva Braun.
Karl Rudolf Werner Best was a German jurist, police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer, Nazi Party leader, and theoretician from Darmstadt. He was the first chief of Department 1 of the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret police, and initiated a registry of all Jews in Germany. As a deputy of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, he organized the World War II SS-Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary death squads that carried out mass-murder in Nazi-occupied territories.
Laurence Rees is an English historian. He is a BAFTA winning historical documentary filmmaker and a British Book Award winning author of several books about Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the atrocities committed, especially by them, during the 20th century. He is the former Head of BBC TV History Programmes.
The Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. was a secret list of prominent British residents to be arrested, produced in 1940 by the SS as part of the preparation for the proposed invasion of Britain. After the war, the list became known as The Black Book.
The military occupation of the Channel Islands by Nazi Germany lasted for most of the Second World War, from 30 June 1940 until liberation on 9 May 1945. The Bailiwick of Jersey and Bailiwick of Guernsey are British Crown dependencies in the English Channel, near the coast of Normandy. The Channel Islands were the only de jure part of the British Empire in Europe to be occupied by Nazi Germany during the war. Germany's allies Italy and Japan also occupied British territories in Africa and Asia, respectively.
Jewish resistance under Nazi rule took various forms of organized underground activities conducted against German occupation regimes in Europe by Jews during World War II. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, Jewish resistance was defined as actions that were taken against all laws and actions acted by Germans. The term is particularly connected with the Holocaust and includes a multitude of different social responses by those oppressed, as well as both passive and armed resistance conducted by Jews themselves.
Gerda Christian, nicknamed "Dara", was one of Adolf Hitler's private secretaries before and during World War II.
Werner Naumann was a German civil servant and politician. He was State Secretary in Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda during the Nazi Germany era. He was appointed head of the Propaganda Ministry by Adolf Hitler in his last will and testament after Goebbels was promoted to Reichskanzler. Naumann was present in the Führerbunker in late April 1945. He eluded capture and led an underground existence under an assumed name until an amnesty in 1950. For the next few years, he headed a clandestine Neo-Nazi organization known as the Naumann Circle until it was exposed and he was arrested. He was subsequently judged to be a "Category II offender" in a denazification proceeding.
Oflag IV-C, often referred to by its location at Colditz Castle, overlooking Colditz, Saxony, was one of the most noted German Army prisoner-of-war camps for captured enemy officers during World War II; Oflag is a shortening of Offizierslager, meaning "officers' camp".
A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction) include stories, novels, performances, and mixed media that often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.
Conspiracy theories about the death of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, contradict the accepted fact that he committed suicide in the Führerbunker on 30 April 1945. Stemming from a campaign of Soviet disinformation, most of these theories hold that Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, survived and escaped from Berlin, with some asserting that he went to South America. In the post-war years, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigated some of the reports, without lending them credence. The 2009 revelation that a skull in the Soviet archives long (dubiously) claimed to be Hitler's actually belonged to a woman has helped fuel conspiracy theories.
Mark Felton is an English author, historian, and YouTuber. Felton has written over a dozen nonfiction books. He runs several channels on YouTube covering different historical subjects of the 20th and 21st century, mainly related to World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Felton has been a lecturer at the University of Essex and at various universities in China. He has also been featured on television as a military history expert. In 2014, he published Zero Night, a book about the 1942 mass allied escape from the German prisoner-of-war camp Oflag VI-B.
