The Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, was a failed coup d'état by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders in Munich, Bavaria, on 8–9 November 1923, during the Weimar Republic. Approximately two thousand Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, but were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 15 Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander.
Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was a German lawyer and SS-Brigadeführer in Nazi Germany. He was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was originally planned. After the war, Schöngarth and six others were tried for murdering an American pilot, Americo S. Galle, who was shot down over the Netherlands in November 1944. They were all found guilty. Schöngarth and four others were sentenced to death and executed in 1946.
Josef Kramer was a Hauptsturmführer in the SS and the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen Belsen concentration camps. Dubbed The Beast of Belsen by camp inmates, he was a German Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. He was detained by the British Army after the Second World War, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on the gallows in the prison at Hamelin by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
Anton Diffring was a German actor. He had an extensive film and television career in the United Kingdom from the 1940s to the 1980s, latterly appearing in international films. Primarily a character actor, he often played Nazi officers in World War II films, and other antagonistic authority figures.
Confessions of a Nazi Spy is a 1939 American spy political thriller film directed by Anatole Litvak for Warner Bros. It was the first explicitly anti-Nazi film to be produced by a major Hollywood studio, being released in May 1939, four months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, and two and a half years before the United States' official entry into the war.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is a 1962 American biographical fantasy film directed by Henry Levin and George Pal. The latter was the producer and also in charge of the stop motion animation. The film was one of the highest-grossing films of 1962. It won one Oscar and was nominated for three additional Academy Awards. The cast included several prominent actors—including Laurence Harvey, Karlheinz Böhm, Jim Backus, Barbara Eden and Buddy Hackett.
Kurt Kreuger was a Swiss-reared German actor. Kreuger once was the third-most-requested male actor at 20th Century Fox. He starred with, among others, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart.
Rudolph Anders was a German character actor who came to the United States after the rise of Hitler, and appeared in numerous American films in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
Alfred Neumann was a German writer of novels, stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as a translator into German.
A war crimes trial is the trial of persons charged with criminal violation of the laws and customs of war and related principles of international law committed during armed conflict.
The Stutthof trials were a series of war crime tribunals held in postwar Poland for the prosecution of Stutthof concentration camp staff and officials, responsible for the murder of up to 85,000 prisoners during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in World War II. None of the Stutthof commandants were ever tried in Poland. SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly was put on trial by a British military court in Germany but not for the crimes committed at Stutthof; only as the commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg. Nevertheless, Pauly was executed in 1946.
Superior orders, also known as just following orders or the Nuremberg defense, is a plea in a court of law that a person, whether civilian, military or police, should not be considered guilty of committing crimes ordered by a superior officer or official. It is regarded as a complement to command responsibility.
Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer was an Austrian novelist, poet and playwright. Later based in Germany, he belonged to a group of writers that included the likes of Hans Grimm, Rudolf G. Binding, Emil Strauß, Agnes Miegel and Hanns Johst, all of whom found favour under the Nazis.
Willhelm Hammann was a German educator and communist politician. A town councilor and a member of the provincial parliament of Hesse in the 1920s, he was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1938 to 1945. In April 1945, Hammann, who was the blockälteste of the children's barrack, sabotaged the planned movement of Jews on a death march to a certain extermination. Yad Vashem awarded Hammann the title of "Righteous among the Nations". Yisrael Meir Lau, current chairman of Yad Vashem Council, was one of the children saved by Hammann.
My Life for Ireland is a 1941 Nazi German anti-British propaganda drama film produced in World War II. Directed by Max W. Kimmich, it tells a story of an Irish nationalist family and their involvement in the Irish struggle of independence over two generations. The film's sets were designed by the art directors Wilhelm Depenau and Otto Erdmann.
Carl Peters is a 1941 German historical drama film directed by Herbert Selpin and starring Hans Albers, Karl Dannemann, and Fritz Odemar. It was produced as an anti-British propaganda film during the Second World War.
Felix Basch (1885–1944) was an American-Austrian actor, screenwriter and film director.
Karl Wilhelm Fricke is a German political journalist and author. He has produced several of the standard works on resistance and state repression in the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). In 1955, he became one of several hundred kidnap victims of the East German Ministry for State Security, captured in West Berlin and taken to the east where for nearly five years he was held in state detention.
Karl Friedrich Titho was a Germany military officer, who as commander of the Fossoli di Carpi and Bolzano Transit Camps oversaw the Cibeno Massacre in 1944. Titho was jailed in the Netherlands after World War II for other war crimes committed there, released in 1953, and then deported to Germany. Despite an arrest warrant in Italy in 1954, Titho was never extradited to stand trial for his actions in Italy, and died in Germany in 2001, confessing and repenting his role in the atrocities just days before his death.
The trial of Neumann and Sass, also known as the Kaunas Trials, was among the largest mass trials of Nazis in the early 1930s. The trial resulted in the convictions of the leaders of regional Nazi parties, Theodor von Sass, Ernst Neumann and other party members for their activity in the Klaipėda Region.
