Tag: World War II (1939-45)

Nazis in Canada? A Secret List With Answers May Soon Be Released.

For 37 years, Canada has kept close guard on an explosive roster of names. The classified report lists 883 possible Nazi war criminals who found harbor in the country after World War II, and many believe it offers insights into exactly what the government knew about how they got there, the extent to which they […]

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Poland’s Ruling Party Uses Germany as Boogeyman as Tough Election Looms

Amid rising alarm this summer in Poland and the Baltic States over a possible military attack from the east, the Polish Embassy in Lithuania requested an urgent meeting with the head of Germany’s diplomatic mission. Polish embassies in other European countries made similar requests. What the Polish diplomats wanted to talk about, however, was not […]

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How the Humble Paperback Helped Win World War II

When American soldiers fought on the battlefields of World War II, they were carrying more than weapons. They also carried ideas — quite literally. The Armed Services Editions, a series of specially designed pocket-size paperbacks, were introduced in the spring of 1943. Over the next four years, roughly 120 million were printed, finding their way […]

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Lise Meitner, the ‘Atomic Pioneer’ Who Never Won a Nobel Prize

There is a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster film about the building of the atomic bomb, in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is reading a newspaper while getting a haircut. Suddenly, Alvarez leaps from his seat and sprints down the road to find his colleague, the theoretical physicist […]

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The Market for Nazi Memorabilia Is Huge, Lucrative and Very Disturbing

News that someone is into Nazi memorabilia or more generally that there’s a ready supply of and demand for Nazi memorabilia is met, predictably, with widespread outrage (if perhaps also with some measure of titillation). If no one seems all that shocked that it’s legal — the sanctity of the First Amendment is baked deep […]

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Raymond Moriyama, Designer of Humane Public Spaces, Dies at 93

One of the firm’s standout works was the Toronto Reference Library, a generous glass and brick structure, completed in 1977. But their projects were not confined to Canada. They designed a transit mall in Buffalo to revitalize the city’s main street; the National Museum of Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh; and the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, […]

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Pope Pius XII Likely Knew of Holocaust, Newly Discovered Letter Suggests

A letter found among the private papers of Pope Pius XII suggests that the Holy See was told in 1942 that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were being killed in furnaces every day at Belzec, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Though news of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hitler was […]

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