How to Flee the Gestapo

Every citizen of every democracy should read Timothy Snyder’s short but important book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder uses examples from the history of Nazism and […]

Rescuing people during the Second World War the way Dutch-Paris did was one of those projects that just keep getting more complicated the further you get into it. It sounds […]

If you wanted to know what the weather would be like during the war, you had to go stand outside and make your best guess. Even if weather forecasting had […]

As I write this the world outside my window is covered in icy slush, and sleet is beating down. Large drops of mostly frozen rain pelted my face as the […]

How did the German police capture so many members of Dutch-Paris? The short answer is that they, especially the Abwehr (military intelligence), were very good at their jobs. And they […]

This week of the end of August and beginning of September 2015 marks the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Belgium by British forces, culminating in the liberation of Brussels […]

I read that the reason books and movies about World War II are so popular is that it was the last time that the moral issues were clear cut, black […]

In the last two posts I’ve described the hard choices that two young men made during the war. In both cases, they did what they felt they had to do […]

In the last post I described a young Alsatian man who was both a resister and a collaborator. He was far from the only young man from the occupied countries […]

An historian can find unexpected treasures in an archive. Usually that means a paper trail leading to an unknown event or unsuspected person. But sometimes the unexpected thing involves the […]