From 1904 to 1908, more than 80 percent of Namibia’s Herero people and 50 percent of its Nama people were killed by German forces in a genocide carried out in concentration camps like the one on Shark Island. Shark Island is a lonely, desolate place, almost Martian in its barrenness and removal from the wider world. Hewn from rocks worn smooth by the Atlantic’s beating waves, the only protection from the brutal African sun afforded there is a smattering of palm trees. This tiny outcrop off the coast of Namibia has a history even more somber than its present geography — and the only testimonial is a small marble memorial shaped like a grave marker. Today, Shark Island has been hemmed into the mainland as a peninsula jutting out from nearby Lüderitz, in the extreme southwest of Namibia. But from 1904 to 1908, it was home to a brutal concentration camp, unofficially referred to as “Death Island.” Shark Island was a tragic last stop for many Herero and Namaqua (also called Nama) people, pu...

Burning at the stake. Heresy. Burning at the stake in public was used in England & Wales to punish heresy for both sexes from at least 1222 to 1612 with the death of Edward Wightman, who was the last to be burnt for this crime at Lichfield in Staffordshire on the 11th of April of that year.  It is not known when burning was first used in Britain, but there is a recorded burning for heresy in 1222, when a deacon of the church was burnt at Oxford for embracing the Jewish faith so he could marry a Jew. In 1401, the king authorised a Statute of Heresy which gave the clergy power to arrest and try those suspected of heresy. The first to suffer under the new act was one William Sautre, a priest, who was executed at (Kings) Lynn in 1402.  This statute was repealed but in 1553, burning was re-introduced by Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary Tudor ("Bloody Mary") and 274 burnings of both sexes for heresy were recorded during her five year reign (reign of terror) between 1553 and 1558. In...

Serbian soldier coming across a dead comrade in the snow during the Great Serbian Retreat, 1915. Today 107 years ago, on November 25, 1915, the Great Serbian Retreat through Albania began. .  In October 1915 Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria launched a joint invasion of Serbia. Being heavily outnumbered in troops, resources and artillery guns, on November 25, 1915, the Serbian Army began a retreat through Montenegro and eventually Albania. Some 220,000 Serbian civilians also joined the soldiers in their retreat. .  The weather was terrible, roads were muddy, and the winter was extremely tough, especially through the Albanian mountains. Food and water were scarce and disease was widespread too. Some Albanian tribal bands also committed massacres on the Serbs, as a revenge for Serbian massacres on Albanians during the Balkan Wars. .  By January 1916, the Serbs had reached the Albanian coast, and on January 18 the first Serbian units were shipped to the Greek islands of...

Evidence of widespread  cannibalism was documented during the famine within Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Some of the starving in Kazakhstan devolved into cannibalism ranging from eating leftover corpses to the famished actively murdering each other in order to feed.  More than 2,500 people were convicted of cannibalism during the famine. An example of a testimony of cannibalism in Ukraine during the famine is as follows: "Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle.  A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was 'not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.' The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. The Soviet regime printed posters declaring: "To eat your own children is a barbarian act." Leave your comment below Related post Serbian soldier coming across a dead ...

Attacks on New Georgia The New Georgia group of islands was about one hundred miles north of Guadalcanal. The five large islands were originally bypassed by the Japanese in favour of skipping to Guadalcanal, but as the American Marines garrisoned the captured Henderson Field, the strategy was revised as more land-based planes were needed to strike Guadalcanal. On 24 Nov 1942, a large Japanese convoy sailed for a small clearing on the western side of New Georgia island, currently used by a small coconut plantation. Although the convoy attracted American attention as early as 28 Nov, American intelligence saw nothing there based on aerial photographs besides a few scattered small buildings. Finally, on 3 Dec, a sharp-eyed American intelligence expert saw something: the Japanese were building an airfield underneath the neat rows of coconut trees. Whenever a tree needed to be uprooted, overhead wires were laid and dressed with leaves so that the appearance of a tree was maintained in the s...

Before the concentration camps, the Nazis' victims endured another kind of hell inside the walls of the Jewish ghettos. here is no justice in the world," one young girl wrote in her diary, struggling through starvation and imprisonment under Nazi rule, "not to mention in the ghetto." Life in the Jewish ghettos of the Holocaust was indeed torture. After their invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis began setting up Jewish ghettos both in that country and across Europe. Jewish civilians were branded and forcibly deported into small, cramped quarters, often segregated from the rest of the city with walls or barbed wire. There they waited, hoped, and prayed, most unaware that this was nothing more than the first step in the Nazi plot for the systematic eradication of Europe's Jewish population. Before they could even be sent to concentration camps, however, many prisoners of the Jewish ghettos were starved out. They were given little to nothing to eat, leaving them to ...

Isadore Seigfreid Jachman of Baltimore, Maryland, was a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army and a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary actions defending the town of Flamierge in Belgium from a German attack on January 4, 1945. Jachman was born in Berlin, Germany before moving to the Unites States with his family when he was two years old. Being Jewish, he had relatives who died in the Holocaust, including six aunts and uncles. He joined the Army in 1942. On January 4th, 1945, Sergeant Jachman (Company B, 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment) and his company were pinned down by enemy artillery, mortar, small arms fire and two hostile tanks that attacked the unit, inflicting heavy casualties. Jachman left his place of cover, dashed across open ground and grabbed a bazooka from a fallen comrade. He damaged one of the tanks and forced both of them to retire, but he suffered fatal wounds. He was just 22 years old.  For his actions on this day, he was posthumously a...

At this very moment, Putin’s well-trained killers are advancing into Kyev and throughout Ukraine to destroy a peaceful democratic nation of 44 million who want only to be free. Vastly outgunned, President Zelensky has chosen to stay and fight with his brave civilian volunteers. Many will die tonight.  The Russians may kill these martyrs and overwhelm armed resistance , but they will not be able to kill the memory of their courage, their principles, and their love of independence for their homeland. He may swallow the porcupine, but their sacrifices will assure Putin’s ultimate defeat. Sam Goldberg  From the New York Times: Feb. 25, 2022, 7:42 p.m. ET24 minutes ago 24 minutes ago Yousur Al-Hlou, Michael Downey and Taras Ratushnyy NYTimes As Russian troops entered Kyiv on Friday, Ukraine’s military began arming civilians to help defend the capital. Scores of residents stood in line to pick up assault rifles at a distribution center in central Kyiv after President Volodymyr ...

Lizzie van Zyl was a 7-year-old Boer girl who was imprisoned in a British concentration camp in South Africa in 1901. After her father refused to surrender to the British, Lizzie was classified as an unwanted prisoner and deliberately starved to death. She died of typhoid shortly after this photo was taken. The British concentration camps were a system of internment camps established by the British during the Second Boer War (1899-1902).  The camps were intended to house Boer civilians who were suspected of supporting the Boer resistance. The camps were overcrowded, unsanitary, and lacked adequate food and medical care.  As a result, an estimated 27,927 Boers (including 22,074 women and children) died in the camps. Lizzie van Zyl's death is a reminder of the horrors of the Second Boer War and the suffering that was inflicted on innocent civilians. Her story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and her death is a reminder of the importance of fighting for human...

Operation Mincemeat allowed British intelligence operatives to trick Hitler into thinking that the Allies were about to invade Greece and not Sicily — leaving the Nazis vulnerable and changing the course of World War II. On a spring day in 1943, the body of a British soldier holding a briefcase full of classified material washed ashore near Huelva, Spain. The fishermen who found him alerted the Spanish authorities, who notified the Nazis. But the waterlogged corpse was actually part of an elaborate ruse codenamed Operation Mincemeat. The scheme, masterminded by British intelligence, was one of misdirection. The British hoped that the documents with the fake soldier would convince the Nazis that the Allies were planning to invade Greece and Sardinia — and not Sicily, as they planned. Though this ambitious mission sounds like something from a spy novel, it did the trick. The Nazis shifted their troops to Greece, and the Allies succeeded in taking Sicily. Now, this astonishing true story ...

On June 6, 1966, James Meredith was shot by Aubrey James Norvell at the start of his solitary march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith pulled himself to cover near a parked car after being shot. Other marchers and newsmen took cover behind another car. Jack R. Thornell’s post-shooting photograph of Meredith on the ground won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1967. Meredith recovered from his wound and rejoined the march before it reached Jackson. During his march, 4,000 black Mississippians registered to vote. James Meredith started a solitary March Against Fear for 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest against racism. Soon after starting his march he was shot by a gunman with a shotgun, injuring him.  When they heard the news, other civil rights campaigners, including SCLC’s Martin Luther King, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael, Cleveland Sellers and Floyd McKissick, as well as the Human Rights Medical Committee and other civil ...

The all-female members of the Soviet's 588th Night Bomber Regiment painted their planes with flowers and attacked Nazi forces across the Eastern Front. The women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces — better known as the Night Witches — had no radar, no machine guns, no radios, and no parachutes. All they had onboard was a map, a compass, rulers, stopwatches, flashlights, and pencils. Yet they successfully completed 30,000 bombing raids and dropped more than 23,000 tons of munitions on advancing German armies over the course of four years during World War II. Colonel Marina Raskova, The “Soviet Amelia Earhart” The all-female Night Witches squadron was the direct result of women in the Soviet Union wanting to be actively involved in the war effort. Many Soviet women had grown weary of playing a support role during the war and wanted to be engaged in combat on the front lines. From the very inception of the war, Colonel Marina Raskova, a pilot who was known as ...