Blogroll

How Hitler became Germany’s “supreme judge”

German shipyard worker Ewald Schlitt probably didn’t know a Berlin newspaper reported his March 1941 assault conviction in a court 275 miles away from the capital. His misfortune was that Adolf Hitler read the article.

In the summer of 1940, Schlitt’s wife of three years confessed to a sexual relationship with another man. She ended […]

Hitler’s Genocidal Plans for the USSR

Adolph Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, is a key turning point in World War II. Called Operation Barbarossa, it caused millions of military and civilian casualties. Long before the military strategy was drawn up, though, Hitler made clear that one of his goals was exterminating wide swathes of Russian […]

Evil cats (really)

I’m a dog person. Always have been. So much so that my kids have as many dogs as there were humans in our nuclear family. Cats are another matter. Never liked them. Never trusted them. Now I come to find out maybe it’s in my (extremely lapsed) Catholic genes.

Chasing heretics was a favorite Catholic […]

Book Review: Death of an Assassin by Ann Marie Ackerman

For the second time in a year, I’ve had book encounters with 19th century European assassins who eventually fled to the United States and began new lives under different names. The first was Sergei Degaev, who assassinated the chief of Tsar Nicholas’s security organization in 1883. Sixteen years later he would become a popular professor […]

Book Review: History of a Disappearance by Filip Stringer

We who live west of the Mississippi are familiar with ghost towns. Just in the northern Great Plains, hundreds of small towns were abandoned when a railroad line wasn’t built. More disappeared when highways and air travel led railroads to abandon lines to and through small communities. Farther west is a multitude of abandoned mining […]