In March 1944, after Nazi Germany occupied Hungary, Döme Sztójay became Prime Minister and aligned the country closely with the Third Reich. Under his government, Hungarian Jews were forced to wear yellow stars, confined to ghettos, and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Between May and July 1944, ...

In Nazi Germany, the courts were transformed from institutions of justice into instruments of persecution. Few men played a greater role in that process than Otto Thierack.

A lawyer by training and a committed Nazi, Thierack rose from regional judge to President of the People's Court and eventua...

After Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939, the Stutthof concentration camp grew into a vast system of imprisonment, forced labour, and mass murder. Among the guards who served there was Gerda Steinhoff, a woman from Danzig who joined the camp system in 1944 and quickly gained a reputation f...

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the city of Lviv fell under brutal German occupation. In the Janowska camp, thousands of Jewish prisoners were subjected to forced labour, torture, executions, and systematic terror carried out by SS personnel and camp authorities.

Living...

After Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Anton Mussert became the most prominent Dutch collaborator of the occupation. As leader of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB), Mussert supported Adolf Hitler, cooperated with the German authorities, and backed the Nazi ...

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Jewish teenager Yehuda Lerner was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto before being deported through a series of Nazi camps during the Holocaust. Separated from his family, who were murdered in Treblinka, Lerner endured starvation, forced labor, disease, and ...

After Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the occupation authorities introduced anti-Jewish laws, deportations, and a system of terror that targeted thousands of Dutch Jews forced into hiding. Among the most feared collaborators was Dutch police detective Pieter Schaap, a member of ...

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Arthur Greiser became one of the most brutal Nazi officials in annexed western Poland. As Gauleiter and Reich Governor of the Posen region, he oversaw forced Germanization, mass deportations, persecution of the Catholic Church, and the murder o...

28 July 1940. Under pressure from Adolf Hitler at the Salzburg Conference, Vojtech Tuka strengthens his position within the wartime Slovak State and becomes one of Nazi Germany’s closest allies in Central Europe.

From lawyer and nationalist politician to Slovak prime minister and foreign ministe...

In 1943, during the Second World War, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) launched a brutal campaign against the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Entire villages were destroyed, churches became death traps, and tens of thousands of civilians — including women and children — were ...

As partisan resistance spreads across Yugoslavia in 1943, German occupation forces launch brutal anti-partisan operations across the Balkans. Villages are burned, civilians executed, and entire communities destroyed in reprisals meant to crush support for Tito’s resistance movement.

One of the u...

22 June 1941. Under the codename Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union and rapidly occupies Lithuania. In the months that follow, the Jews of Vilnius are forced into ghettos, subjected to starvation, terror, and mass executions carried out by Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads...

After the collapse of France in 1940, Fernand de Brinon emerged as one of the most prominent supporters of collaboration with Nazi Germany. A journalist, political figure, and later Secretary of State in Vichy France, he became a key link between the Vichy regime and the German authorities in occ...