On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. Within months, the Germans established Auschwitz concentration camp, where one of the most feared officials became Maximilian Grabner, head of the Political Department. Known among prisoners as the "God of Auschwitz...

Hedwig Höss, the wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, lived with her five children in a spacious villa only meters from the crematoria where more than one million people were murdered. While prisoners were starved, beaten, and killed, she created a comfortable family home filled with gardens...

Konrad Henlein was one of the most influential Nazi politicians outside Germany before the Second World War. While presenting himself as a moderate advocate for the rights of the Sudeten Germans, he secretly cooperated with Adolf Hitler to weaken Czechoslovakia from within and create the politica...

Ewa Paradies became one of the most feared female guards at the Stutthof concentration camp after survivors accused her of using the freezing Polish winter as a weapon against defenseless prisoners. Witnesses testified that she forced women to strip naked and stand in the snow before pouring icy ...

In July 1941, days after Nazi Germany captured Lwów (today's Lviv, Ukraine), the Gestapo and SS arrested and murdered 27 university professors and lecturers, along with members of their families, in a calculated attempt to destroy Poland's intellectual elite.

This is the story of the Lwów Profes...

Albert Forster was one of the most ruthless Nazi leaders in occupied Poland. As Gauleiter of Danzig and later Reich Governor of Reichsgau Danzig–West Prussia, he helped transform the region into a center of terror, overseeing the persecution of Poles and Jews, mass executions, forced Germanisatio...

Luise Danz was one of the most notorious female guards in the Nazi concentration camp system. Born in Germany in 1917, she joined the SS camp service in 1943 after training at Ravensbrück and went on to serve at Majdanek, Płaszów, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and the Malchow subcamp. Survivor...

Diana Mosley was one of Britain's most notorious fascist supporters and one of the few British aristocrats welcomed into Adolf Hitler's inner circle. Born into the famous Mitford family, she abandoned a privileged life to pursue a relationship with Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union o...

Walter Kutschmann was an SS officer and Einsatzgruppen commander responsible for some of the earliest Nazi atrocities following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Best known for leading the execution squad that murdered the Lwów professors, he also oversaw the killings of Polish int...

Ruth Neudeck, later known as Ruth Closius, was one of the most brutal female guards in the Nazi concentration camp system. Trained at the Ravensbrück concentration camp under the notorious overseer Dorothea Binz, she quickly gained a reputation for extreme violence, beating prisoners, humiliating...

On 28 July 1944, the peaceful Montenegrin village of Velika became the scene of one of the worst massacres in the Balkans during the Second World War. Soldiers of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen" and the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS "Skanderbeg", aided by local coll...

In February 1943, just weeks after the German defeat at Stalingrad, Soviet forces captured the eastern Ukrainian town of Grishino, today known as Pokrovsk. When German troops retook the town days later, they reported finding the bodies of 596 German and Axis soldiers, nurses, civilian personnel, ...

After the Second World War, while Allied authorities hunted down Nazi leaders across Europe, one Catholic bishop secretly helped many of them disappear. Using his position in Rome, Alois Hudal provided false identity papers, arranged travel documents, and assisted some of the most notorious perpe...

While Heinrich Himmler orchestrated the Holocaust and oversaw the SS, his wife Margarete Himmler remained one of his most devoted supporters. A committed Nazi and outspoken antisemite, she embraced Adolf Hitler's ideology, visited concentration camps, and never publicly questioned her husband's r...

Alfried Krupp inherited one of Germany's most powerful industrial empires and turned it into a cornerstone of Hitler's war machine. As head of the Krupp company, he oversaw the production of tanks, artillery, submarines, and steel while exploiting tens of thousands of forced laborers, prisoners o...