22 June 1941. Nazi Germany launches Operation Barbarossa, unleashing a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. Within weeks, millions of Soviet soldiers are encircled, captured, or killed.

Among them is Yakov Dzhugashvili — the eldest son of Joseph Stalin.

Raised without his father’s care...

On 18 July 1942, in the prison camp at Beisfjord near Narvik in northern Norway, 287 Yugoslav prisoners were murdered by German and Norwegian guards. Officially justified as a measure to stop a typhus outbreak, the massacre was in reality the deliberate killing of prisoners considered too weak to...

The 1930s, the Soviet Union. As Joseph Stalin consolidates power, fear spreads through the Communist Party. Convinced that enemies and conspirators surround him, Stalin launches the Great Purge – a campaign of arrests, torture, and executions that will engulf the entire Soviet state.

At the cent...

Berlin, 1944. As Allied bombers devastate the capital of Nazi Germany, tension grows inside the Bendlerblock, headquarters of the German Replacement Army. At the centre stands Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Ersatzheer, the organisation responsible for training and supplying millions of German ...

During the Great Purge of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin unleashed a campaign of terror across the Soviet Union. Millions were arrested, tortured, or executed as alleged “enemies of the people.” Among the most feared interrogators of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, was Boris Rodos.

Born in 1905 in...

On 17–18 August 1944, as Allied forces advanced through France and Nazi Germany’s grip on Western Europe began to weaken, violence erupted in German-occupied Belgium. After resistance fighters killed Belgian Nazi collaborator Oswald Englebin near Charleroi, Rexist militias loyal to the occupiers ...

Stanisław Kosior was one of the most powerful Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and a key figure behind the policies that led to the Holodomor, the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 that killed millions.

As First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Kosior helped enforce collectivi...

During the Second World War, millions of Allied soldiers heard a strange voice on German radio. She spoke perfect American English, joked about home, and warned soldiers they would die far from their families.

Her name was Mildred Gillars — better known as “Axis Sally.” From Berlin she broadcast...

On 11–12 June 1937, one of the most devastating political purges in military history unfolded in the Soviet Union. Eight of the Red Army’s most prominent commanders — Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Iona Yakir, Ieronim Uborevich, Robert Eideman, August Kork, Vitovt Putna, Boris Feldman, and Vitaly ...

On 9 April 1940, Nazi Germany launched Operation Weserübung and invaded Denmark. While the country initially experienced a relatively cooperative occupation, growing resistance and sabotage by 1943 pushed the Gestapo to rely increasingly on Danish collaborators to hunt down opponents of the regim...

September 1938. After the Munich Agreement forces Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, crowds of ethnic Germans welcome Adolf Hitler’s troops with flags and flowers. Among them is Roland Puhr, a Sudeten German who soon joins the SS and becomes one of the brutal perpetrators in ...

In April 1936, Joachim von Ribbentrop, then serving as German Ambassador to Great Britain, delivered a speech presenting Nazi Germany as a supporter of peace in Europe. Only two years later, he would become Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, playing a key role in the regime’s foreign policy and di...

On 8 April 1945, prisoners inside Buchenwald concentration camp secretly sent a desperate Morse code message to the advancing Allied forces: “SOS. We request help. The SS want to destroy us.” Just three days later, soldiers of General George S. Patton’s Third Army liberated the camp and discovere...

1 September 1939. As Nazi Germany invades Poland, propaganda and racial ideology fuel a climate in which ordinary civilians become participants in persecution and mass murder.

One of them was Erna Petri.

Living on SS estates in occupied Galicia with her husband, Horst Petri, she abused forced l...

On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz, exposing the full scale of Nazi industrialized murder. More than 1.3 million people were deported there — at least 1.1 million were killed.

Among the perpetrators was Gerhard Palitzsch, one of the camp’s most feared SS men. A former guard ...