Blanka Kaczorowska was only sixteen when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. She soon joined the Polish underground and was awarded the Cross of Valour on the order of General Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army.

But Kaczorowska ultimately betrayed the resistance she had once s...

Emanuel Moravec was a decorated Czechoslovak colonel, military writer, and outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany who urged President Edvard Beneš to resist Hitler during the Munich Crisis of 1938.

After the German occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939, however, Moravec took a radically differ...

The Doctors’ Trial - Nuremberg, Germany - 19 July 1947. Karl Brandt, Nazi doctor and Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, delivers his final speech.

He faced justice at Nuremberg in 1947. Responsible for the Nazi euthanasia programme and criminal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners...

The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich became one of the most notorious formations of the Waffen-SS. From atrocities in Yugoslavia and participation in mass murder during Operation Barbarossa to its brutal reprisals in occupied France, violence against civilians followed the division across Europe....

Eduard Wirths was the highest-ranking SS physician at Auschwitz, overseeing camp doctors including Josef Mengele and supervising the medical system during some of the camp’s deadliest years. He participated in selections that sent prisoners to forced labour or the gas chambers and oversaw human e...

Martin Sommer was one of the most feared SS guards at Buchenwald concentration camp, where he became known as the “Hangman of Buchenwald.” In charge of the notorious punishment block known as the Bunker, Sommer tortured and murdered prisoners through beatings, injections, starvation, and other me...

Emma Zimmer was the oldest female guard to serve at Auschwitz and became notorious for her brutality toward prisoners. Beginning her concentration camp career at Lichtenburg in 1937, she later served at Ravensbrück, where survivors remembered her vicious beatings and cruel punishments.

As a seni...

Dries Riphagen was one of the most notorious Dutch collaborators of the Second World War. Known as the “Dutch Al Capone,” the Amsterdam gangster exploited the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands to enrich himself through betrayal, theft, and the persecution of Jews.

Working with the Nazi Sicherhe...

Jürgen Stroop was the SS general sent by Heinrich Himmler to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. Facing determined resistance from Jewish fighters, Stroop ordered the systematic destruction of the ghetto, with buildings burned and demolished as German forces advanced. Thousands were k...

Before Benito Mussolini became Italy’s Fascist dictator, Ida Dalser supported his political ambitions, sold her business to help finance his newspaper, and gave birth to his son, Benito Albino. Dalser later claimed that she and Mussolini had married—but as his power grew, evidence of their relati...

Hans Spatzenegger began his concentration camp career as an SS guard at Dachau before being transferred to Mauthausen in 1938. There, he became a supervisor in the notorious Wiener Graben quarry, where prisoners were subjected to exhausting forced labour and forced to carry heavy granite blocks u...

August 1941, German-occupied Ukraine. As Nazi forces advance deeper into the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppe C and its auxiliaries begin systematically murdering the Jewish population of Bila Tserkva. After hundreds of adults are shot, around 90 Jewish children — some only a few months old — are left...