Mt. Ettersberg near Weimar, Thueringen, Germany • July 15, 1937 On this date in 1937 Adolf Hitler’s Germany established a concentration camp named Buchenwald (“beech forest”), one of the worst manifestations of Nazi sadism and barbarism in all of World War II. Koncentration Lager (KL for short) Buchenwald was located in a heavily wooded area on the…
Berlin, Germany • June 28, 1935 On this date in 1935, Nazi Germany amended Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that had been in place since 1871 during the chancellorship of Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor in Kaiser Wilhelm I’s Second Reich. Paragraph 175 outlawed acts of “unnatural indecency” only between men. Six years later…
Dachau, Germany • April 29, 1945 On a gray last Sunday in April 1945, 10 miles/16 kilometers north of Munich, Bavaria’s capital, U.S. soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Rainbow Division,” the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, and the 27th Tank Battalion were overwhelmed by the horror they saw as they closed in on Dachau concentration…