X-Nico

24 unusual facts about Nazi Germany


Augusto Pestana

During World War II, soldiers from Augusto Pestana fought for Brazil against Nazi Germany.

BMW 801

The BMW 801 was a powerful German air-cooled radial aircraft engine built by BMW and used in a number of German military aircraft of World War II.

Chlebowo, Lubusz Voivodeship

Under Nazi German rule, the village's name was Germanised to Lindenhain in 1937; after it fell to the Republic of Poland according to the 1945 Potsdam Agreement (see Territorial changes of Poland after World War II), it was renamed Niemaszchleba and again in 1953 Chlebowo.

Daimler-Benz DB 604

The Daimler-Benz DB 604 was an experimental German 24-cylinder aircraft engine, which did not progress beyond the initial engine testing phase and was ultimately abandoned in September 1942.

Freedom Radio

It is set in Nazi Germany during the Second World War and concerns an underground German resistance group who run a radio station broadcasting against the totalitarian Third Reich.

Gare de Montérolier-Buchy

A plaque placed on the station forecourt commemorates the existence there from April to June 1945 of a reception station for deportees, prisoners and returning French obligatory workers being repatriated from Nazi Germany.

German occupation of Belgium

German occupation of Belgium during World War II - The occupation of Belgium between 1940 and 1944 by Nazi Germany during World War II

Gertrude Hiscox

Gertrude Blount Hiscox (1910 Hendon, Middlesex - 1966 Ipswich) was a British collaborator with Nazi Germany in World War II.

Greater German Reich

Nazi Germany, the official state name of which was "Greater German Reich" from 1943 to 1945 (also used informally after the 1938 Anschluss of Austria)

History of the Jews in Slovakia

After the Slovak Republic proclaimed its independence in March 1939 under the protection of Nazi Germany, Slovakia began a series of measures aimed against the Jews in the country, first excluding them from the military and government positions.

HMAS Durraween

Together with HMAS Orara, they sweeped for mines off Wilsons Promontory in November 1940 and removed forty-three mines from Bass Strait, which had been laid by the German auxiliary cruiser Pinguin and auxiliary minelayer Passat.

James L. Jones, Sr.

When the war broke out, he departed Africa, due to the circumstances of military presence of Nazi Germany forces.

Maltatal

After the Austrian Anschluss to Nazi Germany, beginning in 1941 the Malta Valley was the site of a labour camp where deported prisoners of war originating from the Soviet Union were forced to work in a granite quarry supplying a Reichsautobahn construction site in nearby Spittal an der Drau (the present-day Tauern Autobahn).

Max Fechner

Fechner participated in the social-democratic resistance group led by Franz Künstler, and was jailed in 1933–1934 and 1944–1945 by the Nazi regime.

Olszowa, Greater Poland Voivodeship

Following the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Olszowa was occupied by the Wehrmacht and annexed by Nazi Germany.

Przebrno

During the Second World War it was the location for the German concentration camp Pröbernau, a subcamp of the concentration camp Stutthof.

Réseau Morhange

The group was constituted of 82 agents officially engaged in the conflict against Nazi Germany.

Slovakia during World War II

Although Slovakia had signed a "Protection Treaty" with Nazi Germany, in direct violation of that treaty, Germany refused to help Slovakia.

The Slovak State (also the first state of the Slovaks) was founded with help of Nazi Germany.

University Arboretum at California State University, Sacramento

"The name was changed without fanfare to University Arboretum in 2005" because of renewed attention to Goethe's virulently racist views, praise of Nazi Germany, and advocacy of eugenics.

Warszewo, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship

Before 1945 the area was part of Germany (East Prussia), Judendorf (lit.:"Jewsvillage") was renamed "Hermannswalde" in 1936 by Nazi German authorities.

William Wain Prior

These requests, however, were not accepted by the majority of the Danish parliament, who feared that increased military strength might provoke Nazi Germany.

Yisrael Galili

During the Second World War, he was involved in preparations to counter an anticipated German invasion of Palestine.

Zakrzewo, Złotów County

In 1935 the Nazi government changed the village's name to Buschdorf as part of a drive to Germanize Slavic-sounding placenames.


533d Training Squadron

At that time, the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force Bomber Command were engaged in a combined bomber offensive against strategic targets in Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe.

Action Française

In foreign policy, Maurras and Bainville supported Pierre Laval's double alliance with Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy and with the United Kingdom in the Stresa Front (1935) on one side, and with the Soviet Union on the other side, against the common enemy Nazi Germany.

Action of 9 February 1945

The Action of 9 February 1945 refers to the sinking of the German U-boat U-864 in the North Sea off the Norwegian coast during the Second World War by the Royal Navy submarine HMS Venturer.

Ambrosini SAI.403

The single prototype (MM.518) was seized by the Germans and evaluated by the Luftwaffe at Vergiate.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Ashley

During the Second World War Major Lord Ashley served as a British Intelligence Officer with the Auxiliary Units, which were highly covert Resistance groups trained to engage and counteract the expected invasion of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany.

Atentát

The World War II story depicts events before and after the assassination of top German leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague (Operation Anthropoid).

Battle of Kampinos Forest

The Battle of Kampinos Forest was in fact a series of skirmishes and battles fought in the forests around Kampinos during the Invasion of Poland of 1939, between the Polish Army and the German Wehrmacht.

Battle of the Cigno Convoy

Their aim was to isolate and defeat the bulk of the German Afrika Corps and the Regio Esercito (Italian Royal Army) in Tunis by strangling their supply lines.

Battle of Verrières Ridge

The main combatants were two Canadian infantry divisions—with additional support from the Canadian 2nd Armoured Brigade—against elements of three German SS Panzer divisions.

Black people in Nazi Germany

While black people in Nazi Germany were never subject to mass extermination as in case of Jews, they were still considered an inferior race on a similar basis as ethnic Poles or Gypsies, and were likewise described as untermenschen.

Buck passing

The most notable example of this was the refusal of the United Kingdom, USA, France, or the Soviet Union to effectively confront Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

Chinese Righteous Among the Nations

He was appointed First Secretary at the Chinese legation in Vienna in 1937, and when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and the legation was turned into a consulate, Ho was assigned the post as Consul-General.

Dale Maple

However, he was pressured into resigning from the university German Club for singing the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" and other Nazi songs.

Édouard Depreux

After serving as a member of the Sceaux commune council in 1935, and as a council member for Seine (1938–1941), he joined the French Resistance in the fight against the Nazi German military occupation, and held a high-ranking position in the SFIO executive committee, being the editor of the illegal newspaper Le Populaire.

Enemy at the Door

The series was shown between 1978 and 1980 and dealt with the German occupation of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, during the Second World War.

Ernst vom Rath

Ernst Eduard vom Rath (3 June 1909 – 9 November 1938) was a German diplomat, remembered for his assassination in Paris in 1938 by a Jewish young man, Herschel Grynszpan, which touched off Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass.

Francis Daniel Pastorius

Despite the Quaker sympathies of Pastorius, his name was appropriated in 1942 by the Abwehr of Nazi Germany for "Operation Pastorius," a failed sabotage attack on the United States in World War II that included a target in Philadelphia.

Geatish Society

In the next century, similar themes would be taken up in Nazi Germany.

Giulio Cogni

In 1941 Giulio Cogni went to Weimar in Nazi Germany where he met collaborating European writers and joined the "Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung" (i.e. European Writers' League) which was founded by Joseph Goebbels.

Gremmendorf

After the Second World War, the barracks originally intended for German soldiers were taken over and utilized by British occupational forces (Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the country was divided into 4 separate sectors: American, French, British, and Soviet, which would eventually be known as East Germany ), who ended up constructing even more barracks.

Halim Malkoč

Halim Malkoč (12 August 1917 – 8 February 1947) was a Bosnian Muslim Imam and SS Obersturmführer in the Waffen-SS division Handschar, was the first Muslim awarded the German Iron Cross during World War II.

Hans and Sophie Scholl

Hans and Sophie Scholl, often referred to in German as die Geschwister Scholl (literally: the Scholl siblings), were a brother and sister who were members of the White Rose, a student group in Munich that was active in the non-violent resistance movement in Nazi Germany, especially in distributing flyers against the war and the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.

Invasion of Iceland

Requisitioning local means of transportation, the troops moved to Hvalfjörður, Kaldaðarnes, Sandskeið and Akranes to secure landing areas against the possibility of a German counterattack.

John Charmley

Charmley appears to suggest Britain should have negotiated with Nazi Germany in 1940, that it would have been possible to do so honourably and that it would have safeguarded the British Empire better than an alliance with the anti-colonial U.S. President Roosevelt.

K31

In the film Shining Through, a Swiss border guard, with his K31, shot a German sniper firing at Ed and Linda as they were crossing over the Swiss border.

Krøkebærsletta

It was primarily a transit camp for prisoners on their way to Falstad, Grini or camps in Germany.

Liepona

It is famous for an incident in June 1940 when President of Lithuania Antanas Smetona had to cross the shallow river in order to reach Nazi Germany in the aftermath of the Soviet ultimatum to Lithuania.

M39 cannon

The M39 was developed by the Springfield Armory, based on the World War II–era design of the German Mauser MG 213, a 20 mm (and 30 mm) cannon developed for the Luftwaffe, which did not see combat use.

Margaret Heffernan

Examining examples of willful blindness in the Catholic Church, the SEC, Nazi Germany, Bernard Madoff’s investors, BP’s safety record, the military in Afghanistan and the dog-eat-dog world of subprime mortgage lenders, the book demonstrates how failing to see—or admit to ourselves or our colleagues—the issues and problems in plain sight can ruin private lives and bring down corporations.

Military history of the Soviet Union

Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was greatly influenced by the growing tension between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany and an avid supporter of the fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

Opelwerk Brandenburg

The Opelwerk Brandenburg (Opel's manufacturing plant at Brandenburg an der Havel) was built, with impressive speed, in 1935 on the initiative of the government in order to ensure supplies of Opel trucks for the army.

Order of Kutuzov

The Order of Kutuzov 1st class was also awarded to Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in 1945, to recognize the enormous contribution of its workers towards the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Petru Groza

Groza also promised a series of land reform programs to benefit military personnel which would confiscate and subsequently redistribute all properties in excess of one hundred and twenty five acres in addition to all the property of traitors, absentees, and all who collaborated with the wartime Romanian government, the Hungarian occupiers during Miklós Horthy and Ferenc Szálasi's régimes, and Nazi Germany.

Psyclon Nine

In interviews, the band has stated that they are frequently accused of Nazism, partly because their name is derived from Zyklon B, an insecticide best known for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

Rapp-Coudert Committee

Within days after the signing of the political agreement between Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler, and the Soviet Union, headed by Joseph Stalin, American Communists moved as one from vocal public opposition to fascism as part of a broad Popular Front to advocacy of non-intervention in the erupting European conflict, characterizing the fight between Germany and Britain as an "imperialist war" of little import to the American working class.

Reichsführer-SS

The Star Trek episode Patterns of Force depicts an alien planet where a historian has recreated Nazi Germany in an attempt to form a benign fascist government marked by efficiency without sadism.

Šentvid pri Zavodnju

On 22 February 1944 the Slovene poet and Yugoslav people's hero Karel Destovnik (a.k.a. Kajuh) was killed in fighting with German troops in the hamlet of Žlebnik south of the main settlement.

Sprachregelung

Also, euphemisms of Nazi Germany, like "final solution" for what is today known as the Holocaust, have been regarded as a case of Sprachregelung as recounted in Hannah Arendt's coverage of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Tacoma-class frigate

In 1942, the success of German submarines against Allied shipping and the shortage of escorts with which to protect Allied sea lines of communication convinced U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt of a need to engage mercantile shipbuilders in the construction of warships for escort duty.

Television in Russia

Between 1941 and 1945 all television broadcasts in the nation were interrupted because of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Small Back Room

Rice is brought in by Captain Stuart (Michael Gough) to help solve the problem of small booby-trapped explosive devices being dropped by Nazi bombers, which have killed four people, including three children.

Tommy cooker

The term also came to be applied by the German tank crews as a derogatory nickname for the Sherman tank whose earlier models acquired a reputation for bursting up in flames when hit.

We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah

It urges Catholics to repent "of past errors and infidelities" and "renew the awareness of the Hebrew roots of their faith" while distinguishing between the Church's "anti-Judaism" as religious teaching and the murderous antisemitism of Nazi Germany which it described as having "roots outside Christianity."

Wilfrid B. Israel

On 26 March 1943 Israel left London for Lisbon, Portugal and spent the next two months distributing certificates of entry to British ruled Palestine, and investigating the situation of Jews on the peninsula; during World War II the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal sympathized with Nazi Germany but refused to hand over Jews to the Germans.

Wolf pack Seewolf

Coincidentally, Allied Intelligence formed the view that the Germans were planning to mount a missile attack on the United States, using V-1 or V-2 missiles adapted for launch at sea by submarines.