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- Born the fourth of six children to Austrian customs officer Alois Hitler--who had been married twice before--and the former Klara Polzl, Adolf Hitler grew up in a small Austrian town in the late 19th century. He was a slow learner and did poorly in school. He was frequently beaten by his authoritarian father. Things got worse when Adolf's older brother, Alois Jr., ran away from home. His mild-mannered mother occasionally tried to shield him, but was ineffectual. Adolf's attempt to run away at 11 was unsuccessful. At the age of 14 he was freed when his hated father died - an event that he did not mourn.
Hitler dropped out of high school at age 16 and went to Vienna, where he strove to become an artist, but was refused twice by the Vienna Art Academy. By this time Hitler had become an ardent German nationalist--although he was not German but Austrian--and when World War I broke out, he crossed into Germany and joined a Bavarian regiment in the German army. He was assigned as a message runner but also saw combat. Temporarily blinded after a gas attack in Flanders in 1918, he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and was promoted from private to corporal. In 1918, when the war ended, Hitler stayed in the army and was posted to the Intelligence division. He was assigned to spy on several radical political parties that were considered a threat to the German government. One such organization was the German Workers' Party. Hitler was drawn by party founder Dietrich Eckart, a morphine addict who propagated doctrines of mysticism and anti-Semitism. Hitler soon joined the party with the help of his military intelligence ties. He became party spokesman in 1919, renamed it the National Socalist German Workers Party (NSDAP/NAZI) and declared himself its Führer (leader) one year later. In 1920 Hitler's intelligence handler, Munich-based colonel named Karl Haushofer, introduced the swastika insignia. In 1921 Haushofer founded the paramilitary Storm Troopers ("Sturmabteilung", or SA), composed of German veterans of WWI and undercover military intelligence officers. They helped Hitler to organize a coup attempt--the infamous "beer hall putsch"--against the Bavarian government in Munich in 1923, but it failed. The "rebels" marched on Munich's city hall, which was cordoned off by police. Hitler's men fired at the police and missed; the police fired back and didn't, resulting in several of Hitler's fellow Nazis being shot dead. Hitler himself was arrested, convicted of treason and sent to prison. During his prison time he was coached by his advisers and dictated his book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") to his deputy Rudolf Hess. He only served several months in prison before being released. By 1925 the Nazi party was in much better straits both organizationally and financially, as it had secured the backing of a large group of wealthy conservative German industrialists, who funneled huge amounts of money into the organization. Hitler was provided with a personal bodyguard unit named the "Schutzstaffel", better known as the SS. The Nazis began to gain considerable support in Germany through their network of army and WWI veterans, and Hitler ran for President in 1931. Defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler next attempted to become Chancellor of Germany. Through under-the-table deals with powerful conservative businessmen and right-wing politicians, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. One month later, a mysterious fire--which the Nazis claimed had been started by "terrorists" but was later discovered to have been set by the Nazis themselves--destroyed the Reichstag (the building housing the German parliament). Then Hitler's machine began to issue a series of emergency decrees that gave the office of Chancellor more and more power.
In March of 1933 Hitler persuaded the German parliament to pass the Enabling Act, which made the Chancellor dictator of Germany and gave him more power than the President. Two months later Hitler began "cleaning house"; he abolished trade unions and ordered mass arrests of members of rival political groups. By the end of 1933 the Nazi Party was the only one allowed in Germany. In June of 1934 Hitler turned on his own and ordered the purge of the now radical SA--that he now saw as a potential threat to his power--which was led by one of his oldest friends, a thug and street brawler named Ernst Röhm. Röhm's ties to Hitler counted for nothing, as Hitler ordered him assassinated. Soon President Hindenburg died, and Hitler merged the office of President with the office of Chancellor. In 1935 the anti-Jewish Nuremburg laws were passed on Hitler's authorization. A year later, with Germany now under his total control, he sent troops into the Rhineland, which was a violation of the World War I Treaty of Versailles. In 1938 he forced the union of Austria with Germany and also took the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia near the German border with a large ethnic German population, on the pretext of "protecting" the German population from the Czechs. In March 1939 Hitler overran the rest of Czechoslovakia. On 23 August 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin made a non-aggression treaty. In September of 1939 Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland. France and the British Commonwealth and Empire declared war on Germany. In 1940 Germany occupied Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, and launched a major offensive against France. Paris fell and France surrendered, after which Hitler considered invading the UK. However, after the German Air Force was defeated in the Battle of Britain, the invasion was canceled. The British had begun bombing German cities in May 1940, and four months later Hitler retaliated by ordering the Blitz. In 1941 German troops assisted Italy, which under dictator Benito Mussolini was a German ally, in its takeover of Yugoslavia and Greece. Meanwhile, in Germany and the occupied countries, a program of mass extermination of Jews had begun.
On June 22, 1941, German forces invaded the Soviet Union. In addition to more than 4,000,000 German troops, there were additional forces from German allies Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Finland, among others. Hitler used multinational forces in order to save Germans for the future colonization of the Russian lands. Following the detailed Nazi plan, code-named "Barbarossa," Hitler was utilizing resources of entire Europe under Nazi control to feed the invasion of Russia. Three groups of Nazi armies invaded Russia: Army Group North besieged Leningrad for 900 days, Army Group Center reached Moscow and Army Group South occupied Ukraine, reached Caucasus and Stalingrad. After a series of initial successes, however, the German Armies were stopped at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for 900 days until the city of 4,000,000 virtually starved itself to death. Only in January of 1944 was Marshal Georgi Zhukov able to finally defeat the German forces and liberate the city, finally lifting the siege after a cost of some 2,000,000 lives. In 1943 several major battles occurred at Kursk (which became the largest tank battle in history), Kharkov and Stalingrad, all of which the Germans lost. The battle for Stalingrad was one of the largest in the history of mankind. At Stalingrad alone the Germans lost 360,000 troops, in addition to the losses suffered by Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Croatian and other forces, but the Russians lost over one million men. By 1944--the same year the Western allies invaded occupied Europe--Germany was retreating on both fronts and its forces in Africa had been completely defeated, resulting in the deaths and/or surrender of several hundred thousand troops. Total human losses during the six years of war were estimated at 60,000,000, of which 27,000,000 were Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and other people in Soviet territory. Germany lost over 11,000,000 soldiers and civilians. Poland and Yugoslavia lost over 3,000,000 people each. Italy and France lost over 1,000,000 each. Most nations of Central and Eastern Europe suffered severe--and in some cases total--economic destruction.
Hitler's ability to act as a figurehead of the Nazi machine was long gone by late 1944. Many of his closest advisers and handlers had already fled to other countries, been imprisoned and/or executed by the SS for offenses both real--several assassination attempts on Hitler--and imagined, or had otherwise absented themselves from Hitler's inner circle. For many years Hitler was kept on drugs by his medical personnel. In 1944 a group of German army officers and civilians pulled off an almost successful assassination attempt on Hitler, but he survived. Hitler, by the beginning of 1945, was a frail, shaken man who had almost totally lost touch with reality. The Russians reached Berlin in April of that year and began a punishing assault on the city. As their forces approached the bunker where Hitler and the last vestiges of his government were holed up, Hitler killed himself. Just a day earlier he had married his longtime mistress Eva Braun. Hitler's corpse was taken to Moscow and later shown to Allied Army Commanders and diplomats. Joseph Stalin showed Hitler's personal items to Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam Conference after the victory. Hitler's personal gun was donated to the museum of the West Point Military Academy in New York. Some of his personal items are now part of the permanent collection at the National History Museum in Moscow, Russia. - Additional Crew
Joseph Stalin (a code name meaning "Man of Steel") was born Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, the Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire. His father was a cobbler named Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a drunkard who beat him badly and frequently and left the family when Joseph was young. His mother, Ekaterina Gheladze, supported herself and her son (her other three children died young and Jopseph was effectively an only child) by taking in washing. She managed, despite great hardship, to send Joseph to school and then on to Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, hoping he would become a priest. However, after three years of studies he was expelled in 1899, for not attending an exam and for propagating communist ideas and the books of Karl Marx.
Since 1898, Stalin became active in the Communist underground as the organizer of a powerful gang involved in a series of armed robberies. After robbing several banks in southern Russia, Stalin delivered the stolen money to Vladimir Lenin to finance the Communist Party. Stalin's gang was also involved in the murders of its political opponents; Stalin himself was arrested seven times, repeatedly imprisoned, and twice exiled to Siberia between 1902 and 1913. During those years he changed his name twice and became more closely identified with revolutionary Marxism. He escaped many times from prison and was shuttling money between Lenin and other communists in hiding, where his intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin grew, as did his dissatisfaction with fellow Communist leader Lev Trotskiy. In 1912 he was co-opted on to the illegal Communist Central Committee. At that time he wrote propaganda articles, and later edited the Communist paper, "Pravda" (Truth). As Lenin's apprentice he joined the Communist majority (Bolsheviks), and was responsible for the consolidation of several secret communist cells into a larger ring. Stalin's Communist ring in St. Petersburg and across Russia played the leading role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the revolution the Bolsheviks Communists grabbed the power, then Communists murdered the Tsar and the Russian royal family. Stalin and Lenin took over the Tsar's palaces and used the main one in Kremlin as their private residence.
Lenin appointed Stalin the People's Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government and a member of the Communist Politburo, thus giving him unlimited power. Stalin led the "Reds" against anti-Communist forces known as the "Whites" and also in the war with Poland. He also organized "Red Terror" in Tsaritsin (later renamed Stalingrad). With his appointment as General Secretary to the Party Central Committee in 1922, a post he held for the next 30 years, until his death, he consolidated the power that would ensure his control of the country after Lenin's death in 1924. He also took, or gave himself, other key positions that enabled him to amass total power in the Party and Soviet government.
Stalin was known for his piercing eyes and terrifying stare, which he used to cow his opponents into submission during private discussions. In 1927 Stalin requested medical help for his insomnia, anger and severe anxiety disorder. His doctors diagnosed him as having "typical clinical paranoia" and recommended medical treatment. Instead, Stalin became angry and summoned his secret service agents. The next day the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Bekhterev, and his assistants died of poisoning. In addition, before the doctors' diagnosis about Stalin's mental condition could become known, he ordered the executions of intellectuals, resulting in the murders of hundreds of thousands of doctors, professors, writers, and others.
Stalin's policy of amassing dictatorial power under the guise of building "socialism in the country" resulted in brutal extermination of all real and perceived anti-Communist opposition. His purges of the Soviet military brought about the execution of tens of thousands of army officers, many of them experienced combat veterans of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Polish campaigns and other military operations (this decimation of the Russian officer corps would result in the Soviet Union's initial defeats at the hands of Nazi invaders at the beginning of World War II). He also isolated and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky. Stalin's economic policies of strict centralized planning (i.e., the "five-year plans") resulted in the near ruination of the Soviet economy and mass famines in many areas of the Soviet Union, notably in Central Russia and the Ukraine. Popular resistance to Stalin's policies, such as nationalization of private lands and collective farming, by independent farmers ("kulaks"), brought about brutal retaliation, in which millions of kulaks were either forced off their land or executed outright. Altogether Stalin's economic and political policies resulted in the deaths of up to 10 million peasants during 1926-1934. Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led massive purge (known as "The Great Terror") of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the Soviet people" were imprisoned, exiled or executed. In the late 1930s, Stalin sent some Red Army forces and material to support the Spanish Republican government in its fight against the rebels led by Gen. Francisco Franco and aided by troops and material from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Stalin made the Non-Aggression Pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939, which bought the Soviet Union two years' respite from involvement in World War 2. After the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of Generalissimus. He had no formal military training and scorned the advice of his senior officers, due to suspicion and his rising paranoia, actions that resulted in horrific losses to the Russian military in both men and material (not to mention civilian losses). He rejected military plans made by such experienced officers as Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and insisted they be replaced by his own plans, which led to even more horrific losses. Towards the end of WWII he took part in the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Clement Attlee. The agreements reached in those conferences resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of postwar Castern and Central Europe.
From 1945 until his death Stalin resumed his repressive measures at home, resulting in censorship of the arts, literature and cinema, forced exiles of hundreds of thousands and the executions of intellectuals and other potential "enemies of the state". At that time he conducted foreign policies that contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Stalin had little interest in family life, although he was married twice and had several mistresses. His first wife (Ekaterina Svanidze, married c. 1904) died three years after their marriage and left a son, Jacob (also known as Yacov), an officer in the Russian army during World War II who was captured by the Nazis and died in a POW camp (his father refused German offers to exchange him for captured German officers). His second wife (Nadezhda Alliluyeva, married 1919) attempted to moderate his politics, but she died by suicide, leaving a daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, and an alcoholic son, Vasili Stalin, who later died in exile. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin launched attacks on such intellectuals as Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many other cultural luminaries. Stalin personally intervened in the fate of "counterrevolutionary" Yiddish writers and changed their sentences from exile to execution. Thirteen of them were executed by the Soviet secret police; their leader, Perets Markish, was executed in the typical KGB manner by a single gunshot to the head on August 12, 1952, in Moscow.
Stalin died suddenly on March 5, 1953, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, after announcing his intention to arrest Jewish doctors, whom he believed were plotting to kill him. The "official" cause of death was announced as brain hemorrhage. Stalin's apprentice, Georgi Malenkov, took the power, but was soon ousted by Nikita Khrushchev. Three years after death, Stalin was posthumously denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 for crimes against the Party and for building a "cult of personality." In 1961 Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's Mausoleum, where it had been displayed since his death, and buried near the Kremlin wall. In 1964 Leonid Brezhnev dismissed Khrushchev and brought back some of Stalin's hard-line policies. After 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of liberal political reforms known as "glasnost" and "perstroika", and many of Stalin's victims were posthumously rehabilitated, and the whole phenomenon of "Stalinism" was officially condemned by the Russian authorities.- Hideki Tojo was a Japanese politician, general of the Imperial Japanese Army (Ija) and convicted war criminal who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association for most of World War II. He assumed several more positions including Chief of Staff of the Imperial Army before ultimately being removed from office in July 1944. During his years in power, his leadership was marked by extreme state-perpetrated violence in the name of Japanese ultra-nationalism, much of which he was personally involved in.
- Theodore Robert Bundy, more commonly known as "Ted", was one of the most prolific serial killers in the USA. He confessed to 36 murders, but nobody really knows how many had been committed or when he began his legacy of horror; the true total could be higher.
Ted was born to Eleanor Louise Cowell (Louise Bundy) and a father that had taken off when Eleanor discovered she was pregnant. In 1946, faced with limited options, she gave birth to him in an "unwed mother" facility and began a hopeless charade: as Ted grew up, she told him that her parents were his parents and that she was his sister. It wasn't until 1974 when he realized that his mother had lied to him for so many years. He grew to be a handsome, educated and intelligent man who appeared to be well-adjusted and affable. Bundy even volunteered for a crisis telephone hot-line (where he met famed author Ann Rule who was also a volunteer) and had a steady relationship with Diane Edwards (a.k.a. Stephanie Brooks), a girlfriend that would fuel his maniacal rage after she left him.
Ted was studying psychology at the University of Washington on January 31, 1974 when an attractive female student suddenly disappeared. Over the coming months and years, more disappearances followed. Ted's victims were generally young attractive women with dark hair parted in the middle. His modus operandi was to approach his potential victim feigning injury (for example, by wearing an arm-sling or a cast) ask them to help him carry his books or packages. He led them to a secluded area and when they were alone he would knock them on the head with a crowbar, stuff their bodies into his car, strangle them while they were unconscious and then rape the dead bodies (necrophilia). He would then leave the naked body in a wooded area, mostly Taylor Mountain in Washington State, where many of his victims were found.
Along with countless other suspects he was questioned by the police but he initially came out clean because he just didn't seem to 'fit the mold' of a maniacal serial killer. Bundy then went to law school at Salt Lake City, Utah where he murdered a police chief's daughter on October 21, 1974. Another murder followed, and another young woman went missing in Bountiful, Utah. In January 12, 1975, killings eerily similar to the Utah murders began popping up in Colorado. On August 16, 1975 he was arrested for being in possession of burglary tools by Salt Lake City police. When his bronze Volkwagen beetle was searched they found handcuffs, stockings and a home-made mask. Bundy was identified from a police lineup by a woman who had narrowly escaped his clutches in November 1974. In January 1977 he was extradited to Colorado to be tried for murder. In June 1977 he fled the Pitkin County Jail by jumping out of an open window. He was captured 8 days later.
He managed to escape again from the Garfield County Jail by sawing a hole in the ceiling of his cell on December 30, 1977. This time he traveled all the way to Tallahassee, Florida where he lived under pseudonyms including Christopher Hagen and Kenneth Misner. On January 15, 1978 he invaded the Chi Omega sorority on the Florida State University campus where he bludgeoned four girls and killed two. After he fled the Chi Omega sorority, he broke into the house of another woman and beat her severely before her worried roommates next door phoned the police. The young woman survived the attack. She would be his last living victim. On February 9, 1978 he kidnapped 12 year old Kimberly Leach, raped her and sliced her throat. Her body was found eight weeks later in a state park.
On February 15, 1978 he was arrested by Pensacola police when they did a check on his license plates and realized his car was stolen. Teeth impressions were made to compare to bite wounds found on one of the Chi Omega victims and the impressions matched the teeth marks on the victim. Bundy conducted his own defense with the help of several attorneys but, of course, it was all for naught; he was found guilty and sentenced to death by electrocution in 1979. A decade later, when death was finally looking down on him, he began confessing to a staggering amount of murders, 36 in total, but some investigators believe that the real total could be higher. He was executed on January 24, 1989 at the Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida. Many spectators cheered and celebrated his death with champagne. - Born in 1900, Heinrich Himmler was the godson of a Bavarian prince and became an officer cadet during the First World War. Never actually seeing combat, Himmler was discharged at the war's end and went to a technical college, where he majored in agriculture. During the turbulent years of the 1920s in which Germany's economy had been destroyed, Himmler managed to secure work as a chicken farmer and also joined one of the numerous paramilitary groups that had sprouted during that time. In 1923 he participated in the failed attempt by the Nazi Party to take over the Bavarian government (even though he was not yet a member of the party). In 1925, after the Nazis had regrouped, Himmler became a minor member of the Nazi Party in its Central Bavarian Office. Also, at that time, he accepted the position as Deputy Leader of a small group called the SS.
In 1929 Himmler became the Reich Leader of the SS, which at the time numbered less than 200 and was a suborganization of the SA. The SA, commonly known as the brownshirts, was the Nazi paramilitary wing, the group that did the actual dirty work--street fights, attacks against political opponents and outright political murders--of the party. Himmler at once expanded the SS, recruited hundreds of new members and introduced racial screening of members and changed the uniform to the much more familiar black jacket with red armband. In 1934 he orchestrated the destruction of the SA, which both he and Adolf Hitler had feared was becoming too powerful a force within the Nazi party, and many SA officials, from top generals on down to common street thugs, were either tried and executed or murdered outright. His actions secured the position of the SS as an independent group within the Nazi Party. He was made "Reichsfuhrer-SS" and now commanded not only the SS proper, but also the forces of the SD (internal security service) and Gestapo (state security police) as well as the fledging military SS then called the Verfungstruppe (later known as the Waffen-SS). In 1936 Himmler gained total police authority in the country by being named as Chief of German Police, and incorporated all of Germany's regular police forces into the SS. Three years later the Second World War began.
Himmler was the official head of the military Waffen-SS, yet in actuality he had little to do with this organization and left its running to such men as Paul Hausser and Sepp Dietrich. Himmer's most notorious activity during the war was setting in motion the extermination of all European Jews, the so-called "Final Solution", in which wholesale genocide was carried out against groups the Nazis considered "undesirable" or racially inferior, resulting in the murders of more than six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others, a task that was assigned to the infamous Reinhard Heydrich.
By 1944 Himmler's SS had amassed total security and police authority in Germany, had a large armed force in the Waffen-SS and was also quite wealthy through the exploits of the SS Economics Office. Meanwhile, the concentration and death camps continued to be run by men of the SS Death's Head (Totenkopf) units. As the fortunes of war turned against Germany and Allied forces invaded the country and drew closer to Berlin, Himmler was given further power and appointed a military commander both of the Home Army and a frontline Army Group. His lack of military experience proved embarrassing and he was soon relieved of those duties. Meanwhile, however, he had climbed the political chain and been appointed Reich Minister of the Interior, which put him in line to be Hitler's successor. By 1945, with Germany crumbling under relentless Allied pressure, Himmler was on the brink of mental collapse and began to convince himself that he would be the postwar leader of Germany and Minister of Police for the Allies. He secretly offered to negotiate the German surrender, but Allied commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower flatly turned the offer down, refusing to have anything to do with the hated Himmler or his SS. When Hitler learned what Himmler had done, he stripped the former chicken farmer of all his ranks and titles and ordered his arrest. Himmler, however, still had much of the SS under his control and commanded it up to the end, even though Karl Hanke had been appointed the new Reichsfuhrer-SS.
After the surrender of Germany, Himmler wandered aimlessly about Bavaria until he was captured by the British. During his interrogation, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in one of his teeth and died within seconds. Feared by many but respected by few, it can be argued that Himmler was more a creation of those who worked under him, like Heydrich, Pohl, Dietrich, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Hausser, than by his own designs. Heinrich Himmler was survived by his wife and daughter Gudrun, who still lives in Germany and has long been suspected of connections with neo-Nazi groups. - Actor
- Additional Crew
Hermann Göring was born on January 12, 1893, in Rosenheim, Bavaria, the son of a prominent judge. He entered the German Royal Military Academy at Gross Lichterfeide outside Berlin in his teens and graduated in 1911. At the beginning of World War I he saw service as an infantry lieutenant but soon transfered to the air corps. During the war he racked up 22 aerial kills, earning the coveted Blue Max and a promotion to commanding officer of Manfred von Richthofen's "Flying Circus" in 1918 after that famous ace was killed in action. In the years following World War I Göring became one of Adolf Hitler's most devoted followers. The former war hero was named head of Hitler's private army, the Brownshirts, a Nazi paramilitary organization similar to the Blackshirt fascist group in Italy commanded by Benito Mussolini, in 1922. Göring took part in the unsuccessful "Beer Hall Putsch" attempt to overthrow the Bavarian state government in 1923, was wounded and spent some time in prison. In 1933, after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, Göring became commissioner for aviation and in 1935 commander in chief of the newly established German Air Force (the Luftwaffe). By the opening days of World War II, Göring had built the Luftwaffe into the largest air force in the world. His planes performed superbly in the "blitzkrieg" campaigns against Poland, the Low Countries, Norway and France. In recognition of his work, Göring was promoted to Reichsmarschall (a rank above field marshal) on June 19, 1940. The tall, heavyset Göring became well known for his garish, colorful uniforms and his devotion to the war aims of the Nazi party, rivaled only by Hitler's. Göring didn't confine his efforts on behalf of the Nazi party to purely military matters, however; he also developed much of Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish legislation.
Unfortunately for Göring, his hour of military triumph was short-lived. He seriously botched the Battle of Britain in August and September of 1940 by overestimating the Luftwaffe's capability for long-range combat and underestimating the resolve of Britain's Royal Air Force, which resulted in the loss of huge numbers of his aircraft in daily air raids against England, not to mention the death or capture of thousands of his most experienced bomber crews. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the Luftwaffe first held the upper hand against the undertrained and underequipped Soviet Air Force. However, it wasn't long before the tide turned, and before long the Russians were turning out thousands of fighters and bombers and inflicting serious damage on the Luftwaffe, which could ill afford such losses. Starting in 1943 Allied bombers had turned the tide of the air war against Germany, and Göring's vaunted Luftwaffe began losing increasing numbers of planes, not to mention experienced pilots, to the US and British air forces, and Allied bombing campaigns smashed many more German aircraft on the ground in addition to destroying many aircraft factories. In April 1945, with the defeat of Germany a certainty, Göring suggested to Hitler that he make peace with the Allies before they brought total destruction to Germany. Enraged, Hitler ordered his arrest. Göring managed to escape from Nazi custody but was captured on May 2, 1945, by soldiers of the U.S. 7th Army. He was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to death for crimes against humanity during the war crimes trials at Nuremberg late in 1945. His lawyers fought for time with appeals and requests to overturn his death sentence, but they were all denied. On October 15, 1946, just two hours before the former Reichsmarshall was to face the hangman to pay for his crimes, the 53-year-old Hermann Göring committed suicide in his jail cell by taking poison that he somehow had smuggled in with him.- Infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone was born in the tough Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, NY, the fourth of nine children of Italian immigrants from Naples. Capone was a born sociopath. In the sixth grade he beat up a teacher and promptly quit school. He picked up his education from the streets, "making his bones" when he joined the notorious James Street gang. This was run by Johnny Torrio, who later graduated Capone into the even more notorious Five Points gang. It was here that Capone became friends with Lucky Luciano, another who would become a hallmark in the '30s gangster era.
By his late teens Capone had been hired by Torrio and Frankie Yale as a bouncer at a saloon / brothel in Brooklyn. In 1918 he was involved in a bar fight over a prostitute with hoodlum Frank Galluccio. Gallucio went after Capone with a knife, resulting in Capone's picking up the moniker by which he would be known for the rest of his life--"Scarface" (although that word was NEVER used in his presence). Capone, however, would attribute the scar to wounds he received in battle while fighting with the famous "lost battalion" in France during World War I (the fact that Capone never spent one minute in the army was a minor point, apparently). By 1919 he was already suspected by New York police of at least two murders, so he moved to Chicago to work under Torrio's uncle, "Big" Jim Colosimo, a Chicago gangster who ran a string of brothels. Torrio and Colosimo had a dispute over bootlegging during the Prohibition era--Torrio was for it and Colosimo was against it. Torrio hatched a plot with Capone to have Colosimo "rubbed out" and they got their old pal Frankie Yale to do it. Over the next few years the new Torrio-Capone regime went to war with rival bootlegging gangs in Chicago. In 1924 they killed Charles Dion O'Bannion, head of the Irish North Side gang. That didn't end the war, however, which went on for several more years. Capone's younger brother Frank died in a hail of rival gangsters' bullets in 1924. In February 1925 Torrio, who had been badly wounded in a shootout, decided to retire. He told Capone, "It's all yours". At the tender age of 26, Al Capone found himself in control of a sophisticated crime organization with 1,000 gunmen at his command and a $300,000-a-week payroll. He was up to it, however, and made a smooth transition from a simple gun-toting leg-breaker, pimp and killer to a "business executive" (his business card stated that he sold "second-hand furniture"). It was estimated that at one point he had approximately half of Chicago's police department on his payroll, and his reach extended to the highest levels of Chicago's city government and even into the Illinois legislature (he was also suspected of having the Illinois governor "in his pocket"). He controlled the local political process by terrorizing voters into voting for candidates he picked. So great was his power that he claimed he "owned" Chicago, and once publicly assaulted the mayor of nearby Cicero--who was on his payroll--on the steps of City Hall for doing something without his clearance, while the local police looked the other way.
Capone was probably the first "equal-opportunity" mob boss. While many of his fellow Italian and Sicilian gangsters would only hire those from their own ethnic group, Capone hired Jews, Irish, Poles, Slovaks, blacks--as long as he considered them trustworthy, they could work for Capone. He even purged the Chicago organized crime scene of "Mustache Petes", the old-time Sicilian gangsters who he didn't think were capable of running a "modern" crime organization. Capone ran Chicago's gambling, prostitution and bootlegging empire, getting rich giving people what they wanted. He was soon wildly popular among the citizenry and was even cheered at the ballpark, while "respectable" citizens like President Herbert Hoover were not. Capone absorbed smaller gangs into his own--sometimes by negotiation, other times by gunfire--extending his reach to outside the Chicago environs and expanding his empire even further. He was, however, always concerned for his own safety and surrounded himself with trusted bodyguards (including Frank Gallucio, the man responsible for his nickname, "Scarface"). Several attempts were made on his life by rival mobsters--one time a convoy of cars full of gangster Hymie Weiss' gunmen shot up a restaurant at which Capone was dining; the place was destroyed, but Capone came through unscathed. Another time would-be assassins poisoned his soup, but his luck held out again.
On Valentine's Day in 1929 Capone ordered the bloody "St. Valentine's Day Massacre". His underlings found out the location of the warehouse of his rival George Moran (aka "Bugs" Moran) and that Moran was to attend a meeting there at a particular time. Capone sent a carload of his gunmen dressed as police officers to the address. Once there they lined up the seven men they found, but Moran wasn't among them; he was on the sidewalk heading towards the building when he saw the "police car" pull up in front and he quickly ducked into a nearby store. Nevertheless, Capone's gunmen machine-gunned them to death. Following the massacre (when Moran was later asked who he thought was responsible for the murders, he replied, "Only Capone kills like that"), public opinion about Capone began to change. He was not above killing on his own, either. When he was informed that his bodyguards John Scalise and Albert Anselmi were part of an assassination plot against him, he decided to take care of the matter himself. To put their minds at ease, he threw a banquet in their honor. While delivering a glowing testimonial to them, Capone suddenly pulled out an Indian club and beat both men to death.
Although local and state authorities had been trying to bring down Capone for years, the federal government finally managed to do it by prosecuting him for income-tax evasion. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to 11 years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, GA. In 1934 he was transferred to Alcatraz, a federal prison on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay that was set up to hold the nation's worst criminals. He never finished out his sentence, though. In 1939 he was paroled because of the ravages of neurosyphilis, a disease he contracted while running Torrio's and Colosimo's whorehouses. He lived the last eight years of his life as a virtual zombie at his estate in Florida, his brain almost totally destroyed by the disease. - Josef Mengele was born on 16 March 1911 in Günzburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was married to Martha Mengele and Irene Schoenbein. He died on 7 February 1979 in Bertioga, São Paulo, Brazil.
- Born in Solingen, Germany, in 1906, Adolf Eichmann was the son of a moderately successful Austrian businessman and industrialist. In 1914 his family moved to Linz, Austria. During World War I Eichmann's father was a soldier, and returned to the family business in Linz at the war's conclusion in 1918. His family moved to Germany in 1920. When he came of age in 1925 he briefly returned to Austria to study mechanical engineering, but eventually dropped out of college because he was a poor student. He followed in his father's footsteps and became a businessman, working as a traveling salesman, which brought him back to Germany in 1930. His first contact with the Nazi party was when he joined the Wandervogel movement, an anti-Semitic, Aryan-brotherhood type of organization popular with the less-educated segments of German society. In 1932 Eichmann again returned to Austria, where he formally joined the Austrian Nazi Party. On the advice of an old family friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner--himself soon to become an important Nazi official--Eichmann also joined the Austrian branch of the SS, enlisting on April 1, 1932, and being accepted as a full member that November, assigned the SS number 45326. For the next year Eichmann was a member of the part-time Allgemeine-SS (General SS) with the rank of private, based in Salzburg. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Eichmann returned there and submitted an application to join the full-time SS. This was accepted and, in November of 1933, he was promoted to Scharführer (Sergeant) and assigned to the administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp. By 1934 he had decided to make the SS his career and requested transfer into the SS-Security Police which had, by that time, become a powerful and much feared organization. His transfer was granted in November of 1934, and he was promoted to the rank of Oberscharführer (Staff Sergeant) and assigned to the headquarters of the Sicherheitdienst (SD) in Berlin. Eichmann became a model administrator in the SD and quickly became noticed by his superiors. In 1937 he was commissioned an SS-Second Lieutenant (Untersturmführer) and, one year later, sent back to Austria to help organize SS security forces in Vienna after the 1938 annexation of Austria into Germany. His efforts resulted in his being promoted to SS-First Lieutenant (Obersturmführer). At the end of 1938 Eichmann was selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which was set up to forcibly deport and expel Jews from Austria. By this time he had become a student of Judaism, finding the religion fascinating as he had, for several years, been harboring deep-seated anti-Semitic tendencies and a virulent hatred of the Jewish faith. At the start of the Second World War Eichmann was an SS-Captain (Hauptsturmführer) and had made a name for himself because of his operation of the Office for Jewish Emigration. He had even been sponsored by the SS Race and Settlement Office to take a trip to Palestine and study aspects of the Jewish homeland. Ironically, through this work, Eichmann made several contacts in the Zionist movement which he worked with to speed up Jewish emigration from the Reich. In 1939 his office was expanded to cover the entire German Reich, and in 1940 Eichmann was transferred from the SD to the Gestapo and promoted to SS-Major (SS-Sturmbannführer). By 1941 he had been promoted again, this time to the rank of Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), and was the commander of the Jewish Division of the Gestapo Religions Department in the Reich Central Security Office of the SS (the code for Eichmann's position was "RSHA/IV-B4"). In 1942 Eichmann was personally invited by Reinhard Heydrich to attend the Wannsee Conference, where Germany's anti-Jewish measures were developed into an official policy of extermination, which the Germans euphemistically called "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Eichmann was tasked as "Transportation Administrator", meaning he was in charge of all the trains that would carry Jews to the death camps in Poland. For the next two years he performed his duties with incredible zeal and efficiency, often times bragging that he had personally sent over five million Jews to their deaths by way of his trains. His work had been noticed and, in 1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany had occupied that country to forestall a possible Soviet invasion. He at once went to work deporting Hungarian Jews, resulting in some 200,000 to 400,000 of them meeting their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers.
By 1945, however, Eichmann's world--as was that of the Nazi regime he so loyally and faithfully served--was collapsing, and SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler had ordered that Jewish extermination be halted and all evidence of the "Final Solution" be destroyed. Eichmann blatantly defied Himmler's orders and continued his work in Hungary. He was also working to avoid being called up in the last-ditch German military effort, since a year before he had been commissioned a Reserve Lieutenant in the Waffen-SS and had been ordered to active combat duty. Eichmann fled Hungary as the Russians invaded and returned to Austria, where he met up with his old friend Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, however, refused to associate with him, since Eichmann's duties as an extermination administrator had certainly branded him a marked man by the Allies, and Kaltenbrunner himself was in enough trouble because of his own activities. As World War II ended Eichmann went into hiding, being briefly captured by American troops but managing to escape by using a false name and claiming to be a demobilized German soldier. He was able to secure passage to South America and left Germany at the start of 1947. He settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the name of Ricardo Clement and, for the next 15 years, worked in various odd jobs, from factory foreman to junior water engineer to professional rabbit farmer. He had also brought his family to Argentina and started a completely new life. Eichmann's days of safety in Argentina were numbered, however, because in 1960 the Israeli Mossad--the national intelligence service--had learned that he was in Argentina, and a plan was put in place to locate his exact whereabouts in order to capture him and spirit him back to Israel. When the Israelis finally located him, he was seized, smuggled out of the country to Israel and put on trial in April of 1961 (the Israelis didn't go through normal diplomatic channels because they believed that the Argentine government, which had long been accused of providing a safe haven for wanted Nazi war criminals, would refuse to turn him over). He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Adolf Eichmann was hanged on June 1, 1962, at the age of 56 and his ashes scattered at sea, so that no nation would serve as his final resting place. - Osama bin Laden was the founding General Emir and NATO-FVEY designated criminal mastermind behind his militarist forces under the umbrella of Al-Qaeda, and the world's most sought-after militiaman since the 1998 raids on U.S. embassies in parts of East Africa accused by FBI at him, and then accused of single-handedly masterminding series-of-suicide-aircraft-piracies-colloquially-dubbed-as September 11 attacks by the CIA. He claimed indirect-liability for instigating suicide-hijackers in an exclusive interview later on but nevertheless, refuted the charges of being the mastermind by CIA & others. He used to release tapes endorsing militant acts by framing them as retaliatory, self-defense resistance-operations. Almost 10 years after the execution of 9/11 operation, on a late May 1, 2011 evening according to North American Eastern Daylight Time, 44th US President Barack Obama made an announcement that Osama had been summary-executed by US commandos in a hideout under a covert-op codenamed Operation Neptune Spear with OPTASK (operation task) to assassinate him.
- Born in 7 October 1952 is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has been serving as the president of Russia since 2012, and previously between 2000 and 2008. He also served as the prime minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000, and again from 2008 to 2012.
Putin worked as a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel (podpolkovnik), before resigning in 1991 to begin a political career in Saint Petersburg. He moved to Moscow in 1996 to join the administration of president Boris Yeltsin. He briefly served as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and secretary of the Security Council, before being appointed as prime minister in August 1999. After the resignation of Yeltsin, Putin became acting president and, less than four months later, was elected outright to his first term as president. He was reelected in 2004. As he was constitutionally limited to two consecutive terms as president at the time, Putin served as prime minister again from 2008 to 2012 under Dmitry Medvedev. He returned to the presidency in 2012 in an election marred by allegations of fraud and protests and was reelected in 2018. In April 2021, following a referendum, he signed into law constitutional amendments including one that would allow him to run for reelection twice more, potentially extending his presidency to 2036.
During his first tenure as president, the Russian economy grew on average by seven percent per year, following economic reforms and a fivefold increase in the price of oil and gas. He also led Russia during a war against Chechen separatists, reestablishing federal control of the region. As prime minister under Medvedev, he oversaw military reform and police reform, as well as Russia's victory in its war against Georgia. During his third term as president, Russia annexed Crimea and sponsored a war in eastern Ukraine with several military incursions made, resulting in international sanctions and a financial crisis in Russia. He also ordered a military intervention in Syria against rebel and jihadist groups.[16] During his fourth term as president, he presided over a military buildup on the border of Ukraine. Putin accused the Ukrainian government of committing atrocities against its Russian-speaking minority, and in February 2022, he ordered a full-scale invasion of the country, resulting in numerous atrocities and leading to widespread international condemnation, as well as expanded sanctions and calls for Putin to be pursued with war crime charges.
Under Putin's leadership, Russia has experienced democratic backsliding and a shift to authoritarianism. Putin's rule has been characterised by endemic corruption, the jailing and repression of political opponents, the intimidation and suppression of independent media in Russia, and a lack of free and fair elections. Putin's Russia has scored poorly on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, and Freedom House's Freedom in the World index. Putin is the second-longest currently serving European president after Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.