From 1939 via D-Day in Normandy to Berlin
Experience the atrocities of the Holocaust
It was part of Operation Overlord (Allied invasion of Normandy). The amphibious assault operations and associated airborne operations inland. With the landing of Allied forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy codenamed Omaha, Utah, Gold, Sword and Juno, the German occupier faced a serious problem. It would turn out to be the turning point of World War 2 in western Europe
World War 2 or WW2 was a global war from 1939 to 1945. It involved the majority of the world's countries forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies (USA, Britain and Canada) and the Axis (Germany, Italy and Japan). Directly involving more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. WW2 was also the deadliest conflict in human history. Some ±75 million people died including ±20 million military personnel and ±40 million civilians, many of whom died because of deliberate genocide (Holocaust), massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation.
They were all heroes in my eyes. Some of them are featured on my website. Some of them I knew personally. Not just veterans of D-Day are featured but veterans of the entire war. Also Holocaust survivors and civilian stories are featured on my website. Never forget that so many men and women gave all for your freedom!
My website has no political motives nor any financial gain what so ever and is merely a labour of love and a tribute to history and those who witnessed it. I hope you will enjoy your stay on my website and read a few of the many eyewitness stories featured on it.
“Get it all on record now get the films get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. On 9–10 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria during what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass").
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews from the rest of the population. Eventually thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe.
As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany's allies. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms between 1941 and 1945. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were worked to death or gassed. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945.
The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, usually defined as beginning in January 1933, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs (chiefly ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and Soviet prisoners of war), the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissidents, and gay men. The death toll of these groups is thought to rise to 11 million.
The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20th January 1942.
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D-Day, Normandy and Beyond
Middelstuk 5
8196 LA Welsum
The Netherlands
This website is made out of respect for the victims, the civilians and the veterans of WWII. It generates no financial gain what so ever and it is merely a platform to educate the visitor about WWII.
The personal stories on this website are under copyright of the veterans themselves and the families or people who gave the stories to me. Pictures used on this webiste are owned by the veterans who made them or by whomever made the pictures/videos (mostly these images are in the public domain and can be freely used). Also bits of texts have been used with no harmful intent in any way. If you are the owner of any picture(s) or fragments of texts that you wish to remove from this website please contact me. But I ask you to look at the nature of the website and it's goal, educating the viewer about WW2.
A big THANK YOU to the United States Army Center of Military History for their help in providing the input for these pages. All pages on this website are constantly being refitted with acurate data and texts and it is an ongoing process.
Dear visitor, if you need anything from my website please contact me. I will gladly help you.