Category: History

Evgeny Stepanovich Kobytev: A soldier’s face after four years of war, 1941-1945

Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family?

The betrayal of Anne Frank, her family, and the others hiding in the secret annex is one of the enduring mysteries of the Holocaust. Despite decades of investigation, no definitive answer has ever been found. But the question continues to fascinate and trouble historians: Who told the Nazis where to find the people in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht?

Jewish-Nazi collaborator Ans van Dijk stands trial for treason. During the war, she baited fellow Jews out of hiding and got them arrested by the Gestapo. Amsterdam, 1947

Imagine sitting in that Amsterdam courtroom in 1947. The war is over, the Nazis have been driven out, but the scars are everywhere. You’ve lost neighbors, friends, maybe entire branches of your family tree. And now you’re watching a woman — a Jew — stand trial not as a victim, but as a collaborator.

Why did soldiers keep fighting in WWI, even when it became clear they were marching into slaughter?

Why did they keep going?

Why, after seeing entire regiments mowed down in minutes, after watching friends disintegrate under artillery, after spending weeks in flooded trenches with rats chewing on corpses—why did they keep fighting?

Because World War I wasn’t just a war. It was a system. A machine. And once you were inside of it, there was no clear way out.

An American evacuee punches a South Vietnamese man for a place on a chopper out of the Nha Trang in 1975.

If you want to understand how wars actually end—not how the treaties are signed or the monuments get built, but how they really end—look at the photograph. A single frozen instant at Nha Trang Air Base in the spring of 1975.

An American official, face taut with fear and frustration, punches a Vietnamese man in the face. The man is clinging to the side of a plane—already packed, engines spinning, ready to go. He won’t let go. He can’t let go. And the American, trying to clear the doorway so the plane can take off, uses his fist.

Did Hitler ever visit a concentration camp?

It’s one of those facts that feels almost too bizarre to be real, but here it is: Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust, never set foot inside a concentration camp. Not once.

A chain gang, in the American south 1905

The chain gang is an institution of its own, evolved from a simple idea: if the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, the prison system could quietly pick up where the plantations left off. And it did, with ruthless efficiency. Black men — overwhelmingly Black men — convicted of petty crimes, real or imagined, are now property of the state, leased out like equipment to build roads, clear swamps, or break rock.

This Japanese-American fighting unit was one of WWII’s most decorated, 1943-1945

There are moments in history so saturated with contradiction that they almost break your brain. The story of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team is one of them. Picture it: It’s 1943. The world is at war. The United States is fighting the Axis powers overseas, but at home, it’s waging a different kind of war—one of paranoia and racism—against its own citizens. Over 110,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. born, are being rounded up, stripped of their rights, and imprisoned in internment camps scattered across remote deserts and swamps. Their only crime? Their ancestry.

Dick Cheney and George W Bush at the White House on 14 December 2007. Cheney was part of a group of Bush Jr advisers who called themselves ‘the Vulcans’

Let’s get one thing straight: the story of Dick Cheney is not one of accident. It’s a story of intent. And if you want to understand the post-9/11 world—if you want to understand Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, surveillance, even the modern deep suspicion of government—you have to understand Cheney. And to understand Cheney, you need to understand the Vulcans.

Civil War Draft Letter, Providence, RI, 1863