Showing results for "The Attempt" in 20th Century

Mankind has always been fascinated with the hidden, the mysterious, and the unexplained. Every society has its tall tales and ghost stories, its odd legends and heroes. Also, every society has its stories of strange beasts, dangerous or benign, that live in the twilight world between the everyday and the legendary. Through most of our history we have been closely tied to nature, hunting in forests and having an intimate knowledge of the animals in our region.

After a brief revival following World War I, during which it successfully defeated a Soviet attempt to invade in an effort to carry "international revolution" into Germany and Central Europe, Poland once again fell victim to its neighbors in 1939. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and Josef Stalin's USSR collaborated in the conquest and then split Poland between them. The Germans instituted oppressive rule in their portion of Poland, executing some 7,000 people on political grounds and imprisoning thousands of others.

Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, Pope John Paul II and President ­Ronald Reagan took bullets from would-be assassins. Few realized at the time how close both men came to dying. Surviving these near-death experiences created a singular bond between the pope and the president that ­historians have failed to appreciate. When John Paul II and Reagan met only a year later, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for a ­reason. That reason? To defeat Communism. In private, Reagan had a name for this: “The DP” - the Divine Plan.

Millions of men were flung into the grinder of World War I and World War II, leading to commensurately huge numbers of prisoners of war (POWs). Camps were built to hold thousands of captives. Many of these men did not sit idle. Many spent their time preparing elaborate escape plans in the hopes of returning to their home nations and back to the fight. Networks of brave volunteers helped captives make their way to freedom, and secretive organizations were established in the heart of governments with the aim of encouraging and assisting escape attempts.

It is often claimed that Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany through democratic means, and while that is a stretch, it is true that he managed to become an absolute dictator as Chancellor of Germany in the 1930s through a mixture of politics and intimidation. Ironically, he had set such a course only because of the failure of an outright coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch about a decade earlier.

Eliyho Matz has done the world a service by bringing this documentary history together in book form, so that readers may see for themselves what was known, documented, and reported about the Holocaust during the 1940s, and hopefully be able to apply his information and analysis to the thorny problems facing America, Israel and the world today.

La guerra siempre ha tenido como resultado a prisioneros. En la antigüedad, muchos fueron convertidos en esclavos por los ejércitos victoriosos, mientras que en la Europa medieval, a menudo eran devueltos a sus familias a cambio de un rescate, lo cual llevaba a la fortuna o a la pobreza dependiendo del bando en el que se encontraba.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 “winning” the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the Solar System.

Like other totalitarian leaders, Adolf Hitler kept an iron grip on power in part by making sure nobody else could attain too much of it, leading to purges of high-ranking officials in the Nazi party. Of these purges, the most notorious was the Night of the Long Knives, a purge in the summer of 1934 that came about when Hitler ordered the surprise executions of several dozen leaders of the SA.

In the years preceding the height of the European Holocaust’s worst atrocities, Adolf Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany, confronted the world with a moral test. His early experiment of allowing Jews to seek homelands elsewhere came to define his future course of action toward the Jewish population of the continent. The acidic hatred he bore for the Jewish presence in European society was clear enough, but the leader of the Nazi Party could not precisely gauge the international community’s likely response to a campaign of extreme abuse directed against his own citizens.