World History: True Stories of the 20th Century

The Son Thang massacre, a war crime during the Vietnam War, saw U.S. Marines execute unarmed civilians in a South Vietnamese village. On February 19, 1970, five U.S. Marines entered the South Vietnamese village of Sơn Thắng seeking revenge for an ambush that killed their comrades. Believing the village harbored Viet Cong, they executed sixteen unarmed women and children. The massacre, quickly expo...

Hans Loritz, a Nazi concentration camp commandant of Dachau and Sachsenhausen, became one of the key architects of early SS camp brutality during the Second World War. Hans Loritz was belonged to concentration camp commandants of Nazi Germany, playing a key role in shaping the terror system of the early SS camps during the Second World War. His name is closely associated with the concentration cam...

Roland Freisler, a Nazi judge and President of the People’s Court, became one of the most feared figures of the Third Reich by turning trials into instruments of terror and mass execution. Roland Freisler stands among the most feared figures of Nazi Germany during the Second World War - a judge who transformed the law into a weapon and turned courtrooms into theatrical stages of humiliation, intim...

Marcel Petiot, a French serial killer posing as a resistance helper, used Nazi-occupied France to lure victims and murder them under the guise of escape. Marcel Petiot remains one of the most disturbing figures to emerge from France’s wartime history—a man who used the chaos of occupation, the trust of frightened civilians, and the secrecy of resistance networks to commit a series of murders that...

Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian fascist leader and Nazi collaborator, became a symbol of treachery during the Second World War. In the 1930s, he founded the fascist Nasjonal Samling party, promoting authoritarianism, anti-communism, and racial ideology inspired by Nazi Germany. When German forces invaded Norway in April 1940, Quisling infamously declared himself head of government during a radio broa...

Akira Mutō, a senior Imperial Japanese general responsible for atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre, became one of the most brutal and consequential commanders of the Second World War. Born in 1892 in Kyushu, Mutō rose through the ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army as part of a generation shaped by militarism, nationalism, and the belief in Japanese racial and cultural superiority. Educated...

Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, teenage Dutch resistance fighters, became some of the most remarkable anti-Nazi operatives in the Netherlands during World War II. In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, bringing occupation, repression, and the systematic persecution of Jews. As deportations to camps like Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Mauthausen began, a resistance movement slowly emerged. Amon...

The Kyiv public execution in January 1946 saw Nazi perpetrators responsible for crimes including the Babi Yar massacre hanged before thousands of residents in one of the most dramatic postwar justice events. After the German occupation of Kyiv on 19 September 1941, a series of explosions—planted by the retreating Soviet NKVD—served as a pretext for Nazi retaliation. The city’s Jewish population wa...

Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and architect of the Gulag system, rose from a poor Jewish family in the Russian Empire to become one of the most powerful and feared men in the Soviet Union—and ultimately a victim of the very terror he helped build. Born in 1891 in Rybinsk, Yagoda grew up in a household shaped by underground revolutionary activity: his father, a jeweler...

Magda Goebbels, the symbolic “First Lady” of Nazi Germany and wife of Joseph Goebbels, stood at the centre of one of the regime’s most disturbing family tragedies. As Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, he shaped the ideological landscape of the Third Reich, orchestrating mass propaganda, antisemitic hatred, and total loyalty to Adolf Hitler. At his side stood his wife, Magda Go...

Sergei Bunyachenko, a high-ranking Soviet officer turned Nazi collaborator during the Second World War, is a story of betrayal, ideological conflict, and brutal retribution. Born in 1902 into a poor Ukrainian family, Bunyachenko joined the Red Army at age 15 and fought in the Russian Civil War. A graduate of the Odessa Military Academy and later the Frunze Military Academy, he climbed the ranks qu...

The Feodosia massacre refers to the killing of German prisoners by Soviet forces after the Red Army recaptured the Crimean port city during the Second World War. The violence unfolded in a city already marked by earlier atrocities committed under Nazi occupation. On 3 November the 46th Infantry Division together with the 170 Infantry division captured Feodosia. This mid-sized city on the Crimean c...

Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, ruled with strong American support until his violent overthrow and assassination during the escalating Vietnam War. Ngo Dinh Diem was one of the most controversial figures of the Vietnam War era. Rising to power in the aftermath of French colonial rule, he became the first president of the Republic of Vietnam, commonly known as South Vietnam. Ba...

Max Pauly, commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp during the Second World War, became responsible for brutal crimes within the Nazi camp system, including the infamous murder of children at Bullenhuser Damm. Max Pauly was a Nazi concentration camp commandant during the Second World War whose career culminated in one of the most horrifying crimes against children during the Holocaust. A ve...

Josias, Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, a German aristocrat turned SS leader, became deeply involved in the Nazi regime and held authority over the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War. Josias, Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, was a former German aristocrat whose pursuit of power and restored privilege led him deep into the criminal machinery of Nazi Germany, especially during th...

Gordon Frederick Cummins, an RAF airman during the Second World War, became infamous as the “Blackout Ripper,” a serial killer who terrorized London during the wartime blackouts of 1942. During the darkest years of the Second World War, as London endured nightly air-raid sirens, blackout regulations, and the constant threat of German bombs, a different kind of terror began stalking the city—one th...

Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest who became president of wartime Slovakia, led his country into collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. A Catholic priest turned president, Jozef Tiso led Slovakia into collaboration with Hitler’s Third Reich, transforming a nation once part of democratic Czechoslovakia into a loyal Nazi puppet state. Under his leadership, Slovakia enacted one of t...

Kenji Doihara, an Imperial Japanese Army general and intelligence officer, became one of the key architects of Japan’s expansion into China and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Kenji Doihara was one of the most notorious architects of Imperial Japan’s expansion into China and a central figure in the chain of events that helped ignite the wider conflict in Asia during the Second World...

Francisco Boix, a Spanish Republican prisoner at the Mauthausen concentration camp, risked his life to preserve photographic evidence of Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. Francisco Boix, a young Spanish Republican and former soldier in the Spanish Civil War, became during the Second World War one of the most important photographic witnesses to Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. Born in Barcelona in...

The Stutthof executions of 1946 were among the rare public punishments of Nazi war criminals, when former SS guards from the Stutthof concentration camp were hanged before a large crowd in Gdańsk. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, launching the Second World War and beginning one of the darkest chapters in European history. Within days of the invasion, the Germans established Stutth...

Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful head of Stalin’s secret police, became one of the most feared architects of repression in the Soviet Union. Lavrentiy Beria was one of the most feared men in the Soviet Union — a figure whose name became synonymous with terror, repression, and unimaginable cruelty. Rising from the Caucasus political elite, Beria quickly proved himself indispensable to Joseph Stalin. A...

Eva Braun, the longtime secret companion and eventual wife of Adolf Hitler, chose to remain at his side in the Führerbunker as the Third Reich collapsed in April 1945. In the final days of April 1945, as Soviet forces closed in on Berlin and the Third Reich collapsed, one person made the fateful choice to remain at Adolf Hitler’s side until the very end: Eva Braun. For fifteen years she lived in t...

Andrey Vlasov, once a celebrated Red Army general who helped defend Moscow in 1941, later became one of the most notorious collaborators with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Once celebrated as a hero of the Red Army, General Andrey Vlasov would become one of the most infamous traitors of the Second World War. A brilliant officer who helped defend Moscow from Hitler’s forces in 1941, Vlas...

The liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 exposed the horrors of the Nazi camp system and was followed by controversial reprisals against captured SS guards. The liberation of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, by the U.S. 45th Infantry Division marked a pivotal moment in World War II. Located near Munich, Dachau was the first regular concentration camp establishe...

The My Lai Massacre remains one of the most infamous atrocities of the Vietnam War, when U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in a South Vietnamese village. On March 16, 1968, in Quảng Ngãi Province, South Vietnam, soldiers of Charlie Company, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division entered the village of My Lai expecting to confront Viet Cong fighters. Instead, they encountered una...