WW II

Archaeologists have found evidence of a mass execution of German prisoners who were forced to dig their own graves and then shot by the French Resistance a few days after D-Day, during World War Two.

French and German teams discovered bullets and cartridges, as well as coins, at a remote site in central France identified by the last surviving witness.

After France surrendered to Hitler’s Germany in 1940, the underground Resistance movement gathered force over years of occupation and by June 1944 was poised to help the Allied invasion in Normandy.

In the early going of this marathon film, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context also is important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.

Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Josef Stalin’s Communist forces invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” marks November 30, 1939.

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster epic Oppenheimer is wowing critics and selling out cinemas across the world. It’s already threatening to eclipse the disappointing Indiana Jones remake and even Tom Cruise’s raved about latest installment of the Mission Impossible series. But it’s a worldwide hit with one notable exception: the film hasn’t been released in Japan yet, and no word has been given of when it will be. Some are speculating that there may be no Japanese release at all.

Klaus Fuchs says nothing in Oppenheimer, but by giving the Russians atomic secrets he maintained a balance of power

There is a character in Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer who lurks in the background of many scenes; a tall, balding, shadowy figure without a single line of dialogue. But he is the second most important person in the story of the atomic bomb.

J Robert Oppenheimer built the bomb. And Klaus Fuchs stole it.

The Manhattan Project, and the Los Alamos Laboratory under Oppenheimer, produced the first nuclear weapons. The project cost some $2 billion (about $21 billion today) and employed 130,000 people. One of them was Fuchs, a brilliant physicist and a KGB agent, who passed those dangerous scientific secrets to Stalin, enabling the Soviet Union to build its own bomb.

Not an honourable act in my view.

On July 20, 1944, at 12:42, a bomb went off in the conference room of the Wolf’s Lair military headquarters in East Prussia, the easternmost province of the German Reich until the end of World War II. It was supposed to kill Adolf Hitler, and had been planted by German army officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The former ardent National Socialist now no longer saw any other option apart from murdering the dictator. “There is nothing left but to kill him,” he had told his closest confidants a few days earlier.

Stauffenberg was not only the assassin, but also the most important organizer of a large-scale coup attempt by people from conservative circles, which included high-ranking military, diplomatic and administrative officials.

The full horrors of the only Nazi concentration camps to exist on British soil will finally be investigated in an official government inquiry, the Observer can reveal.

Eighty years on from one of the darkest episodes in British history, the government is to carry out a review into the numbers of prisoners murdered by the Nazis on Alderney, the tiny Channel Island and British crown dependency.

It has now been established that the SS ran two of the camps on Alderney during the second world war, and new evidence of the scale of Nazi barbarity on the island has emerged over recent years. The number of victims has been contested, with some claiming thousands were killed with many buried in mass graves on the island.

On July 21, the biopic “Oppenheimer” will drop in theaters. It dramatizes the story of “the Father of the Atomic Bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer. The film is being criticized for a lack of racial diversity. Far more problematic is its whitewashing of the physicist’s communist sympathies.

In the movie, Oppenheimer is called “the most important man who ever lived,” an absurdity unmatched in Hollywood razzle-dazzle but one that is gaining traction as the zeitgeist moves left, popularized by such bizarre fiction as “real communism has never been tried.”

If your code name is cropping up in the Venona transcripts there could be a problem.

As for the movie being too “White” it was called The Manhattan Project, not The Harlem Project but I agree Lizzo would have made a credible Oppenheimer.

SINGAPORE—In the spring of 1944, Second Lt. Thomas V. Kelly Jr.’s mother received a one-page letter at her home in Livermore, Calif., informing her that her son was killed in action. His plane was hit by antiaircraft fire and disintegrated midair during a mission in New Guinea, his commander wrote.

“Unfortunately this is the only information we can furnish,” the letter read.

In a storage room in Buenos Aires, an Argentinian investigator made a discovery that would reverberate through a boardroom more than 7,000 miles away.

Pedro Filipuzzi unearthed what researchers claimed were files that revealed the names of 12,000 undercover Nazis who lived in the Latin American country during the 1940s and had bank accounts at a Swiss lender: Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, later to be renamed Credit Suisse.

SYDNEY (AP) — A team of explorers announced it found a sunken Japanese ship that was transporting Allied prisoners of war when it was torpedoed off the coast of the Philippines in 1942, resulting in Australia’s largest maritime wartime loss with a total of 1,080 lives.

The wreck of the Montevideo Maru was located after a 12-day search at a depth of over 4000 meter (13,120 feet) — deeper than the Titanic — off Luzon island in the South China Sea, using an autonomous underwater vehicle with in-built sonar.

God be with them.