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Before 1936, the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games were generally low-key. However, Nazi Germany turned them into a well choreographed event. All Olympic opening ceremonies since then have been influenced by what took place in Berlin in 1936.
Tags:
1936
Summer
Olympics
ceremony
Added: 3rd December 2007
Views: 415
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
 
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Fascinating footage of women's gymnastics from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It looks like slow motion compared to what gymnastics became in the 1970s.
Tags:
1936
womens
gymnastics
Olympics
Added: 16th June 2008
Views: 168
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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One day before Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini met a more public end. Mussolini and Clara Petacci, his mistress, were caught by communist partisans while trying to flee into Switzerland. On April 29, 1945, the two were shot to death in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra. Their corpses were then taken to the Piazzale Loreto in Milan and strung up on meat hooks above a gas station. Crowds threw stones at the bodies for several days.
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Benito
Mussolini
Added: 21st July 2008
Views: 176
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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This edition of Time Magazine chronicled the worst incident in the history of the Olympic Games. On September 5, 1972 a radical terrorist group, Black September, got through ridiculously lax security at the athletes' village in Munich, West Germany simply by wearing track suits and acting like they belonged there. At 4:30 a.m. they took a group of 11 Israeli athletes, coaches, and officials hostage. Two Israelis were killed almost instantly for resisting. The other nine died at the airport where special German anti-terror police got into a gun battle with the terrorists. (One German policeman was killed too.) Up to that time, the 1972 Summer Olympics had been a splendid, friendly affair. The 'openness' of the Games and limited security was deliberate. The West German organizers wanted to erase the memories of the 'Nazified' 1936 Berlin Olympics. Since that awful day, Olympic Games security has become much more efficient and hugely expensive.
Tags:
Olympic
massacre
Israelis
Munich
Added: 15th August 2008
Views: 101
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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This is an IOC profile of Jesse Owens, the famed American athlete, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. I've always loved the story about how Luz Long helped Owens qualify for the long jump finals.
Tags:
Jesse
Owens
Luz
Long
Olympics
Added: 16th August 2008
Views: 105
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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On November 9, 1989, one of the major symbols of the Cold War came tumbling down: the infamous Berlin Wall. It had divided free West Berlin from communist East Germany since 1961. It was a great day for humanity!
Tags:
Berlin
Wall
Added: 21st August 2008
Views: 91
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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The Greatest Mass Rape in History
One of this century's greatest crimes, and probably one of the greatest crimes against women in history, was the mass rape of the conquered women of Europe in 1945. The rapists were mainly Red Army soldiers, some of them non-White troops from the Far East and Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union.
As the Red Army advanced toward her in 1945, the city of Berlin had become a city virtually without men. Out of a civilian population of 2,700,000, 2,000,000 were women.
Former Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse recalled: "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to 80... It was an army of rapists."
The rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labor.
As Author Antony Beevor put it,
"If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilization can be when there is little fear of retribution."
Photos
The National Archives
The Library of Congress
Film Clips: Official and Amateur footage
Vincent Romano Archives
http://www.webalice.it/romanoarchives/
Aduio Clip: BBC4 The Woman's Hour "War Rape"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshou...
Music
Hagia Sophia
Star of the Winds
IRFAN
http://www.myspace.com/irfantheband
Come Tenderness
Lisa Gerrard
http://www.lisagerrard.com/
conceived and produced by
Dale Caruso
to learn more;
Berlin: The Downfall 1945
Antony Beevor
http://www.antonybeevor.com/
Tags:
WWII
German
Soviet
War
Crimes
Rape
Brutality
Horrors
of
War
Added: 25th September 2008
Views: 148
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Posted By: dalecaruso |
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Here's another clip from the movie This Is The Army (1943)--and perhaps the most memorable: Irving Berlin singing one of his own songs...Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning.
Tags:
Irving
Berlin
Added: 13th November 2008
Views: 113
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Posted By: Lava1964 |
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