Among the top Nazis, Heinrich Himmler was the leading racial fanatic. As Reichsfuhrer and SS chief, he personally set up the Lebensborn program in 1935 to turn the German population into a superrace through selective breeding. Thousands of carefully selected German women were encouraged to have intercourse with SS men, who were presumed to be among the racial as well as the political elite. Once pregnant, the women were signed into one of twelve special maternity centers, where they received lavish medical and personal care. When one ...

Back in his days as the geek god of clerks at Manhattan Beach Video Archives, Quentin Tarantino must have looked at all those World War II movies, especially the ones about plots to kill Hitler, and realized what was wrong: everybody knows the ending. Bad guys lose. Hitler died in his bunker. Where's the suspense? Where's the ambiguity? Most films about the war treat the historical record as sacred, which often serves as an excuse for lofty moral judgments. ...

A 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was found strangled Thursday in his Upper East Side apartment, a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner said Friday. Felix Brinkmann, a native of Latvia, escaped death for a year while he was in the Nazis' Mauthausen, Ebensee and Auschwitz concentration camps. Five times he had been slated for the gas chambers, but each time he used his fluency in German to talk his way out. After the war ended, he was stunned ...

She told stories, flirted outrageously with boys and was constantly changing her hairstyle. It could be the description of almost any young girl growing up in Europe. But this is how Eva Schloss remembers her childhood friend Anne Frank, who had not died in a Nazi concentration camp, would have celebrated her 80th birthday this week. Schloss described Frank, whose account of hiding from Jewish persecution in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam is one of the world's mostly widely-read books, as a spunky ...

Few question Pope Benedict XVI's good will, nor the eloquence of his prose. But for the second time in three years, the Pope has delivered a highly anticipated discourse on the Holocaust that was moving but, by its silence on specific subjects, missed an opportunity of historic proportions. Welcomed at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial early Monday evening, Benedict spoke powerfully of the victims, and called on humanity never to forget the attempt to exterminate the Jews as a way ...

The photograph is a jarring image that shows Nazi Party members, shovels in hand, digging up graves of American soldiers held as slaves by Nazi Germany during World War II. While the men dig up the site, U.S. soldiers investigating war crimes stand over them. Two crosses with helmets placed atop them -- the sign of a fallen soldier -- are visible. Two Germans are knee deep in mud. Another, with a handlebar mustache, has the look of a defeated ...

Pope Benedict XVI will not visit Israel's Holocaust museum when he makes his first trip to the region as pope in May, though he will visit an adjacent memorial, his ambassador to Israel said Tuesday. The museum includes controversial wording that reflects a long-running dispute over the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II. The pope will visit the memorial section of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but will not step inside the museum part, the envoy, papal nuncio ...

Germany's Nazi past continues to unsettle its present. Privileged clans and mighty industries alike have subjected themselves to public scrutiny and painful mea culpas over activities and associations before and during World War II. But the latest controversy links the poisoned mementos of Auschwitz to the ongoing global financial crisis in a still unraveling tale of leveraged buyouts, corporate hubris and financial humiliation. At the center of the drama is Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, 67, the grande dame of one of ...