WWII – Scott's Blog

Book Review: Conversations with an Executioner

2026-08-27books, culture, Europe, Germany, history, learnings, personal, Poland

Conversations with an Executioner: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi Who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto by Kazimierz Moczarski describe the supposed prison cell conversations between a World War II Polish…

Analog Logging

2026-08-25books, culture, Europe, Germany, personal

I checked out Wilhelm Hohenzollern: The Last of the Kaisers by Emil Ludwig from the University of Minnesota libraries. Today book inventory, checkouts and tracking are computerized, but not so…

Random Learnings #71

2026-07-22Denmark, Europe, history, learnings, personal, United States

While flipping through the Britannica Book of the Year 1948 at breakfast, I read Denmark's entry: The question of U.S. privileges in Greenland, Denmark's great island, was raised vociferously by…

Kleine Berlin

2026-06-15Europe, Italy, travel

Kleine Berlin is the Italian pejorative for the area of Trieste where German soldiers were worked and lived during World War II. Kleine Berlin also refers to the air raid…

Random Learnings #67

2026-02-07Europe, Germany, history, learnings, personal

If we know anything about National Socialism, it's that for the first time in German politics human stupidity has been successfully and completely mobilized. -Kurt Schumacher, SPD member of Weimar…

Unexpected Continuity

2025-12-04art, Europe, Germany, history, learnings, museum, personal

From the Brittanica Book of the Year 1968, p376: Another in a series of legislative measures designed to establish the separate statehood of East Germany was passed by the People's…

Oh What A Year: 1933

2025-12-02Europe, Germany, history, learnings, North America, personal, United States

[Nothing like spending a Sunday reading undigitized, bound periodicals at your local university library...] Time Magazine began 1933 by declaring Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president-elect, as Man of the Year.…

Random Learnings #60

2025-09-01Europe, history, learnings, personal, Poland

I knew that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact split Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I knew that post-war Poland's eastern borders moved west, the Soviet Union demanding the…

When Name Recognition Is Not Good

2025-08-14Europe, Germany, history, learnings, personal

The Netflix show Five Came Back: The Reference Films consists of twelve government-sponsored propaganda films. The first episode is Nazi Concentration Camps is about the well-known and appalling conditions the…

Profits Over Patriotism

2025-08-10history, learnings, personal

Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM, made a bold claim in an editorial published before the United States entered World War II: We are either internationalists or isolationists, and I…