Noticias relacionadas con la 2ª Guerra Mundial

[Bandura]

Pues eso, de vez en cuando aparecen en la prensa noticias relacionadas con la segunda guerra mundial, sería interesante recopilarlas en este hilo. Me refiero a noticias de muertes, etc... pequeños detalles, ese tipo de cosas.

Para empezar puedo comentar una noticia de hace pocos días, la muerte de un alto funcionaro japonés, no recuerdo el nombre, que estuvo presente en la firma de la paz en la bahia de Tokio.

El descubrimiento del avión donde murió el autor del Principito, hacía una misión de reconocimiento en el sur de Francia.

[Santiago Plaza]

Hola Daniel.
Me parece interesante la propuesta.

He recogido estas noticias que cuentan historias interesantes.
La pega es que están en ingles...

WWII pilot revisits spitfire wreckage in Germany

By James Mackenzie
VEELBOEKEN, Germany, May 30 (Reuters) - On a spring afternoon in 1945, spitfire pilot Victor Murphy ran into a formation of enemy fighter planes over Nazi Germany and battled in one of the last aerial dogfights of World War Two.
He was shot down but this week, almost 60 years later, the Australian returned to Germany to watch excavators dig up his spitfire wreckage.
On April 19, 1945, the Royal Australian Air Force pilot took off in a four-plane patrol from his base near Hanover, Germany, on an armed reconnaissance mission. The patrol was to fly over airfields trying to keep the remaining planes in a severely depleted German air force on the ground.
But the mission turned out to be more than just routine. Murphy's unit got an unwelcome surprise when it approached what looked like American Thunderbolts.
"We saw a sunlight reflection on planes in the distance. We could see there were numerous planes there and we went towards them for some reason," said Murphy, now in his eighties.
"As we got closer and there was no turning back, we saw they were Focke-Wulfs and we were heavily outnumbered... I think they came from the factory because they didn't have any camouflage on their fuselage, just aluminium cladding," he said.
In the ensuing fight his plane and another were hit.
"I had to bail out," said Murphy.
Once on the ground his situation was still dangerous.
"We had orders to use guns to fight our way out because farmers and Hitler youth groups were active at the time and they would just kill any pilots that were shot down," he said.
But instead Murphy was captured by German soldiers, who took him to a Luftwaffe camp where guards hid him from Nazi fanatics.
"The SS were going around prison camps and shooting prisoners and the guards were aware of this so they took us to barns and hid us in the night time," said Murphy.
The guards, eager to protect themselves and their prisoners from advancing Russian troops, put Murphy and others in the path of British soldiers and he was rescued in early May, hours before the war ended.
After the war, Murphy returned to his hometown Melbourne, Australia. He came back to Germany this week to watch as excavators recovered the wreckage of what they believe to be his aircraft.
On an idyllic summer's day in northeastern Germany, dozens of spectators gathered in woodlands to watch the digging, which is being sponsored and filmed by a British television company.
"I am surprised at the interest this has aroused in Germany, England and Australia," said Murphy, wearing a cravat and a blazer with an airmen's association badge.
"I don't think I did anything out of the ordinary."

FACTBOX-Ardeatine Caves - one of Italy's worst WWII massacres

ROME, June 4 (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush visited the Ardeatine Caves on Friday, site of one of the worst World War Two massacres in Italy, on the first day of a European trip commemorating major battles in the conflict.
Here are five facts on the massacre.
* The massacre took place on March 24, 1944, and is regarded as one of the most serious war crimes committed in Italy.
* A day earlier, a bomb had exploded in Rome's Via Rasella as a German unit was marching by. It killed 33 soldiers.
* Under the direction of SS Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, 335 Italians who had no connection with the Rasella affair were taken from various prisons and shot dead in groups of five and buried in the Ardeatine caves.
* Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had ordered 10 people to be killed for every dead German stormtrooper but an extra five were shot by mistake. The victims, who included 75 Jews, were taken to the Ardeatine Caves, near the catacombs of early Christians outside Rome, and shot.
* Former Nazi major Karl Hass, who died in 2004, and ex-SS Captain Erich Priebke were convicted of participating in the 1944 massacre. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2001, Italy's Supreme Court threw out Priebke's request to be released from house arrest where he is serving his sentence.

FEATURE-Germany, Russia probe the fate of WWII prisoners

By Katie Allen
BERLIN, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Weighed down by the 40 kg (90 lb) tombstone in his hand luggage, Mikhail Radchenko boarded a Moscow bus bound for central Germany, hoping to mark the grave of his father who died there six decades earlier in a Nazi prisoner of war camp.
Radchenko was three when he last saw his father, Illarion Ivanovich Radchenko. At the age of 64, he was finally able to mark his grave.
Radchenko found his father's resting place with the help of historians, who have been digging through World War Two archives opened up since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
An estimated 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were executed, worked to death or died of hunger and disease during World War Two.
Across the eastern front, the Soviet Union, which had suffered a loss of 27 million people, kept hundreds of thousands of German POWs as forced labourers for years after the fighting stopped.
Millions went missing on both sides.
"There is nothing harder to cope with than not knowing where a lost relative is. It is impossible to mourn someone properly until you know they are definitely dead," said Klaus Mittermaier from the tracing service of the German Red Cross.
"Things like Christmas and the person's birthday are particularly hard."
His service has received 17 million requests to find missing soldiers and civilians since the war ended in 1945. In the early years tracing was made easy thanks to returning soldiers with reports of their fallen comrades and the Red Cross could answer four fifths of the requests.
Yet 1.4 million German soldiers and civilians who disappeared in Soviet-occupied territory are still officially missing, says Mittermaier, who has traced graves for 22 years.
PERSONAL STAMP ON STATISTICS
On the Russian side, demand for information is also high.
Russia's ambassador in Berlin, Sergei Krylov, says the embassy gets letters daily from Russians wanting help with finding the graves of their relatives.
Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian and German authorities are now working together to uncover the soldiers' fates.
Starting in 1999, Russian and German archivists searched through files kept under wraps by security services during the Cold War and have so far traced the individual stories of 60,000 Russian soldiers taken prisoner during the war.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once said: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
Moscow and Berlin have now sought to put a personal stamp on the statistics in the book "For the living. Remembering the dead". Its photographs, prisoner records and death certificates chronicle the fate of individual Russian and German prisoners and their relatives' quest to find them.
"Grass has grown over the soldiers' graves and their personal stories but now we can look into what happened to individuals," said author and historian Klaus-Dieter Mueller.
One such story is Radchenko's. He wrote to German authorities in 2001 asking for information about his father, who he believed had died in a concentration camp in 1941.
However, research in several archives showed the soldier, born in 1906, had in fact died in early 1942 and was buried in a "cemetery of the unknown" -- a misleading title, it turned out, when historians found an exact list of who was buried there.
NEVER HEARD FROM AGAIN
There is also the tale of Erhard Schulze, who spent decades looking for his father Fritz after he was arrested in eastern Germany by Soviet authorities in 1946 and was never heard from again.
German researchers wrote to the Russian military state prosecution service and documents showed Fritz Schulze died in prison just 12 days after his arrest.
Mueller said his team of six historians and scores of administrators hope to make a painstaking survey of 90,000 soldiers' files a year from now.
"Most of the files are not in alphabetical order and many of the papers are in a bad state. Also, the files are spread across various European secret service offices and with Russia alone being so vast it's a lot of work collating them," he said.
The book is just the first part of the pan-European search, which is expected to last another decade and reveal the fate of a million German and eastern European soldiers.
As well as uncovering painful stories from the war, the researchers also hope to trace Russian and German soldiers who continued to toil in Stalinist forced labour camps after 1945.
"Until 1995 a Red Army solider who fell into enemy hands was officially seen as a traitor. Many were either imprisoned or treated as outcasts," said Mueller. "They came back only to get caught up in the cogs of Stalin's legal apparatus."

Saludos,

[Kalael Kalhattan]

Interesante asunto este...

Pues en plan efemérides, comentaros que hoy hace 63 años que empezó la Operación Barbaroja... Hoy empezó una pesadilla que costó más de 20 millones de vidas y en las que los humanos dieron muestras de la bestialidad más infame y del heroismo más puro.

Guardemos al menos unos segundos de silencio por la conmemoración de millones de vidas segadas por la barbarie.

Un saludo

[Lino]

Bueno, aunque sea del 26 de agosto, es una noticia relacionada con la WWII, así que la dejo aquí.

http://elmundo.es/elmundo/2004/08/26/ob ... 20145.html

Saludos