Browsing: December 13

A Brief History On December 13, 1945, Irma Ida Ilse Grese, age 22, was executed in accordance with her sentence of death for the crime of committing War Crimes (Crimes Against Humanity) for her service as a concentration camp guard at Ravensbruck and Auschwitz Nazi death camps during World War II. Digging Deeper The apparently attractive young lady thus became the youngest female executed by British authorities during the 20th Century. Irma was born in 1923 to a dairy working family in Germany, but her mother committed suicide by drinking acid in 1936, after finding out her husband was having…

A Brief History On December 13, 1294, Pope Celestine V, also known as Saint Celestine, resigned from the office of Pope of the Roman Catholic Church after only five months as pope.  An ineffective and incompetent pope, Celestine pulled stunts such as appointing several people to the same high position and acting as a puppet for King Charles II of Naples.  The successor to Celestine as Pope, Boniface VIII, imprisoned Celestine and overturned the various decrees Celestine managed to publish.  One of these decrees was the right of a Pope to abdicate, the right under which Celestine quit.  Obviously, both…

A Brief History On December 13, 1577, Francis Drake set out from Plymouth, England on his ship, the Golden Hind, on a voyage that would take the ship and crew around the world, the first circumnavigation of the globe by an English vessel.  This voyage, of course, has gone down in history as a famous one, as have the rest of the voyages listed here.  We, however, will provide you with some little-known facts about each of these voyages that your teacher probably never told you. Digging Deeper 5. HMS Beagle, 1831. The HMS Beagle was made famous by Charles…

A Brief History On December 13, 1937, the blood-lust of a number of Japanese soldiers reached unprecedented proportions when they massacred over 250,000 Chinese in Nanking! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Japan waging a war against their huge but militarily weak neighbor, China, during the lead up to World War II. Resentful of western spheres of influence in China and western colonies throughout Asia, Japan was ready for their own piece of the pie. In their arrogance, they considered themselves the master race and as such deserved to rule all of Asia.  This ethnocentric and nationalistic feeling set the…