Tag: German

Anzac Guerrillas – Podcast

When the Germans took thousands of Allied prisoners during the catastrophic Greek campaign of 1941, a handful of Australian soldiers escaped from prison trains in occupied Yugoslavia. What awaited them was not passage home, but a brutal underground war where the fate of a nation was at stake.

Told through the eyes of two of the Australian escapees – mineworker Ross Sayers and storeman Ronald Jones – Anzac Guerrillas is the incredible true story of how these men became resistance fighters, double agents and spies, evading the Nazis and exposing a group of genocidal collaborators.

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Karl Muller and the fatal lemon

Reading time: 6 minutes
Britain had been wary of foreign agents operating within its shores in the run up to the First World War, and the Secret Service Bureau – now commonly known as MI5 – had been established in 1909. It had found great success rounding up German spies when the conflict broke out. Nonetheless, it was vigilant that enemy operatives might attempt to send reports on Britain’s military and economy back home.

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The Malta convoys: Australian sailors speak

Reading time: 7 minutes
The island of Malta, located in almost the exact centre of the Mediterranean, was an important depot and staging post for the Allied efforts in North Africa and, later, the invasion of Italy. As a result, the Axis forces bombed it relentlessly for years, something you can read about more in our article on the Siege of Malta through Australian eyes.

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The Strangest Battle of World War II? Uncovering the Battle of Castle Itter

Reading time: 6 minutes
In the waning hours of the war, exactly five days after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, a bizarre battle would commence in a small Austrian town, just south of the German border.
Seven hundred years after its construction in the 1200s, Castle Itter would host a battle between the Waffen-SS (the Nazi party’s specialist paramilitary) and a combined force of defecting German Wehrmacht troops, American soldiers, Austrian resistance fighters, and various French political prisoners.

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Free France was African: the Story of France’s African Soldiers in WW2

Reading time: 15 minutes
From a humble, precarious exile in London, Free France patched together from soldiers and sailors of the scattered French military under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. One of the most storied resistance movements in World War II, far-flung Frenchmen swelled in number until hundreds of thousands could return to liberate France in 1944.

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A History of Drinking with the World’s Oldest Pubs

Reading time: 7 minutes
Alcohol is one of humanity’s oldest inventions.
Our earliest evidence of humans brewing and drinking alcohol comes from 8th Century BCE China – over 9,000 years ago.
Across the world, from China and India to Mesopotamia and Europe, we’ve brewed many different types of alcoholic drinks, and almost as old as the drinks are the places we drink in.
While most of the world has a long history of drinking establishments, Europe is the home of the pub, which comes from the Roman tradition of establishing tabernaes or wine shops everywhere they went.

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