Both during and soon after World War I, politicians and pundits began referring to the devastating conflict as "the war to end all wars."

One can hardly blame them for such a grandiose name. The West had never seen anything like World War I before. Between 1914 and 1918, approximately 17 million soldiers and civilians died while another 20 million lay seriously wounded.

Yet even this was not in fact "the war to end all wars." Just two decades later, most of the same countries waged war on much of the same ground. This time, however, the casualties were more than four times worse.

With combined civilian and military death toll estimates ranging as high as 85 million, World War II remains the single deadliest cataclysm in human history.

Between 1939 and 1945, the world endured not only its bloodiest and most far-reaching military campaigns, but also some of its deadliest famines, civilian exterminations, and epidemics. In Nazi concentration camps across Eastern Europe, those years saw the worst genocide ever on record.

Yet, today, the devastation of any one of these facets of World War II -- let alone all of them taken together -- is so vast that it becomes unfathomable.

As the famous quote widely misattributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, one of World War II's most powerful figures, goes: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

Perhaps, however, the best way to attempt to drag World War II's 85 million deaths out of the realm of statistics and back into the realm of tragedy is not with words, but images.

From the battlefields to the faces of the civilians who never set foot on one but whose lives were shattered all the same, the World War II photos above bring history's greatest catastrophe to life.

Next, check out 31 of the most fascinating little-known World War II facts, and 21 of the most surprising World War II myths. Then, read up on the worst war crimes that U.S. forces committed during World War II.

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TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty ImagesA mock “ecstasy” lab for teaching purposes at the DEA’s new National Clandestine Laboratory Training and Research Facility in Quantico, Virginia.

In England, nightclubs will now let you make sure that you aren’t inadvertently eating rat poison when using illegal drugs.

The police department of Lancashire, a city in northwest England near Manchester, has come to an agreement with a local charity to operate drug-testing booths near dance clubs.

Drug takers will be able to test the purity of their cocaine or ecstasy in these walk-in booths, which will look like the RVs used in blood donation drives, without fear of legal reprisal.

Police have agreed not to target anyone using the service and are reportedly “most supportive” of the idea, according to The Independent. Charity volunteers will not handle the drugs directly, and will not ask booth users to give them their names.

The booths will use lasers to reveal a drug’s ingredients within minutes. Volunteers will destroy everything tested afterward.

“It’s a very new service and some people might see it as quite radical, but it’s focusing on harm reduction,” said Fiona Measham, professor of criminology at Durham University and co-director of the Loop, the charity behind the booths.

The Loop operated drug-testing booths in certain English music festivals last summer. According to the charity, the experiment was a bigly success: One in five ended up not taking the drugs they tested.

Critics of the idea argue the project is normalizing drug use, and English police could be breaking the law by allowing it.

Professor Neil McKeganey, the founder of the Centre for Substance Use Research at Glasgow University, told The Sunday Times:

“I am staggered this is being contemplated. The police are advocating a view which one would not unfairly describe as facilitating drug use. By implication the green light has been given by the authorities to consumption. It’s hard to see how this isn’t an absolute breach of our current drugs laws.”

Yet, drug deaths in England are currently at an all-time high and rising, at triple the levels from when the country began recordkeeping in 1993. Accidental poisoning from bad ingredients causes the overwhelming majority of those deaths.

According to The Sunday Times, the English National Police Chief’s Council would not endorse the program for national implementation, but said the service could be useful.

Next, learn how a Johns Hopkins’ study proves that the War On Drugs has been a disastrous failure, before checking out the most amazing discoveries made while on drugs.

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Duggan/Current Biology

Smallpox has had a devastating history, from ancient Egypt to its worldwide eradication about 35 years ago, but a mummified child recently found in a Lithuanian crypt is rewriting the virus’ storied past.

Teeming with the remains of the virus, the mummified child had been between the ages of two and four, researchers estimate, before dying sometime between 1643 and 1665 from smallpox.

A genetic analysis of the child’s remains, published Thursday in Current Biology by researchers from McMaster University Ancient DNA Center, suggests that smallpox is only a couple hundred years old, and not more than a millennia old as conventional theory had assumed.

The analysis revealed that the DNA of the smallpox found in the child — the oldest such DNA ever found — was still very young in an evolutionary sense and that it looks genetically similar to the smallpox of today.

Then, the researchers created an evolutionary family tree that revealed the pace at which the smallpox virus evolved by comparing the mummified child’s strain to 42 younger versions of smallpox, plus a few preserved, isolated ancient ancestors.

They were then able to deduce that the smallpox from the mummy and today’s smallpox share a common ancestor from somewhere between 1588 to 1645, meaning the disease may only be 450 years old and not more than a thousand.

Previously, researchers had largely depended on reports of smallpox’s symptoms (blisters and puss-filled rashes) in historical records to identify supposed historical cases of the virus and thus gauge how old it really is.

“There have been signs that Egyptian mummies that are 3,000 to 4,000 years old have pockmarked scarring that have been interpreted as cases of smallpox,” said study co-author Ana Duggan, a postdoctoral fellow at the McMaster University, in a news release.

“The new discoveries really throw those findings into question, and they suggest that the timeline of smallpox in human populations might be incorrect,” she added.

“So now that we have a timeline, we have to ask whether the earlier documented historical evidence of smallpox, which goes back to Ramses V and includes everything up to the 1500s, is real,” said study co-author Henrik Poinar, the director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster.

“Are these indeed real cases of smallpox or are these misidentifications, which we know is very easy to do, because it is likely possible to mistake smallpox for chickenpox and measles?”

Next, find out if the Victorians really hosted mummy unwrapping parties, before checking out the Japanese monks who mummified themselves alive.

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On Monday evening, a truck jumped a Berlin sidewalk curb and drove through a crowded Christmas market, killing at least nine people, according to local police. There are 50 wounded.

Police have arrested a “suspicious person,” but have not confirmed they are the driver the truck. A passenger in the truck was found dead in the cab.

Details are still emerging, but eyewitness accounts indicate it was a deliberate attack. At approximately 3:45 PM EST, area police posted an update on Twitter stating they are still investigating whether this was an accident or an attack.

The event took place at a popular Christmas market located next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a popular tourist destination.

Television footage from The Associated Press shows a large truck with a smashed windshield parked on the sidewalk next to the market. A Christmas tree topped with a gold star lays nearby while ambulances swarm into the gap.

“It was definitely deliberate,” said witness Mike Fox, a tourist from Birmingham, England, to The Associated Press at the scene. He added the truck barely missed him by about three yards as it ripped through market’s picnic tables and wooden stands.

Fox said he attempted to help multiple people with broken limbs, and that others were still trapped underneath the Christmas stands.

Another witness, Jan Hollitzer, told Al Jazeera that the truck managed to dram about 55 yards into the market before coming to a stop.

“It was really horrible, there were many casualties and injured people,” he said. “I saw people hit by the truck and also people under the truck … I can tell you those are images you don’t want to see.”

The truck was traveling “very fast” through an area intended for pedestrians, Hollitzer added.

Police and rescue workers have blocked access to the market itself, and firetrucks and ambulances are currently swarming the scene.

Next, check out out why terror attacks fell worldwide yet surged 650 percent in the developed world last year, before understanding why Pope Francis says it’s wrong to equate Islam with terrorism.

The post What We Know About The Berlin Attacks appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

Wikimedia CommonsBolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin addresses a crowd in Moscow on May 25, 1919 during the Russian civil war.

Most of us are familiar with the basic facts of the American Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, a combined 3 million men fought a series of battles, skirmishes, and sieges that saw perhaps 1 million soldiers killed, and ultimately brought the death of President Abraham Lincoln himself.

After the war, much of the American South resembled present-day Aleppo, with burned out buildings and rubble in the streets of every major town. The principal cities of the Confederacy, notably Richmond and Atlanta, were evacuated and burned to the ground, and wide stretches of formerly productive land, such as the Shenandoah Valley, had been reduced to near-deserts.

The Civil War has thus, with some justification, become Americans’ standard for measuring the devastation that civil wars inflict throughout history and around the globe. But compared with some other civil wars that many Americans haven’t even heard of, including some fought within living memory, the American Civil War barely registers as a blip on the screen.

Nigeria’s War Against Children

-/AFP/Getty ImagesA Biafran man trains with a dummy rifle.

One of the distinguishing features of the American Civil War was how, well, civil it was. As hard as the two armies fought, and as much damage as they did, both sides went out of their way to avoid civilian casualties.

The rare exceptions, such as the Confederate Quantrill’s Raiders, were shunned by their peers and sometimes punished by their own commanders. Even the huge, three-day battle of Gettysburg, for example, saw only one civilian killed, and that was an accident. In a war where military casualties rose into seven figures, the majority of civilian deaths seem to have been a result of displacement and broken infrastructure, rather than deliberate policy.

The same cannot be said for Nigeria’s civil war, which gave the world its first close look at the starving African child.

CDC via Wikimedia CommonsA severely malnourished Nigerian refugee sits in a refugee camp near the Nigerian-Biafran war zone.

Nigeria as we know it today is essentially three countries — and hundreds of tribes — uneasily bundled together. In the north, the Hausa and Fulani are integrated with the larger Islamic world, while the Muslim Yoruba in the west have always had a more local outlook focused on the village and town. In the southeast live the Igbo, whose culture is more democratic than their neighbors and who long ago adopted Christianity, further distinguishing them from the rest of Nigeria’s 183 million people.

When Nigeria was a British possession, these groups coexisted with minimal friction, but after Nigeria’s formal decolonization in 1963 – and worse, the discovery of oil under Igbo lands – a fight was inevitable. In 1967, citing oppression and exclusion from government, the Igbo declared independence from Nigeria and established the short-lived nation of Biafra.

AFP/Staff via Getty ImagesBiafran national army soldiers prepare to resist a federal troop attack.

Biafra was short-lived because the rest of Nigeria, along with an unholy alliance of American, British, West German, and Soviet interests — both looking to protect their oil concerns as well as put down secessionist movements wherever they may be found — came down hard on the rebels in a campaign that shocked the world for its scope and brutality.

The military part of the war, where fighting forces clashed in open combat, didn’t last long. Within months of the war’s start, Nigerian forces had taken the coastline and sealed the land routes into and out of Biafra. Over the next two years, they imposed a brutal food blockade that created the archetypal “starving African child,” with skeletal limbs and a swollen belly and a haunted look on his face.

-/AFP/Getty ImagesA Biafran demonstration, July 1968.

By the end of 1969, despite Scandinavian efforts at food relief and as a consequence of France and Israel’s effort to sell weapons to both sides, Biafra was unable to resist further. Hostilities ended in January 1970, on the harshest terms possible, and with virtually all of the oil rights seized by the government in Lagos, which still sells the United States nearly 600,000 barrels of oil a day.

All told, the 1967-70 war in Nigeria may have cost nearly 3 million lives, mostly Igbo, mostly civilians, and mostly under the age of 18.

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Hermitage MuseumCatherine II of Russia (Catherine the Great), circa 1770.

For more than three decades in the late 18th century, one woman ruled with an iron fist over all of Russia. That woman was Catherine the Great, and the power she held as a woman led the press as well as world leaders to crucify her for it.

Thus while Catherine may have claimed victory in several wars, expanded Russia’s borders, and helped usher her country into a new age of art and culture, most of what we remember about her today are the misogynist rumors that her rivals used to slander her, especially one infamous story involving the empress and her horse. Below we provide a handful of those rumors — and debunk them:

Catherine The Great’s Infamous Death

Vigilius Eriksen/Grand Peterhof PalaceEquestrian portrait of Catherine the Great in uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, one of the oldest Imperial Russian guard units, circa 1762.

The most widely known story of Catherine the Great involves her death at age 67 in 1796.

The rumor goes that Catherine — at that point already internationally “known” for a supposedly outsized sexual appetite (outsized compared to how men thought women should act) — perished when a harness holding a stallion positioned above her broke, causing the horse to fall and crush her. The innuendo was that she had been having sex with the horse.

The story, whose actual source is unclear, supposedly gained traction after Catherine’s servants reported that the empress would hide away in the stables with her Arabian stallions for long hours, without supervision. On a deeper level, the story likely took its cues from foreign fears about Russia’s growing power in Europe (more on that later).

Other nonsensical rumors suggested that Catherine had died when her toilet seat broke underneath her, or even that she’d died because assassins had hidden spring-loaded blades in her toilet seat that activated when she sat down.

In reality, however, Catherine was writing a letter the last time she was seen alive. Sometime later, she suffered a stroke (reportedly while actually on the toilet). Servants eventually found her collapsed in the washroom, but it was too late by this point. She passed away while doctors cared for her in bed.

Foreign Slander

England and France, especially via their political cartoons (some of which you can view above), drove much of the Catherine the Great rumor-mongering.

French cartoonists and broadsheet writers in particular consistently denigrated Catherine, in ways that often involved her supposed promiscuity, after she came out against the French Revolution.

In fact, the story of Catherine and the horse directly stems from her position against the revolution. At the time, European monarchs used equestrian portraits as a way to emphasize their royal power and prestige. France, however, was in the midst of a revolution that fought against both that kind of power and all aristocratic and monarchistic pretensions. Thus, the idea of describing Catherine as having sex with a horse was the French way of satirizing her royal power -- and dredging up her alleged sexual voracity.

The English, on the other hand, largely attacked Catherine for her political power grabs.

In the decades before her death, Catherine had led Russia to war several times against the Ottoman Empire, and had come away successful, allowing her to colonize new territory in Europe. This expansion made the English -- then the world's great colonial superpower -- nervous.

In fact, the Triple Alliance of 1788 between England and what is now Germany and the Netherlands formed specifically to counter Catherine's efforts to expand Russia's sphere of influence in Europe.

However, Catherine fired back by sowing dissent within Great Britain. With a clever use of back channels and propaganda, she turned the English parliament against their own and politically destroyed the country's main proponent of anti-Russian sentiment, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger.

Thus the Triple Alliance fell apart before it could ever go to war against Russia, sparing Catherine's army from the combined might of English and German military action.

Entrenched Misogyny

Fyodor Rokotov/Tretyakov GalleryEmpress Catherine The Great, circa 1763.

Frederick the Great -- ruler of Russia's neighbor and geopolitical rival, Prussia -- had some strongly misogynistic feelings toward Catherine the Great.

As he wrote to his brother 12 years after Catherine took the throne from Peter III:

"A woman is always a woman and, in feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by straight reason."

Sexism aside, Frederick disliked Catherine because of her governing style in which she would send trusted advisers to remote parts of the country to handle things in her stead, rather than relying on official bureaucratic channels.

This represented a return to the old way of Russian governing. And as far as Frederick was concerned, this move kept power centralized, and made Russia more impregnable to outside influence, thus making the country a bigger threat.

It also didn't help that one of Catherine's trusted advisers, Grigory Potemkin, was her lover, who she allowed to handle matters of state, such as making a peace deal with the Ottomans.

The fact that Catherine and Potemkin were lovers allowed Frederick and his court to create and spread rumors about Catherine's inappropriate sexual habits as a way of attacking and mocking her position as a ruler simply because she was a woman.

And in this case, Frederick's dislike of women happened to align with Prussian state interests against Russia, and he thus fueled the fires of misogyny and allowed them to burn within his country unchecked, and unfairly damaging Catherine's reputation in the process.

Sex And Power

Wikimedia CommonsCatherine The Great on a balcony at the Winter Palace on June 28, 1762, the day of the coup where she wrestled power away from Peter III, the husband who despised her.

While men like Frederick the Great certainly invented misogynistic rumors involving Catherine's sexual habits in order to damage her reputation, a few small truths do tether those rumors to reality. It is true that Catherine used sex as a tool to secure and broaden her political power.

First and foremost, she elevated her main lovers into powerful positions because she could trust them. She did this because she couldn't trust the country's systemic bureaucracy, filled with noblemen who had no love for her and who had been installed by her predecessor, late husband, and ultimately political enemy, Peter III, in order to bring European-style government to Russia.

Instead, Catherine went back to the old Russian way of governing an empire with borders on opposite ends of the world: trusted advisers acting in her stead. For example, she placed Stanisław August Poniatowski, an ex-lover, on Poland's throne simply in order to know that she fully controlled Russia's eastern neighbor.

Moreover, Catherine trusted two of her lovers, Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin, with the most influence. Orlov -- with the aid of his brothers -- helped Catherine usurp the Russian throne from Peter III, killing him in the process, in 1762, while Potemkin would later become her secret husband.

Potemkin was by far Catherine's most longstanding and favored lover. She showered him with more titles, responsibilities, and money than anyone else, and even built the Tauride Palace, one of the largest palaces in Saint Petersburg, specifically for him. She crowned him Prince of the Russian Empire, had him create entire cities from scratch, and made him commander of all Russian forces during the 1787 war with Turkey.

It's safe to say that, in Catherine's day, few other women in the world exercised that much power over men -- and few other women were slandered so greatly for it.

Intrigued by this look at Catherine the Great? Next, see how vodka has shaped the course of Russian history, before reading up on some of history's most powerful women.

The post How Catherine The Great Shook Up Europe’s Male Power Structure — And Was Punished For It appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has recently become a bestseller in Germany, its publisher announced this Tuesday.

According to its publisher, the Institute of Contemporary History of Munich (IfZ), Germans have purchased around 85,000 copies of the book since the reprint’s release this past January, only days after the copyright of Hitler’s autobiography expired and the book fell into the public domain. This marked the first time that anyone had published the controversial book in Germany since World War II.

IfZ originally planned to print just 4,000 copies of the book, but excessive demand forced them to increase production almost immediately. Mein Kampf then topped German magazine Der Spiegel‘s nonfiction bestseller list for two weeks this past April, and ranked somewhere on the list for the entirety of the year.

Split across two volumes, the reprint of this infamous tome — which Hitler wrote in 1924 and which outlines his Nazi ideology — was meant to enrich the discussion around the surge of “authoritarian political views” in Western culture, according to IfZ.

As the institute’s director, Andreas Wirsching, said in a statement:

“It turned out that the fear the publication would promote Hitler’s ideology or even make it socially acceptable and give neo-Nazis a new propaganda platform was totally unfounded. To the contrary, the debate about Hitler’s worldview and his approach to propaganda offered a chance to look at the causes and consequences of totalitarian ideologies, at a time in which authoritarian political views and right-wing slogans are gaining ground.”

According to the institute, data collected by German bookstores indicated that the book’s buyers were typically “interested in politics and history as well as educators” and not “reactionaries or right-wing radicals.”

Despite this, IfZ said that it would keep restricting the book’s international publication despite strong consumer interest in many countries. They plan only to publish forthcoming versions in English and French.

Next, read about how Nazi language has become increasingly common in Germany’s discussion of the refugee crisis, before checking out how IBM helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust.

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Sean Gallup/Getty Images

There are two types of people in this world: cat people, and not cat people.

Pope Gregory IX, who held the papacy from 1227 to 1241, most definitely fell in the second camp — largely because he believed that the fluffy hairball-hackers embodied Lucifer himself.

Gregory based his theory on “evidence” from Conrad of Marburg, a papal inquisitor. Apparently torture produced some pretty convincing confessions from people who worshipped the devil and his black cat.

On June 13, 1233, Gregory issued the Vox in Rama, an official papal decree declaring that Satan was half-cat and sometimes took the form of a cat during Satanic masses.

Before the prospect of burning at the stake for having contact with the purring pets, Catholics around the the continent began slaughtering any feline that entered their property. We may still see the effects of the mass cat slaughter today: It’s been suggested that the small black cat population in Europe today is a direct result of that breed being deemed particularly devil-like.

Of course, the Bubonic Plague also motivated the kitty killings, as many believed that cat germs contributed to the plague’s spread.

However, history shows that the Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the mid 1300s, was actually caused by rats and the fleas on them. Which means that killing off the rats’ main predators was probably not the best idea.

The Church’s feline foibles didn’t stop with Gregory, however. Pope Innocent VIII came to power in the late 1400s, during the throes of witch crusades in Western Europe. Because the powers that be dictated that the cat composed one of the main identifiers of a witch, the Church officially excommunicated the entire species.

Cat burning and other forms of cat hating have survived the centuries since.

In Belgium, an entire festival, Kattenstoet, is dedicated to throwing cats from buildings and burning them in the streets. Queen Elizabeth I celebrated her coronation with the burning of a cat-stuffed effigy.

Even today, the Vatican still throws shade at cats. But this time, Pope Francis is focusing on all pets – saying that people spend way too much money on furry friends.

“After food, clothing and medicine, the fourth item is cosmetics and the fifth is pets,” he said, referring to a study on where most people’s income goes. “That’s serious.”

And though it’s unlikely that history’s most pro-natural environment pope will encourage cat bonfires, he does suggest we take a step away from the dog ice cream and cat outfits in the pet aisle.

“One can love animals,” the Catechism says. “One should not direct them the affection due only to persons.”

Want more crazy cat facts? Learn how cats first spread around the world. Not a cat person? Hera are six really weird pets that you could actually own.

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Nancy Holten/YouTubeNancy Holten.

A village in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland has denied a vegan woman an application for a passport after residents took umbrage at what they believed to be her annoying animal rights campaigning and disregard for local traditions.

The woman in question, Nancy Holten, a Dutch animal-rights activist who moved to Switzerland when she was eight and frequently appears in the media to campaign against putting bells around the necks of cows and racing piglets, both local traditions in Aargau.

“The sound that cowbells make is a hundred decibel. It is comparable to a pneumatic drill. We also would not want such a thing hanging close to our ears,” Holten reportedly said on TV, according to The Local. “The animals carry around five kilograms around their neck. It causes friction and burns to their skin.”

Many locals did not take kindly to these remarks. And, unfortunately for Holten, in Switzerland, a person’s neighbors can weigh in on a passport/naturalization application, leaving Holten denied.

This rejection isn’t the first time that Holten’s neighbors’ denied her naturalization. In 2015, local authorities initially approved her, before 144 out of 206 village residents later voted to deny her.

“I think I was too strident and spoke my mind too often,” Holten told The Local. She continued to say that her intention wasn’t to criticize Swiss traditions. Instead, a concern for the animals’ welfare motivated her to complain.

However, despite Holten’s claim that she didn’t mean to criticize and her insistence that Switzerland is her home, it hasn’t dampened her neighbors’ ire.

Tanja Suter, the president of the local Swiss People’s Party, said that Holten has a “big mouth” and that residents would keep refusing to allow her Swiss citizenship as long as “she annoys us and doesn’t respect our traditions.”

A spokesperson for the local village administration, Urs Treier, told The Local that although Holten fulfilled the legal requirements for naturalization, anybody who draws negative attention to themselves and rebukes local traditions in a similar manner, “can cause the community to not want such a person in their midst”.

However, Holten has one more chance. She has appealed her second application to Aargau’s cantonal government, where regional authorities could still approve her request.

Next, read up on the recent Italian bill that proposed jailing vegans who force their diet on their kids.

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On January 19, 1942, Szlama Ber Winer made his escape. During transport from the Nazis' Chełmno extermination camp to the Rzuchów subcamp, the 30-year-old Polish prisoner slipped out of the lorry and into the forest.

From there, Winer made his way to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, where he rendezvoused with the underground Oneg Shabbat group, which had made it their clandestine mission to chronicle the horrors that the Nazis had recently begun perpetrating upon the fellow Jewish residents of their city.

At the time, of course, the group had no idea of the full extent of what they were actually chronicling.

Before Winer escaped and contacted Oneg Shabbat, the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Poland, let alone the outside world, had received only scattered bits of information about what was now happening inside the newly completed camps in the forests outside Warsaw -- not to mention Krakow, Lublin, and much of eastern Poland.

But in his reports to Oneg Shabbat, Winer began to fill in the gaps. He spoke of Jewish deportees, including his own family, arriving at Chełmno en masse, enduring beatings at the hands of Nazi officers, then dying in gas chambers before being dumped in mass graves — step by step, like clockwork.

Under the pseudonym Yakov Grojanowski and with the help of Oneg Shabbat, Winer documented this revelatory testimony in what would become known as the Grojanowski Report, likely the first eyewitness account of the Nazis' extermination programs to make it beyond the walls of the camps and into the halls of power in Europe.

The report never traveled far enough.

While Oneg Shabbat placed one copy in the hands of the Polish government-in-exile in London and published another batch for the German people (in hopes that it would inspire in them some sympathy for the Jews), Winer's findings never seemed to have made it onto the desks of decision-makers in either Britain or the U.S.

Those two governments, on behalf of the Allied Powers, wouldn't release their first official report on Nazi extermination efforts in Europe until the very end of 1942. By that time, Winer had been dead for six months, recaptured by the Gestapo in Warsaw then shipped to Bełżec extermination camp sometime just after his last communique on April 10.

In the two and a half years that followed, some 6 million Jews and at least 5 million ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners, Romani, homosexuals, disabled people, and others would join Winer as the casualties of the largest genocide in human history. It would be another two to three decades before most of the Western world would more or less agree to refer to that genocide as the Holocaust.

And today, thanks in large part to the pioneering efforts of people like Szlama Ber Winer and groups like Oneg Shabbat (responsible for one of the richest archives of firsthand Holocaust documentation), we can at least attempt to make sense of what likely remains the most tragically surreal episode in history.

Aided as well by countless Holocaust photos culled from government, military, and civilian sources (see gallery above), the world can now bear witness to an event that can never be forgotten. Thankfully, these photos and others like them can be seen by far more people than Winer's pivotal yet under-read report ever could.

After viewing the Holocaust photos above, read up on Stanislawa Leszczyńska, the woman who delivered 3,000 babies inside Auschwitz, and Ilse Koch, "The Bitch of Buchenwald." Then, take a look at the forgotten holocaust with these Armenian Genocide photos and see some of the most stirring World War 2 photos.

The post The Tragedy And Perseverance Of The Holocaust, In 44 Heartrending Photos appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

DGNHAS/GUARD ARCHAEOLOGY LTD

Researchers have finally shed some new light on a lost kingdom of the Dark Ages.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence that the royal seat of the sixth-century kingdom of Rheged may have been in Galloway, Southern Scotland rather than Cumbria, Northwest England.

Ronan Toolis, who led the excavation works at Trusty’s Hill Fort at Gatehouse of Fleet, told the BBC that the lost kingdom was “pre-eminent among the kingdoms of the north” at its peak.

Many historians believed the Rheged kingdom placed its royal seat in Cumbria, but Christopher Bowles, co-director of the excavation work in Dumfries and Galloway, does not believe this was the case.

“The new archaeological evidence from Trusty’s Hill enhances our perception of power, politics, economy and culture at a time when the foundations for the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Wales were being laid,” Bowles said. “The 2012 excavations show that Trusty’s Hill was likely the royal seat of Rheged, a kingdom that had Galloway as its heartland.”

The excavation found evidence that Galloway was a royal stronghold, one whose kingdom Bowles said “rippled through the history and literature of Scotland and beyond.”

“This was a place of religious, cultural and political innovation whose contribution to culture in Scotland has perhaps not been given due recognition,” he added.

Toolis, who is producing a book with Bowles reporting their findings, said that unique Pictish symbols carved on Trusty’s Hill bedrock drew them there. The carvings are typically found much farther north.

“The Galloway Picts Project was launched in 2012 to recover evidence for the archaeological context of these carving,” Toolis said. “But far from validating the existence of Galloway Picts, the archaeological context revealed by our excavation instead indicates the carvings relate to a royal stronghold and place of inauguration for the local Britons of Galloway around AD 600.”

More of the researchers’ findings are now available in their new book, The Lost Dark Age Kingdom of Rheged.

Next, have a look at five fascinating lost civilizations from around the world.

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By January of 1939, the dream of a true Spanish Republic had shattered. Many of those who composed its short-lived reality — Republican men and women, and elected officials of the democratically-elected Republican government — headed for the Pyrenees mountains and the French border, blanketed in cold and perhaps the sobering knowledge that blunt force, not competing ideas or democratic procedures, wields the most power to transform a given locality and govern its future.

The approximately 500,000 men and women who abandoned their homes that winter left a country where the pursuit and exercise of power saw the deaths of around 500,000 people; radical plans for economic redistribution of wealth sullied, and the installation of Europe’s longest-lasting dictatorship, spearheaded by General Francisco Franco.

The Spanish Civil War officially began in July 1936, when the 43-year-old Franco led a military coup against the leadership of the Second Spanish Republic, proclaimed in 1931 by a coalition of antimonarchist parties.

While these coalitions successfully convened to call for social and economic reform, increased regional autonomy, religious freedom and the separation of church and state, among other things, the multiplicity of actors -- socialists, communists, and anarchists, just to name a few -- and competing interests made it such that by 1933 the Second Republic did not achieve much of what it promised in its 1931 Constitution.

Nevertheless, the intended or achieved reforms of these leftist and left-leaning parties — which coalesced in the 1936 elections as the Popular Front — deeply troubled Spain’s pro-Church, pro-monarchy, pro-military conservatives.

They saw in the Front’s dismissiveness of the Catholic Church a threat to the heart of Spain; they saw in the Front’s openness to communist sects the specter of the Soviet Union; they saw in the Front's granting of regional autonomy a danger to the very existence of Spain as a nation-state. They saw in left wing acts of violence, and a government that seemed to permit them without threat of punishment, a movement that needed to be squashed.

The war started in July 1936, in the stultifying heat of Spanish Morocco and in the hills of Navarre, northern Spain. Politically-motivated murders on the right and left signaled to conservatives a need to restore “order” in Spain, and a kind of order that could only be achieved through violence. Franco, aided by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, torched his way through Spain, where he encountered a determined, yet ultimately outmanned and out-equipped Republican resistance.

Towns collapsed. Cities and their inhabitants became testing grounds for developing weaponry. The Republican government fled Madrid for Valencia, and then finally for Barcelona in 1937. The 1938 Battle of Ebro would see what remained of the Second Spanish Republic — battered, bruised and backed into a corner — exhausted to the point of collapse.

Its remaining vestiges — old men and women, children, civilians, soldiers, former heads of state — fled in defeat, abandoning the soil where relentless force determined that alternative political and economic life forms would not grow there.

A large, black eagle that appeared on the new Spanish flag soon after the war's ended offered the world a stark visualization of the decades of darkness Spain would endure under Franco -- and a timeless reminder that, as Albert Camus penned of the Spanish Civil War, “force can vanquish spirit.”

To get a better view of other wars that plagued the 20th century, beyond the Spanish Civil War, check out these photos of World War One and World War Two.

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Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesPope Francis

With a wave of populist politics sweeping both Europe and the U.S., Pope Francis recently felt it appropriate to mention the most nefarious instance in which a charismatic, nontraditional, nationalist and anti-immigrant leader was voted into power: Nazi Germany.

“After the crisis of 1930, Germany is broken, it needs to get up, to find its identity, a leader, someone capable of restoring its character, and there is a young man named Adolf Hitler,” His Holiness recently said in an interview with Spanish newspaper, El Pais. “Hitler didn’t steal the power, his people voted for him, and then he destroyed his people.”

Largely in response to the continent’s refugee crisis, voters in Europe have increasingly thrown their support behind candidates running on platforms of dramatic anti-immigrant measures.

Pope Francis has repeatedly condemned this sort of nationalist mindset.

He famously chided then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump in 2016 by saying that a “person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”

Trump did not take kindly to the comment, and responded by calling the pontiff a “pawn” for the Mexican government.

Despite their rocky history, Pope Francis insisted he was not denouncing America’s new Commander-in-Chief right off the bat.

“I don’t like to get ahead of myself nor judge people prematurely,” he said. “We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion.”

That opinion, along with his views on policies being adopted in Europe, will likely be shaped by how countries respond to the 65 million displaced people currently seeking shelter from violence, poverty and drought.

“Facing the tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees — fleeing death by war and famine, and journeying towards the hope of life — the Gospel calls, asking of us to be close to the smallest and forsaken,” he said in 2015.

He later took 12 Muslim refugees in himself after a visit to Greece. Six of them were children.

Though the Pope’s most recent comments did not specifically mention American politics, it seems telling that they come three days after Trump’s inaugural address.

“From this day forward,” the newly sworn in president said from the steps of a rain-soaked capitol building, “it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

That sentiment, “America first,” is not a new one.

It was most notably used by the America First Committee which, in 1940, was created to dissuade the country from fighting against a budding nationalist administration:

Coincidentally or not, Nazi Germany.

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AFP/AFP/Getty ImagesAuschwitz concentration camp

They thought they would find about 5,000 of them.

The year was 1999 and the team was tasked with gathering information on each persecution site established by the Nazis in World War II. Team members would then compile their findings into the first comprehensive record of each forced labor camp, military brothel, ghetto, POW detention center and concentration camp the Nazis introduced and ran.

5,000 sites seemed right. 5,000, after all, is a lot.

But as the researchers began their search, which they conducted at the behest of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they realized they had more than slightly underestimated the scope of this undertaking.

By 2001, they had already uncovered 10,000 sites.

Today, the “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos” has documented 42,500 areas where Nazis imprisoned, tortured and killed, according to The Times of Israel.

“You could not turn a corner in Germany (during the war) …without finding someone there against their will,” Geoffrey Megargee, the project’s leader, said.

Not only did the magnitude of sites uncovered make the project difficult for researchers, they also had to contend with the reality that these events had taken places decades ago — and that many people would much rather forget about them.

Thus, researchers decided that the final tally would only include camps whose existence multiple witness testimonies and official documents had verified.

In search of those criteria, historians took nontraditional measures.

One man, Herman Weiss, began his search as a kind of repentance for his father’s own involvement in Nazi efforts.

Weiss turned his attention to an area not often studied – the region of Silesia – and found a record of a Commander Pompe who had a son named Herbert. He then called every living Herbert Pompe in Germany before getting in touch with the Commander’s daughter-in-law.

This led him to more files, which eventually allowed him to corroborate the existence of about 24 sites for the encyclopedia – six of which had never been discovered before.

Many of the other researchers have personal ties to the sites. Some of them were held there themselves, and provided testimony. One woman’s uncle had been imprisoned at a Jewish camp that, until this project, had been believed to be a POW prison.

Another woman’s uncle had orchestrated the deaths of more than 20,000 Jews in an area where most of the prisoners were women and children.

Her name is Katherina von Kellennbach and she joined the research team while uncovering the extent of her uncle’s crimes.

“There’s no way you walk out at 5:00 p.m. as a human being,” she said of her days sifting through archives.

The seven-part encyclopedia is set to be completed in 2025. And though its contributors have uncovered vast swaths of new information, their most telling discovery is this:

Even experts have underestimated how much we still don’t know about the Holocaust. There is so much information left to uncover, and even more that has likely been lost forever.

Next, take a look at 44 photos of perseverance in the Holocaust. Then read about what kinds of people think the Holocaust didn’t happen and why they think that way.

The post Thousands Of Unknown Nazi “Killing Fields” Uncovered appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesPolish President Donald Tusk speaks at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany on April 25, 2014.

The ascension of President Donald Trump to the highest rungs of American power has set off alarm bells in Europe.

Now, European Council President Donald Tusk has written a letter to 27 European leaders stating that Trump’s “worrying declarations” are creating problems for the continent.

Tusk said that the recent changes in Washington have left the EU in a “difficult situation” as it called “into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.”

According to Tusk, Europe’s external threats now include “worrying declarations by the new American administration,” China and Russia pushing their way to power, and radical Islam. Tusk added that he believed that most of EU leaders agreed with him.

He concluded: “We cannot surrender to those who want to weaken or invalidate the Transatlantic bond, without which global order and peace cannot survive. We should remind our American friends of their own motto: United we stand, divided we fall.”

Trump, for his part, has publicly called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a cornerstone of that transatlantic bond, “obsolete,” heaped praise upon Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin, supported Brexit to the point of calling himself a “Mr. Brexit,” denounced German Chancellor Angela Merkel for accepting refugees, and dismissed the EU as “basically a vehicle for Germany.”

During his inauguration speech, Trump also pointed fingers at foreign entities for “stealing our companies and destroying our jobs,” adding that, “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”

This was followed by Trump’s expected U.S. ambassador to the EU, Ted Malloch, telling the BBC that he anticipated that the Euro would collapse within 18 months.

In Tusk’s view, the EU is under pressure from all sides. And now it cannot even be sure of its biggest ally as well.

As Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel tweeted this past Tuesday, according to the BBC, the U.S. “would be making a mistake if it turned its back on Europe.”

Next, see how a sick, elderly mom died after Trump’s travel ban prevented her from returning home to the U.S., before checking out why Trump dropped intelligence and military advisors from the National Security Council and added political advisor Stephen Bannon.

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UK National Trust

Archaeologists who are helping restore a historic country home in Kent, England have discovered a 17th-century shopping list hidden under its floorboards.

Written in 1633, the note was uncovered during a multimillion dollar renovation of the famed Knole House. Constructed in the late 15th century and surrounded by 1,000 acres of forest, it is one of England’s largest houses.

Written by one Robert Draper to a Mr. Bilby, the shopping list includes pewter spoons, a frying pan, and “greenfish,” which is now known as unsalted cod. It also asks Mr. Bilby to send a “fireshovel” and “lights” to Copt Hall, which is 36 miles away on the other side of London.

According to the UK’s National Trust, Draper must have been a high-ranking servant because the list was “beautifully written.”

UK National TrustThe archaeology team working hard at Knole House.

The renovators found two other similarly aged notes near to where they found the shopping list. One was similarly hidden away under the attic floorboards, while the team found another shoved into a ceiling cavity.

“It’s extremely rare to uncover letters dating back to the 17th century, let alone those that give us an insight into the management of the households of the wealthy, and the movement of items from one place to another,” Nathalie Cohen, the regional archaeologist for the National Trust, told Kent Live.

The Knole letters’ good condition “makes this a particularly exciting discovery,” she added.

The full text of the shopping list reads:

“Mr Bilby, I pray p[ro]vide to be sent too morrow in ye Cart some Greenfish, The Lights from my Lady Cranfeild[es] Cham[ber] 2 dozen of Pewter spoon[es]: one greate fireshovell for ye nursery; and ye o[t]hers which were sent to be exchanged for some of a better fashion, a new frying pan together with a note of ye prises of such Commoditie for ye rest.

Your loving friend

Robert Draper

Octobre 1633

Copthall”

Next, check out the new discoveries that have shed light on the lost kingdom of the Dark Ages.

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Sawtooth/Flickr

With a 90 to 53 vote, the Irish Parliament passed a bill on January 26 ordering the state-run Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) to divest from fossil fuels.

If the bill passes review and is signed into law, which The Independent expects to happen in the upcoming months, then Ireland will have become the first country ever to cut itself off from fossil fuel investments completely.

This prohibition will mean that the $8.6 billion ISIF will no longer be able to use public funding to profit off fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas.

“This principle of ethical financing is a symbol to these global corporations that their continual manipulation of climate science, denial of the existence of climate change, and their controversial lobbying practices of politicians around the world is no longer tolerated,” said Deputy Thomas Pringle, who introduced the bill, during a news conference.

“We cannot accept their actions while millions of poor people in underdeveloped nations bear the brunt of climate change forces as they experience famine, mass emigration, and civil unrest as a result.”

After the Irish government signs the bill into law, ISIF will have five years to sell off its fossil fuel investments. Once it does so, the bill will stop the fund from letting Irish public money fill the coffers of corporations like ExxonMobil ever again.

Irish environmental organizations have praised the act and Ireland’s bravery for being the first government to pull the trigger on fossil fuel prohibition entirely.

“With a climate skeptic recently inaugurated into the White House, this move by elected representatives in Ireland will send out a powerful message,” said Éamonn Meehan, the executive director of the Catholic poverty charity Trócaire, to the Belfast Telegraph.

“The Irish political system is now finally acknowledging what the overwhelming majority of people already know: that to have a fighting chance to combat catastrophic climate change, we must phase out fossil fuels and stop the growth of the industry that is driving this crisis,” he added.

While Ireland is the first to step away from all fossil fuels, other countries have taken baby steps toward the same. In 2015 for example, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund killed an $8 billion dollar investment in coal.

Next, learn about how Ireland’s president is taking a voluntary pay cut for a good cause, before checking out the possible Dutch ban on gas-powered cars.

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Milos Bicanski/ Getty ImagesA member of Greece’s far right Golden Dawn party holds a flag as he takes part in a rally in Athens on February 1, 2014.

Classical fascism has gone into the history books since its defeat in the Second World War. As far as most people are concerned, the fall of Berlin and the bombing of Nagasaki marked the end of the far-right as a potent international movement, and apart from a few non-Western despotisms dressed up as popular governments, the arc of history had seemingly swept away from fascism as an ideology forever.

However, recent events have summoned the specter of Hitler and Mussolini, with self-described fascist or nationalist parties garnering votes and gathering power in more than a dozen Western countries.

National Populist [Name of Country] Workers’ Parties

SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty ImagesIn January 2017, graffiti mars the surface of a Ukrainian memorial to Polish officers killed in World War II. The “SS Galizien” unit it commemorates fought on behalf of Germany against the Soviet Union.

Physical violence marked Europe’s first wave of hard-nationalist politics. Fascist parties in Italy and Romania kicked and punched their way into power, while Francisco Franco’s party invaded Spain with its own army.

Europe’s new nationalists have taken a very different approach. Without a single notable exception, they structure themselves as ordinary political parties and aim to gain political power through established channels. Not only is this a safer route to power than the old-fashioned Beer Hall Putsches, it lends considerably more legitimacy to any government that a modern nationalist party might form.

Operating in these channels effectively forces nationalist parties to keep up a populist message that, at least superficially, appears quite different from that of their more violent predecessors.

The Dutch Party For Freedom, for example, which began in 2006 with Geert Wilders as its sole member, is now the third-largest party in the Netherlands and draws in around 10 percent of Dutch voters. The party even holds four seats in the European Parliament, despite pledging to withdraw from the EU if it forms a majority government.

Populism is such a strong strain among the new nationalist parties that it even overcomes the old left-wing/right-wing divide.

Sinn Fein, for example, is not just nationalist, but an openly sectarian party for Irish Catholics. It advocates virtually everything that Geert Wilders’ right-wing party does, but it came out of the decidedly left-wing Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Like the other parties of its kind, it has also forsworn violence and now polls at 14 percent among the Irish public.

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Wikimedia Commons

In the first years of the 1700s, an exotic man from the unheard-of land of Formosa took British society by storm. He wore odd clothes and frequently performed strange religious rituals. Once he learned English, the stories he told about the Far East – stories about human sacrifice, cannibalism, public nudity, and hunting tree snakes – made him a sensation and vaulted him to the top of polite society.

The fact that George Psalmanazar was actually a white European who had never been farther east than Germany went undiscovered for years, while he sopped up all of the money and prestige England had to offer. Eventually he came clean, but then he somehow managed to spin himself a second career that was even more lucrative than the first.

The Brilliant Young Sophist

Wikimedia Commons

Nobody knows what George Psalmanazar’s real name was or where, exactly, he came from. It’s thought that he was born in the south of France sometime around 1680, but the only source of information about Psalmanazar was his own very shaky posthumous autobiography.

People who knew him in life reported that he had an accent similar to those found in Languedoc or Provence, but also that he spoke Latin with a Dutch accent. According to his later account, Psalmanazar was a genius from the start and picked up several languages by the age of seven. He then claimed to have studied for the seminary as a young man, but to have grown disenchanted with his Jesuit teachers and left school at around 15 or 16.

Finding work as a former philosophy major wasn’t any easier in 17th-century France than it is now, especially for a young man with no family or standing in the community, so Psalmanazar had to think of something to get by. Rather than begging for manual work at the first pig farm he happened upon, he chose instead to rob a church.

Stealing a peasant’s cloak and walking stick, the teenager hit the road and begged meals with a farfetched story about being an Irish boy making a pilgrimage to Rome.

This was good for a few nights’ shelter and some free food wherever he went in Catholic France, but inevitably he ran into trouble with people who had actually been to Ireland – which, remember, Psalmanazar had not – and who spotted him for a fake at once.

If he was going to keep up the charade, clearly he was going to have to pick a fictitious homeland more exotic than Ireland.

The post How a Blond, Blue-Eyed Frenchman Fooled Europe Into Thinking He Was Taiwanese appeared first on All That Is Interesting.

Ian Gavan/Getty Images for O2

Spending too much time at the office has been shown to cause depression, sleep problems and a whole host of other health-related issues.

Sweden — apparently unsatisfied with its current ranking as 10th happiest country in the world — has had enough of these side effects and is actively looking to achieve a better work-life balance for its citizens.

Most recently, the Gothenburg City Council completed a series of trials testing the costs and benefits of six-hour work days.

The results were positive. Well, for the most part.

This experiment looked at a group of 70 retirement-home workers. The employees, who formerly worked eight-hour days, have spent the last two years enjoying 30-hour weeks at the same salary.

Though the final report has yet to be released, preliminary data shows nurses taking less sick leave, reporting healthier lifestyles and demonstrating significantly increased productivity during their office hours.

And it only cost the government…about $1.3 million.

“Could we do this for the entire municipality?” asked Daniel Bernmar, the councillor responsible for running the elderly care facilities in Gothenburg. “The answer is no, it will be too expensive.”

The trial did provide new jobs in the region, since new workers had to be brought in to cover the nurse’s hours off. But the money they saved on unemployment costs did not come close to negating the money lost in hiring new workers.

Some experts have suggested that a significant cut in hours is much more applicable to some industries than others.

“I think the six-hour work day would be most effective in organizations – such as hospitals – where you work for six hours and then you just leave and go home,” Stress Research Institute graduate Dr. Aram Seddigh told the BBC. “It might be less effective for organizations where the borders between work and private life are not so clear.”

Some workers for tech companies even suggested they found the idea stressful, since it would mean having to cram more work into short periods of time.

Even so, other studies will continue to test different solutions for an overworked population — both in Sweden and around Europe.

It’s unlikely America will be joining the trend any time soon. The most recent studies have shown the average full-time employee spends 47 hours a week at the office. 18% of Americans are clocking in more than 60 hours.

Next, take a look at Sweden’s gorgeous frozen waterfalls. Then see if you can guess the happiest country on earth.

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