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Lithuanian nationalists clubbing Jewish Lithuanians to death. Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, June 27, 1941. In June and July 1941, detachments of German Einsatzgruppen, together with Lithuanian auxiliaries, began murdering the Jews of Lithuania. Groups of partisans, civil units of nationalist-rightist anti-Soviet affiliation, initiated contact with the Germans as soon as they entered the Lithuanian territories. A rogue unit of insurgents headed by Algirdas Klimaitis and encouraged by Germans from the  Sicherheitspolizei  and  Sicherheitsdienst , started anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas (Polish: Kovno) on the night of 25–27 June 1941. Over a thousand Jews perished over the next few days in what was the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred in what was later known as the  Lietūkis Garage Massacre . During the Lietūkis Garage Massacre, carried out before the invading Germans had actually set up their administratio

The Last Jew of Vinnitsa, 1941 A picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labeled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa”. It shows a member of Einsatzgruppe D just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. All 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred at the time. There were two mass shootings in Vinnitsa, on the 16th of September, and the other on 22nd September. A subsequent massacre of Jews appears to have been of Jews brought in from outside the district. This is the evidence for the date of this photograph. There was one eye-witness to the procedure involved. Wehrmacht officer Lieutenant Erwin Bingel had been ordered to assist the Commandant of Uman district with men to guard the railway lines and around the airport. He was aware that ditches had been dug on the perimeter of the airfield and a number of specialist SS men had arrived by plane. All the Jews of the ar

Ukrainian askaris standing near bodies of murdered Jews, Warsaw, 1943 Two Ukrainian askaris peer into a doorway past the bodies of Jews killed during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943. Two Ukrainian askaris peer into a doorway past the bodies of Jews killed during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The original German caption reads: “Ukrainian askaris used during the operation”. During WWII, the Germans used the term “askaris” for Red Army deserters who formed units fighting against the Red Army and in other actions on the Eastern Front. They were largely Ukrainians and Russians. Askaris troops were not part of SS, they were just auxiliary troops. The word askari is a loan word from Arabic meaning “soldier”, which in turn is from Persian (lascar – meaning “army”). In the context of World War II, the term often has connotations of collaborationism, and (in the case of the occupied Soviet territories) of anti-Bolshevism (and widely

Highway of Death, the result of American forces bombing retreating Iraqi forces, Kuwait, 1991 Highway of Death, 1991. On Sunday 24, February 1991, allied forces launched a combined ground, air, and sea assault which overwhelmed the Iraqi army within 100 hours. By 26 February, Iraq had announced it was withdrawing its forces from Kuwait, but still refused to accept all the UN resolutions passed against it. Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, trucks, and troops fleeing the allied onslaught formed huge queues on the main road north from Kuwait to the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Allied forces bombed them from the air, killing hundreds of troops in their vehicles in what became known as the “Highway of Death”. The scenes of devastation on the road are some of the most recognizable images of the war and were publicly cited as a factor in President George H. W. Bush’s decision to declare a cessation of hostilities the next day. The devastating attack resu

An assisted suicide pod that passed an independent legal review showing it complies with Swiss law. At the push of a button, the pod would fill with nitrogen gas, rapidly lowering oxygen levels and killing the user. The concept of a capsule that could produce a rapid decrease in oxygen level, while maintaining a low CO2 level, (the conditions for a peaceful, even euphoric death) was the brief behind the Sarco. When Exit was approached in 2012 for a technological solution for a UK man with Locked-in Syndrome, it was the Sarco that emerged. No doctor required and yet completely lawful. The elegant design was intended to suggest a sense of occasion: of travel to a ‘new destination’  HOW THE POD WORKS 

American pilots resting with a Japanese skull, 1944 The U.S. media helped propagate this view of the Japanese, for example describing them as “yellow vermin”. In an official U.S. Navy film, Japanese troops were described as “living, snarling rats”. The mixture of underlying American racism, which was added to by U.S. wartime propaganda, hatred caused by the Japanese war of aggression, and both real and also fabricated Japanese atrocities, led to a general loathing of the Japanese. Although there were objections to the mutilation from amongst other military jurists, “to many Americans the Japanese adversary was no more than an animal, and abuse of his remains carried with it no moral stigma”. According to historian Niall Ferguson: “ To the historian who has specialized in German history, this is one of the most troubling aspects of the Second World War: the fact that Allied troops often regarded the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians — as Unte

Street vendor selling mummies in Egypt, 1865 Egyptian mummy seller, 1875. During the Victorian era of the 1800s, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt threw open the Gates of Egypt’s history for the Europeans. At that time, mummies were not accorded the respect that they deserved from the European elites and in fact, mummies could be purchased from street vendors (as shown in the picture) to be used as the main event for parties and social gatherings that took place in the 18th century. The elites of the era would often hold “Mummy Unwrapping Parties”, which, as the name suggests, had the main theme in which a Mummy would be unwrapped in front of a boisterous audience, cheering and applauding at the same time. During that period of time, the well-preserved remains of ancient Egyptians were routinely ground into a powder and consumed as a medicinal remedy. Indeed, so popular was pulverized mummy that it even instigated a counterfeit trade to meet demand, in which the fle