On something as vast as the Second World War, there are always more details to be found. For example, what became of Heinrich Müller, last seen in the Führerbunker on 1 May 1945 but who certainly did not die there? He’s not a minor figure; he was chief of the Gestapo from 1939 until the end. It’s not impossible that the question of his fate may yet be answered.
Which is a shame because many of those books were well researched as best as possible at the time.
I dont know I feel there are a few great areas for me as it pertains to WW2 history, and maybe there are books on these topics, off the top of my head:
—Japanese takeover of Indochina, Burma and what were their plans for an India invasion and possible beyond
—Potential undercover Axis allies in the Middle East and Latin America and what were their intentions and how might they have supported the Axis
—Neutral countries and how much they may have supported or did not support various players (I know there have been History channel specials on IRA collaborators with the Nazis)
—Nazi plans for the USSR had they won at Stalingrad
Im sure there are more topics
Plugs his book again, it’s not going to be high military history and I think it wil be pretty unique, actually!
Lots of areas where the problem is a lack on interest on part of historians rather than lack of material.
East Africa, Persia-Iraq, Ceylon, Syria-Lebanon, Madagascar.
German historian Miriam Gabhardt have just published a book about what happened to the women of bavaria in 1945 when the american troops arrived. “Als die Soldaten kamen die Vergewaltigung deutscher Frauen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs”.
New and controversial information.
Tell us more…in English.
My Deutsch is rusty, but I think the title translates as “When the Soldiers came : German women raped at the end of WW2”
The Ainu people and Kuril Islands issues between Russia and Japan are ongoing, so any movement on either of those issues is a new development in WWII.
The only thing I think might be interesting are the details of the Stalin-Hitler “non-aggression pact”-which allowed Hitler to plan for his eventual war against the Soviet Union. Were any special promises given to Stalin? Like maybe the right to re-invade Finland , occupy the Baltic, etc.? Stalin must have liked the pact, because he didn’t believe the Germans would trick him-up to the start of Operation Barbarossa, he still believed Hitler would not attack.
Of course, Stalin planned (eventually) to attack Germany-as soon as his armies were ready (and he had senior officers to replace the ones he murdered in the purges of 1938).
Hopefully the Soviet archives will reveal what happened to Raoul Wallenberg
They didn’t find out what happened to Martin Bormann conclusively until 1998. They’d found what they thought to be his body as late as 1972, but DNA tests didn’t confirm until 26 years later. Interestingly enough, he apparently died not far from Hitler’s bunker
It’s not at all unlikely that more of this kind of thing might crop up.
Various items that were looted during the last stages of have been turning up in recent years. E.g., some items taken from Hitler & such’s HQs by American troops.
Either the GIs have died and the families have come forth with the items wondering what to do with them or the GIs themselves just want to come clean.
Most are just everyday items but it’s possible that diaries and other important documents might turn up in the next decade or so. Materials that could shed light on key events and personalities.
Of course the Nazis looted like crazy and some of their stuff is still turning up. So maybe there’s a chance that a really big find could come up.
Is there likely that there is anything unseen about Rudolf Hess still lurking in the British archives? There Official Secrets Act has been a real pain to historians.
There is a Martin Bormann theory floating around in the last few years which would have a significant new perspective on the war if it was true.
The theory is that Bormann was actually a Soviet agent spying on the Nazis. He was passing on information about Germany back to Moscow and sabotaging the German war effort from within. In 1945, Bormann “disappeared” by rejoining the Soviets as they occupied Berlin.
Is any of this true? Almost certainly not. The theory is supported mainly by right wing groups who want an explanation why the Germans lost WWII. They want to believe that the Nazis would have won if it had been a fair fight but those nasty Russians used trickery. And usually they mention there were a lot of Jews involved in this plan.
That right there is proof of their insanity. The US and USSR would have ground the Germans into paste, even without stuff like Enigma, Ultra, etc…
Sheer numbers would have told; even if the Allies lost something like 3:1, we’d still have had more troops to occupy Germany with.
There’s nothing new to be found out here; the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were suspected long before the wars end and confirmed with the defeat of Germany in 1945. The USSR even finally admitted to them in 1989. It very clearly divided up said countries and all of Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, with some minor changes later agreed upon as can be clearly seen on these maps, notably the agreement for Germany to get the Suwalki Triangle in exchange for the USSR getting a larger slice of Poland as compensation.
Outside of the delusions and imaginary evidence of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun who not only admits to but boasts of highly selective use of materials, there is no evidence whatsoever that Stalin was planning to invade Germany. The idea that it was a pre-emptive strike by Germany was nothing more than gross Nazi propoganda for those who didn’t have the stomach for the fact that Hitler had been stating in very plain words that he intended to invade the Soviet Union since they were untermenschen living on lebensraum that rightfully belonged to the Germanic peoples since before he wrote Mein Kampf.
Hardly earth shattering, but I read this about Jerry cans this morning.
Well, I don’t know how much wholly new information there is left to be uncovered, but there are are a lot of stories that haven’t been widely told before.
Anthony Beevor is one of the only historians who’s written about the sheer scale of rapes committed by the Red Army and how commonly both German and Allied soldiers and killed unarmed prisoners.
I don’t think it is any secret that Western Allied soldiers shot German soldiers attempting to surrender - particularly if those prisoners were from the SS. This was a predictable response to the SS’s own tactics. Though generally, that happened during the battle, not in cold blood afterwards. That, at least, is a significant difference - the SS sometimes excecuted POWs in cold blood, after they had been taken prisioner.
However, this was a surprise, at least to me:
Woah, never heard that one before.
Not sure about the Western front, but Japanese prisoners shot “while trying to escape” en route to the POW camps behind the lines were pretty common out in the Pacific. And that’s the least shocking thing Marines got themselves up to out there.
Now you can chalk that up to Japanese behaviours as well if you want : a lot of US soldiers justified their behaviour with the rape of Nanking or the Bataan death marches for example - events they themselves took no part in, and the people they were fighting probably didn’t either. But they’re convenient excuses to let your beast out.
When all is said and done, the brutalization of the war was very much a two-way street.
Dunno about rearing, but yeah there was at least one POW camp supervisor who had a thing about cannibalism and chopped up prisonners to eat fresh people sukiyaki. I have no idea whether that was a widespread practice though - as I said, I’d only heard about that one guy.
As for cannibalism itself happening (outside of a torture, cruelty, gratuitous context), not altogether surprising : the logistics of the IJA were shitty to begin with and the Silent Service helped them along. Starvation was pretty common among the island garrisons and the guys stranded in the jungles, from '42 onwards. War is hell, you do what you gotta do…
Same thing happened at Stalingrad (on both sides). Sieges will do that, and have most likely done that since the first war there ever was.