Author Mike Croissant describes the family connection that inspired his research into the last mass bombing raid of the Second World War in Europe.

His book, Bombing HItler's Hometown: The Untold Story of the Last Mass Bomber Raid of World War II in Europe, was published in March. It's available in better bookstores and through online e-tailers through Kensington Publishing.

Mussolini was not happy about being in the Axis by 1943. And Stalin refused to attend the Casablanca Conference with Churchill and Roosevelt. Meetings of the summit and other senior leaders of the Axis and Allied powers through the war show the evolution of each side's war aims between 1939 and 1945.

Map: The Kursk salient, spring 1943

Image 1: Roosevelt and Churchill aboard the HMS Prince of Wales at the Argentia Conference, August 1941.

Seated: President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Standing directly behind them: Admiral Ernest J. King, USN; General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army; General Sir John Dill, British Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, USN; and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, RN. At rear: Harry Hopkins talking with W. Averell Harriman. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Image 2: The Second Moscow Conference, August 1942

Left to right: UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, USSR Premier Josef Stalin, and W. Averrell Harriman, representing President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Office of War Information Photograph (Wikimedia Commons).

Sources:

Antony Beevor, The Second World War. London, UK: Little, Brown and Co., 2012.

Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Sean McMeekin, Stalin's War. New York: Basic Books, 2021.

Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2017

Wikipedia: various pages.

Sound effects by Zapsplat.

In April 1943, Jewish people forced into the grossly overcrowded ghetto in Warsaw rose up against the nazis, killing hundreds of SS soldiers. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising failed, but its memory lives on.

SS members force Jewish people out of shelters for deportation to death camps, spring, 1943. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A map of the Warsaw Ghetto, the area nazi oppressors forced Jewish people to remain in.

SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop (center), commanded of the SS brigade that destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto.

In April and May, the SS systematically destroyed every building in the Warsaw Ghetto.

SS soldiers continuing to destroy the Warsaw Ghetto, May 1943. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

"Waves of stone, crushed bricks, a sea of brick. There isn’t a single wall intact — the beast’s anger was terrible." — Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman, Warsaw, 1945.