History – Page 5 – The Official Site of Jim Snowden

From Kripo to SiPo, the Nazification of German Detectives

By jim_snowden August 12, 2013History

The Kriminalpolitzei, known as Kripo, was the German equivalent of the British CID. It began in Prussia in the 1790s with six plainclothes detectives tasked to investigate serious crimes. Over the 19th…

Marriage In The Third Reich

By jim_snowden August 8, 2013History

Because the building of a pure, highly populous Aryan racial community was central to the Nazi gospel, the Nazis were obsessed with driving women out of the professions and into…

Why Did They Fill Out Death Certificates At Auschwitz?

By jim_snowden August 2, 2013History

The wife of Talking Points Memos' Josh Marshall discovered recently that her maternal great-grandfather didn't die at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen when they swept through his town. Instead, according…

Philipp Bouhler, Hitler’s Mailman

By jim_snowden July 30, 2013History

In the news yesterday was a story about a bell still in active use in Austria that was dedicated to Adolf Hitler. A rare find today, such things were common…

The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls

By jim_snowden July 23, 2013History1 Comment

In the 1920s, one of the most popular youth groups in Germany was the Wandervogel. Founded in the 1890s, the Wandervogel was a male-only youth organization dedicated to nature, German…

Gays and Lesbians In the Third Reich

By jim_snowden July 19, 2013History

Though old German laws against homosexuality--most notoriously Paragraph 175 of the German penal code--persisted through the Weimar republic, the 1920s were a time when German homosexuals not only successfully pressed…

Block Wardens: The Eyes and Ears of the Gestapo

By jim_snowden July 15, 2013History1 Comment

One of the things that surprised me when I started researching the Nazi police apparatus for Summer of Long Knives was how small the Gestapo really was: 40,000 agents and staff to…

Wilhelm Frick: The Man Who Nazified Germany

By jim_snowden July 8, 2013History1 Comment

Frick was many things to the Nazi party. As one of their earliest members of parliament he drafted legislation which would eventually become the Nuremberg Laws. Frick was also the…

Reinhard Heydrich: The Young Evil God of Death

By jim_snowden July 1, 2013History3 Comments

Like all the most ambitious people, Reinhard Heydrich was a collector of titles: SS Obergruppenfuehrer, Head of the SD, Head of the Prussian Gestapo, Head of Gestapo for the Reich,…

Where Did Spam Come From? And What Does It Mean?

By jim_snowden June 30, 2013History, The Larger World

A few weeks ago I made a plea for better written spam, because if we can't get rid of spam and consign its manufacturers to the Phantom Zone (oh, how…