Story From Everyday

January 8th 1697 Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead was executed in Edinburgh. This is a cracking, if sad tale, and shows you how religious beliefs can be a blight on our history. So who was oor Thomas, a villain?, a murderer?, a smuggler?, or some enemy of the state? No Thomas’s crime was blasphemy who took the lord’s name in vain…….this would be comic if it wasn’t for the tragic fact that he was executed, unlike the man in Life of Brian, who uttered the words Jehova, Thomas complained that he wished he was warming himself in hell rather than that chilly night walking past the recently built Tron Kirk on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.  On a chilly evening in Edinburg, Scotland in 1696, twenty-year-old Thomas Aikenhead was walking with three other medical students when he remarked that at that moment he would prefer to be in Hell, where at least he would be warm. A few months later he would be on trial, with his life at stake.... Read story At that time blasphemy was a crime in Great...

At the Royal Palace of Caserta 150 topless women for the performance by Giuseppe Palmisano Caserta – At the Royal Palace of Caserta, Giuseppe Palmisano’s project “aka iosonopipo: Vuoto #2” was set up. One hundred and fifty black-skinned women and an empty space. The female bodies fill the space to form a single living sculpture. “A living space – says the creator of the performance – made of people, not a display case in which to close objects, to look at them better“. After the success of the first phase of the project “(Vuoto #1)” where only white-skinned women appeared, Giuseppe Palmisano relaunches the experiment. This time with black-skinned women, with the intent of praising diversity instead of preaching equality. The result of the final project will be a black and white diptych, which will finally make the  Palmisano’s goal is to photograph 150 girls at once, dressed only in a pair of black tights, according to the aesthetic that distinguishes him and that has graduall...

When David Zivkon, a Jewish prisoner during World War II, discovered 12 photographs of the 1941 murder of Jews on Shkede Beach in Latvia, he recognized some of his neighbors. The photos showed them undressing in front of a shooting pit.  Zivkon was working in the home of SS officer Karl Strott when he discovered the negatives of the photographs depicting the murder of the Jews of Liepaja  , the Yad Vashem museum website reports. Zivkon secretly copied the negatives and returned the originals, and later, in 1945, handed the set of photographs over to Soviet investigators,  The Times of Israel journalist Matt Leibowitz writes. The site of the massacre in Shkede, Latvia. December 1941. Yad Vashem After the "Murder on the Beach" images were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, they became a visual symbol of the "Holocaust by Bullets": the German SS execution squads and their collaborators murdered 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Now hi...

On this day in 1076, William the Conqueror had Northumbrian Earl Waltheof II beheaded for treachery — the only major noble executed by the Norman king. When the Norman Conquest brought William the Conqueror to power, the nobles didn’t know the Normans would be able to keep what they’d won … and being nobles, they started plotting. Multiple revolts shook the northern marches where Waltheof had his domain, and the burly Northumbrian, according to skald Thorkill Skallason, was a Norman-killing machine. Waltheof burned a hundred Of William’s Norman warriors As the fiery flames raged; What a burning there was that night! Our day’s principal made nice with the Conqueror and even got dynastically wedded to William’s niece, Judith. But his fame as a warrior and strategically positioned estates soon had conspirators wooing him for another run at rebellion — the Revolt of the Earls, which would turn out to be the last serious resistance to the last successful invasion of Britain. Waltheof e...

Naked Jewish women from the Mizocz ghetto wait in a line before their execution by the German Order Police with the assistance of Ukrainian auxiliaries, 1942. They are carrying their children Literally to the grave. Damn. Between East and West Germany, the west was much more Nazi. Prominent Nazis made a concerted effort toward the end of the war to surrender to the Western allies who would treat them better, and were then incorporated into government and military command. You didn't have people like Adolf Heusinger, Franz Halder, or Hans Speidel running around in East Germany. You didn't have leadership like Adenauer pushing to halt denazification in East Germany. Saying all the nazis "switched hats and went to communist East Germany" is like saying males produce estrogen. Sure they do a tiny bit, but is that really the gender you associate with estrogen? One of the facts that I learned about the Holocaust from my grandfather that has stuck with me even up throug...

In 1922, the photographer  Germaine Krull  landed, tired and ill, in Berlin, after being expelled from the Soviet Union. U.S.S.R. authorities had accused her of harboring anti-Bolshevik sentiments, imprisoned her, and forced her to endure a fake execution. Her lover, Samuel Levit, had traveled with her to Moscow, but eventually abandoned her. When Krull arrived in Berlin, the city was enjoying a creative renaissance, thanks to the rise of  German Expressionist  painting,  Bauhaus  design, Jungian philosophy, and Langian film. Krull’s new city matched her bohemian nature; she was the embodiment of the  neue frau , or a modern, independent woman who challenged the traditional demarcation of gender roles. “In that period, I wanted to make something new; I thought of taking some blatant photographs, perhaps galant,” Krull reflected in her memoirs, referring to “galanterie,” an elegant Enlightenment aesthetic with erotic connotations. Germaine Krull Po...

Photo showing the execution of German SS Guards by U.S. Troops during the liberation of Dachau. This is the 45th Div. There's an actual video of this, without audio, of course. I saw it a couple of years ago but don't have a source. I think it is a documentary. The SS are standing against the wall, and someone just spontaneously starts shooting, then 30 cal. joins in. An officer or NCO starts waving his hands running towards the scene, any more the shooting stops. It's really quick. Im the mod of r/MilitaryHistory. This photo comes up occasionally, with some wild and extreme commands about warcimes, and if you're a hardcore neo-Nazi, German genocide. The claim that it's a warcrime is debatable, but this is absolutely a case where the situation is ambiguous, and eyewitness testimony is unclear. To explain what led to the death of these camp guards, we have to first think about the operation to take the prison in the first place. The camp's capture occurred i...

96 US military members who were executed in Europe during WW2 for rape and or murder. Buried in unmarked graves in a French graveyard, with only a number on their headstones.  Not all the men who served in the US military in WW2 were heroes. Some of them were hardened criminals who were convicted in a court, and the judge gave them the choice " Join the army or go to jail ". Others were drunks or those who wanted to get away from a messy marriage or debts. During the course of the war, the US military executed 161 men, mostly for rape, and or murder. Some took place in the US, some in Britain and in the case that I am about to outline, in Europe, after the D Day landings. Each case was investigated, a courts marshal trial was conducted and a verdict of guilty was returned. The order of execution was approved by either General Eisenhower or in some cases by the Commanding General of that theatre of the war. Now to the hidden part. All of the 96 men were buried at the same...

Polish war prisoners on their way to prison camp in 1939. After a few months they were taken to forest of Katõn (400 km from Moscow), where they were executed by shots to back of their head. A total of 20 000 polish war prisoners were executed by soviet soldiers in that forest. It's more complex than that: "Many of these victims were called to be soldiers due to the outbreak of war, but before WWII, they were outstanding doctors, lawyers, generals, lecturers and professors, scientists, political leaders, and artists. They were well educated, intelligent, open-minded, prominent, distinguished people, either wealthy before the war or with prospects for great careers. Many had graduated from the best universities in the world, were published in worldwide science journals, worked for foreign universities, medical clinics, or legal practices, and were recipients of foreign scholarships, awards, and prizes." They also wiped out the intelligentsia, many of the victims serve...

Three Soviet POWs, one who looks like a civilian, stand in their own grave moments before their execution by German Wehrmacht forces. Eastern Front, 1942. Some examples from an interrogation report of *U-490*, sunk 12 June 1944: >The captain, Oberleutnant z. S. d. R. Wilhelm Gerlach, was 39 years of age.  For many years before the war, he had served in the merchant marine and had won his master’s certificate.  At the outbreak of war, he was drafted to the U-boat arm as an enlisted man.  He served for a time under Kapitänleutnant Johann Mohr on U-124, first as quartermaster and later as executive officer.  U-490 was his first U-boat command.  His men were rather scornful of Gerlach.  They felt that he was too timid and resembled a clerk in a shoe store more than a naval officer.  He was pleasant and polite but very secure with his interrogators.  They were astonished to find that a man of his age and worldly experience had succumbed so comp...