By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 July 2026

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 23 July 2026

Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz death camp, was called to testify at Nuremberg on 15 April 1946 as a defence witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the successor to Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the key institution of Heinrich Himmler’s SS-police complex, which was the most individually powerful element of the Nazi regime after 1941.
Continue readingBy Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 October 2025

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 August 2022

It was on this day in 1968, fifty-four years ago, that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, one of its colonies in the “Warsaw Pact”, which had embarked on a program of liberalising reforms. The Czech leadership did not intend to depart from the socialist path, merely to soften its edges—and ran into the brute fact that this was not possible. Continue reading