John Baker’s Blog

Extract from a speech by Heinrich Himmler, to Schutzstaffel (SS) officers at Poznan on the 4th October,1943:
In the months that have gone by since we met in June 1942 many of our comrades were killed, giving their lives for Germany and the Fuhrer. In the first rank - and I ask you to rise in [...]

The old bungalow on De Longpre Avenue, the house where Charles Bukowski wrote many of his best known novels and became the voice of Los Angeles, is now the subject of a dispute between preservationists, who want to turn it into a monument, and the owners of the property who claim that the writer was [...]

On the Banksy website there is a section called Manifesto which quotes an extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The extract is rather lengthy and much of it fairly tough-going, but Willett Gonin notes, eventually, the arrival [...]