In just a few sentences, Willy Peter Reese illuminates why the Nazi-Soviet war would descend into a vicious hell on earth.

A Road to Tokyo gallery takes shape around a striking WWII macro-artifact. 

In William Shirer's war memoir, two foreign correspondents walk in a Berlin park and share a farewell drink as a global inferno nears ignition.  

Watching the Museum's P-40 Warhawk land in Campaigns of Courage.  

A passage from William Shirer's memoir of The Nightmare Years bears witness to the stark brutality of 1940 Europe. 

The battle that defined for the American Army the tough realities of what war with the German army truly meant.

As the "Hinge of Fate" was turning across the globe, Operation Torch became the US military's first step toward defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe.

With a glimpse of Stalin's grave in Red Square, a brutal legacy rewinds. 

A French writer fleeing Paris in June 1940 has a nervous first encounter with the enemy. 

In a cemetery outside Warsaw, Marxist-Leninist theory meets the course of history. 

Leon Werth captures the chaos and uncertainty that preceded the Nazis into Paris. 

George Kennan is most known for his diplomatic work following World War II, as the Soviet Union imposed an Iron Curtain on the states of Eastern Europe and Cold War tensions began. But Kennan's writings during World War II give the eerie account of a region on the precipice of Nazi conquest.