world war II
Eddie Slovik was the only American soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War. In October 1944 he left his unit in Belgium, wrote a confession and handed it to an Army cook. A lieutenant colonel twice offered to let him tear it up. He refused. He was shot on January 31, 1945.
true crime
Two boys, aged four and three, died in Scotswood in the summer of 1968. The girl convicted of killing them was 11. Her identity today is protected for life by court order.
Algeria
During the 1957 Battle of Algiers, French paratroopers threw living prisoners from helicopters into the Mediterranean Sea. When corpses resurfaced, they weighed victims' feet in concrete. The man who counted the bodies resigned in protest.
Washington DC
On April 13, 1861, an Irish watchmaker named Jonathan Dillon scratched a secret message inside Lincoln's gold pocket watch while the president had no idea. The Smithsonian confirmed it on March 10, 2009 — 148 years later.
Ancient Rome
Yes — her name was Locusta of Gaul. Already imprisoned for poisoning when Empress Agrippina recruited her in 54 AD, she went on to kill two emperors' relatives, earn imperial estates from Nero, and run a school training assassins in state-sanctioned murder.
Germany
In 1536, three Anabaptist leaders were tortured to death in Münster. Their bodies were locked into iron cages on St. Lambert's Church. The cages have never come down.
History
On December 7, 43 BC, Rome's greatest orator was assassinated on Mark Antony's orders. His severed head and right hand were nailed to the Rostra in the Roman Forum — the very platform from which he had spent over a year denouncing Antony in his Philippic speeches.
vienna
The Holy Lance in Vienna's Hofburg Treasury was considered proof of divine right to rule. A British metallurgist tested the iron — it was forged in the 7th century AD, centuries after the Crucifixion. The nail inside it, however, is consistent with a 1st-century Roman nail.
France
In 1827, a young Nubian giraffe walked 550 miles from Marseille to Paris as a diplomatic gift to King Charles X. She was the first living giraffe France had seen in over three centuries — and she triggered a full-blown fashion craze.
Archéologique Notre-Dame
Beneath the parvis of Notre-Dame lies a 200-metre archaeological crypt containing the layered ruins of three separate cities — Roman, medieval, and 19th-century Paris — stacked on top of each other. Most visitors above never know it is there.
Prague
A blackened, mummified human forearm has hung from an iron chain inside Prague's Church of St. James the Greater for approximately 400 years. The church's own inscription says a thief reached for the Madonna's jewels and was seized by the figure. It has never been taken down.
Moscow
In 1925, a Soviet physician severed a dog's head and kept it alive with two pumps and a glass jar. The machine he built became the blueprint for open-heart surgery.