A Turkish shampoo commercial has provoked (understandable) outrage after using Adolf Hitler as its spokesman.

The 13-second spot for Biomen shampoo uses archival footage of Hitler at a rally, dubbing in the Turkish voice-over, "If you are not wearing a woman's dress, you should not use her shampoo either."

This raises the question: Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to use Hitler in their ad campaign?

Well, it turns out that the answer is lots of people. Lots and lots of people.

According to advertising blogger Copyranter, apart from breasts, Hitler "may be the most over- and misused creative linchpin in advertising today." The Nazi architect of the Holocaust has sold everything from Vodka to deodorant. Even international branches of Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann have jumped into the fray.

Wrap it up or you'll create a baby Hitler.

Client: Doc Morris condoms.

Agency: Grey Group, Germany

Of course. Hitler loved Chinese food. How could we forget?

Client: Chopstix. "Can't hate everything."

Agency: Dentsu, Indonesia

What kind of stains are they talking about?

Client: Texsana Dry Cleaning

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Frankfurt has elected a Jewish mayor, marking the first time since the Nazi era began in 1933 that a major German city will be led by a Jew, Die Welt reports.

Social Democrat (SPD) Peter Feldmann, 53, won 57.4 percent of the vote in a runoff, beating the Boris Rhein, the candidate fielded by Chancellor Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The win also means the CDU is out of power in Frankfurt for the first time in 17 years. “This is a big, big surprise,” Feldmann said. “Nobody, including me, expected this.”

A political scientist and former director of an elderly care facility, Feldmann spent two years at a kibbutz in Israel when he was younger. A "liberal Jew", he is also the co-founder and spokesman of Arbeitskreis jüdischer Sozialdemokraten (AJS), a Jewish group within the SPD party. Feldmann's election manifesto included promises to fight child poverty, adequate elder care, and low-income housing.

Outgoing Frankfurt Mayor Petra Roth (CDU) had previously said that big cities were the "laboratories of society", where social changes are especially noticeable early on.

In 1933, Frankfurt was home to Germany’s second largest Jewish population, with over 30,000 residents, but by 1945 that number had been diminished to just over 600. It has since rebuilt that number to over 7,000 people, Algemeiner reports. Its last Jewish mayor, Ludwig Landmann, was elected in 1924.

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A Dallas-based foundation has handed two albums belonging to Adolf Hitler, which catalog art and furniture stolen by the Nazis during World War II, to the National Archives.

The albums were given to the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art by the relatives of two American soldiers who had taken them from Hitler's home in the Bavarian Alps as souvenirs, Associated Press says.

The Foundation's founder and president, Robert M. Edsel, is quoted as saying that the albums were "prized possessions of Adolf Hitler."

US News names the American soldiers as Cpl. Albert Lorenzetti and Pfc. Yerke Zane Larson, and says that the leather-bound books had become family heirlooms, but their original purpose was unknown.

More from GlobalPost: Wolfgang Beltracchi, convicted German art forger, faked Hitler paintings

It was only when the albums were donated to the Monuments Men Foundation that their significance was realized, and it was decided that they should be handed over to the National Archives.

The National Archives currently possesses a total of 41 albums, My Fox 9 says.  The 39 others were discovered in Germany in May 1945 and later used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials.

They were compiled by a special Nazi task force called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, The New York Times explains, who were charged with documenting objects taken from French museums and private collections for a museum Hitler planned to build in his hometown Linz in Austria.

More from GlobalPost: Outrage over Turkish shampoo ad featuring Hitler

This post originally appeared at GlobalPost.

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World War II had many heroes whose names everyone knows: Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur are only a few. But those who worked behind the scenes are less known, often because they worked with "classified" information.

One such person is Alan Turing, the man who helped give the Allies their biggest tactical advantage against the Axis forces and is the father of much of modern computing, yet was censured for his sexual orientation after the war and died an ignominious death.

But not everyone is content to let him rest in infamy. Last month, a petition was circulated in the UK to honor Turing by putting his face on the new £10 notes.

So this being the centenary of his birth, we decided to dig into his contributions to the war and science.

Alan Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912.

(Source)

He studied mathematics and later taught quantum mechanics at Cambridge University.

This is where he proved that automatic computation cannot solve all mathematical problems. This concept, called the Turing machine, is the basis for the modern theory of computation.

(Source)

During World War II, he worked at the British government's code and cipher headquarters, Bletchley Park.

(Source)

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MOSCOW (AP) — School notebooks with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on the cover are causing controversy in Russia.

One of Moscow's largest bookshop said it is running out of the notebooks because they are so popular — but human rights activists have slammed the notebooks as promoting Stalin as a hero to children.

Russia's education minister says while he disapproves of the notebooks, there is no legal way to stop stores from selling them.

Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1953, is a controversial figure in Russia today. Although he was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens, Stalin is still highly regarded for having led Russia to victory in World War II and overseeing its rise as an industrial and military superpower.

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Raymond Aubrac, one of the greatest leaders of the French resistance, passed away yesterday evening, the BBC reports.

His story is certainly worth remembering.

An engineer by training, Aubrac was born Raymond Samuel, a Jew, in 1914. Both his parents were later sent to Auschwitz and he adopted the name Aubrac.

Before the war he dabbled in Left Wing politics, but it was the war that pushed him to action. In 1940 he formed a movement against the Nazi operation — called Liberation Sud — in Lyon.

By 1942 he was working with General De Gaulle's Resistance chief Jean Moulin. The next year the two were arrested in a Gestapo raid — Moulin was later tortured to death.

Aubric was luckier. While being transported by the Gestapo, a group of resistance fighters (including his wife, Lucie) attacked the convoy. His wife had famously arranged for him to be moved so that they could marry (she was pregnant at the time and such options were allowed in French law).

The AFP reports that the  act became one of the most famous Resistance wins of World War II — two films were made about it, "Lucie Aubrac" and "Boulevard des Hirondelles."

He fled France in 1944, and after the war enjoyed a successful career in government and banking. His wife died in 2007.

Before his death he had endorsed French Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in next month's elections. Both Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy paid their respects to the hero today, Liberation reports.

Aged 97, he was one of the few leading members of the resistance still alive. He died in a military hospital in Paris.

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Kyrgyzstan’s “Eternal Flame” isn't really eternal. The light was turned off by Kyrgyzgas on Wednesday over an outstanding bill of $9,400, the AP reports.

“Eternal Light in the capital of Kyrgyzstan is switched off due to nonpayment of debt at KGS 440,000,” Deputy Director General of Kyrgyzgas OJSC, Eugene Orlenko, told Kyrgyzs news agency 24.kg. “It is not first time when gas is switched off on the Victory Square. Gas supply will be resumed as soon as money will be transferred,” he added.

The Eternal Flame is a memorial to soldiers who died fighting in World War II. Every year on May 9, the country has a military parade, where the Kyrgyz president and other dignitaries stand before the Eternal Flame while soldiers lay wreaths around it.

Perhaps to avoid a bigger PR disaster, the Flame was restarted a few hours later, with Kyrgyzgas doing a volte-face on its previous claims by stating the move was purely for scheduled maintenance, Kabar.kg reports.

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In November 1944, fifty years before Predator drones swept on the scene, the Japanese military devised a low-tech method of dropping bombs on foreign soil that didn’t require pilots. All it took was balloons—specifically, 9,000 33-foot-diameter “balloon bombs,” or Fu-Gos, each carrying 35 pounds of explosives.

Released from Japanese shores, these balloons were designed to rise to 30,000 feet then ride the jet stream east, making their way toward the U.S. in about three days. At that point, an altimeter would trigger a reaction that would jettison the bombs, which would explode once they landed, whipping up fires and panic across the country.

That, at least, was the plan. The Japanese would soon learn that you should never place your hopes of winning a war in the hands of the wind. Only a few hundred of these balloons made it to the States, and even fewer exploded. Plus, apparently the Japanese hadn’t checked the weather: The balloons landed during a cold, damp winter, sparking only a few brush fires that didn’t do much damage.

One balloon landing in Nevada was picked up by cowboys and turned into a hay tarp. In Montana, two lumberjacks stumbled across a balloon with Japanese markings and the undetonated bomb still attached. Seven fire balloons in total were turned in to the Army, and as sightings continued to pop up everywhere from Alaska to Texas to Iowa, Americans started wondering what was up.

In January 1945, Newsweek ran an article titled “Balloon Mystery.” At that point, the U.S. Office of Censorship stepped in, asking that media outlets refrain from mentioning the balloons, lest this give the Japanese the impression their attack had been a success, which might encourage them to send more. So the media kept their mouths shut. The Japanese, figuring there was no way Americans could keep this big a secret, were forced to conclude that their balloons had failed, and discontinued their use. Nonetheless, Japanese propaganda broadcasts boasted that their balloons had caused huge fires, widespread mayhem, and death counts as high as 10,000.

Only one balloon bomb claimed any American lives, and it was more of a sad tragedy than a military triumph: Five kids and their pregnant Sunday school teacher, Elyse Mitchell, came across the balloon in Oregon during a picnic in the woods. As Mitchell’s husband explained, “[One of the kids] came over and told us that there was a white object near by. We went to investigate. It blew up and killed them all.” Mrs. Mitchell, Joan Patzke (11), Dick Patzke (13), Eddie Engen (13), Jay Gifford (12), and Sherman Shoemaker (12) became the only World War II casualties in the continental U.S., although they were hardly the sort of PR coup that would buoy Japanese spirits.

After their death, the media blackout was lifted to make Americans aware of the threat. Parks were filled with posters depicting what the balloons looked like, and warnings to not mess with them.

At the end of the day, Japan’s balloon bombs boasted a kill rate of only .067 percent. It was a flop as far as secret weapons go, although the Japanese get points for creativity. And remnants of these balloon bombs still exist, with parts being found as recently as 1992. So if you spot a balloon in the woods, steer clear—and take a moment to appreciate the fact that you may be witnessing one of the best-kept secrets of World War II.

Also…

This wasn’t the only attack on Oregon during World War II. In 1942 a Japanese pilot in a submarine-based floatplane tried to drop incendiary devices over the forests around the town of Brookings.

In 1988 the Chicago Tribune caught up with the pilot of that mission, Nobuo Fujita, who returned to Brookings several times after the war and became something of an honorary citizen. According to his 1997 New York Times obituary, he gave the local library $1,000 to buy books about Japan for children, “so that there wouldn’t be another war” between the two countries.

As for Elyse Mitchell’s husband, life was marred by another tragedy. After his wife’s death, he remarried, became a missionary, and traveled to Vietnam. In 1962 he was taken captive by the Viet Cong and never heard from again.

Judy Dutton is a regular contributor to mental_floss magazine.

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Connecticut-based Alexander Historical Auctions has a number of Nazi-related documents up for auction this week, including two that go into horribly graphic detail about the physical health of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Notably Lot 181 includes x-rays of Hitler's skull and a number of other reports by his six physicians, while Lot 182 features a grim assessment of Hitler's body after his death.

Firm President Bill Panagopulos told the Washington Examiner that the documents had rarely been seen and he expected them to fetch $2,000 each.

Lot 181 in particular gives a close up of Hitler's health, with frankly ridiculous facts such as:

• Hitler had a good libido during his rise to power, and enjoyed the company of beautiful women.
• While he slept in a separate bed from Eva Braunn, he also injected semen from young bulls to spark his libido.
• He used pills to control his flatulence, a result of his veggie-heavy diet.
• His doctor gave him cocaine to clear his sinuses and had to cut the dosage after the Nazi leader began to develop an addiction.

Whilst we can't vouch for the authenticity of the documents, Alexander Historical Auctions is well-known in the World War II auctions trade — though critics have accused it of profiting off of Nazi memorabilia.

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In 1942, the U.S. government snapped up more than 60,000 acres of land in eastern Tennessee as part of the Manhattan Project. 

The area, called Oak Ridge, was already home to about 3,000 people. But for the next seven years, the town remained top-secret while thousands of federal workers developed materials for the atomic bomb. Residents were required to wear badges when outside their homes and armed guarded were staked at all the city's entrances.   

The U.S. Department of Energy recently digitized hundreds of 1940s-era photos of the "secret city." Although many of the photos are posed, they provide a snapshot of life during a monumental period in U.S. history.   

[via A Continuous Lean]

Thousands of people from all over the country who were brought in to work at the site lived in housing developments.

By 1945, the population of Oak Ridge grew from 3,000 to 75,000.

Here's a typical "Flat-Top" housing structure.

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Two years before the Nazi invasion of Poland, an Atlantic author made country-by-country predictions about Germany's eastward expansion.

In 1937, Hitler's military intentions were becoming increasingly clear.

He had already ascended to the top of the German government and instilled in the populace a fiery national socialism.

But that movement was beginning to be stifled by Germany's established borders. The next move was conquest.

In his 1937 piece "Hitler Looks Eastward," Atlantic author Henry C. Wolfe described the restlessness on the ground: "'To DAY Germany belongs to us; tomorrow the whole world!' Nazi Storm Troopers parading along Danzig's ancient cobbled streets sing out National Socialism's challenge to the nations across the 'bleeding frontiers' of the Third Reich."

To Wolfe, the question at this point was not if the Nazis would strike, but when -- and where. He noted that all throughout Germany, media reports and political speeches were proclaiming a vital need for more land. One Nazi official in Könisberg explained it to him this way: "'Colonies to absorb our surplus population and provide us with the raw materials we lack will solve our economic and social problems.'"

Which countries would fall submissively in line with Hitler, and which would oppose? Here were some of Wolfe's guesses and how they panned out:

Austria: Most certain to dissolve into Germany (Austria was annexed into Germany a year later):

The National Socialists are fond of talking about 'peaceful penetration' in Austria. ... National Socialist speeches dealing with Austria drip with sentiments of brotherhood and dwell on the bonds of 'blood community,' 'Pan German solidarity,' and 'one people, one Reich, and one Führer.' 

Romania: The Nazis had gained influence in the country, but some Rumanian political groups would resist (Romania would join the Axis powers in 1940):

Rumania is another of the key objectives of German foreign policy. For some months this colorful little kingdom has been a battleground on which Nazis have waged violent warfare against their enemies who support Rumanian ties with France and the Little Entente and cooperation with the Soviet. As in other countries where there is a German minority, Hitler is using the Teutons in Rumania as shock troops to prepare the way for Nazi domination.

Bulgaria: Germany had an eye on the country, but "supine acceptance of defeat is not ... a Bulgarian characteristic." (The country was initially neutral, then joined the Axis in 1941. After a coup in 1944, Bulgaria joined the Allies):

When the various national delegations paraded into the gigantic Olympic stadium at Berlin last summer, Nazi eyes glowed with delight and National Socialist hearts beat faster at the sight of the Bulgarians. These sturdy Balkan athletes came goose stepping on the field as a prelude to a full fledged straight armed salute to the Nazi All Highest.

Hungary: The country would join Germany if it could find a way to benefit (Hungary signed an alliance with Germany in 1940): 

Hungary is watching this Nazi campaign closely, hoping that Rumania will oppose the Germans. In that event, the Magyars[Hungarians] believe, it would be only a question of time till Germany's new army, sweeping through Czechoslovakia, would help the Hungarians reclaim their 'lost provinces.' What Hungary fears is that the Nazis will be able to win complete control of Rumania, thereby lessening for Germany the value of her Hungarian support. Such a development would make territorial revision at the expense of Rumania more difficult for the Magyars to achieve.

Turkey: The Eurasian gateway nation could not afford being isolated. If all the other countries fell, it might not have a choice (Turkey remained neutral for most of the war, joining the Allies in 1945):

Should either Germany or Italy gain a substantial foothold in the Balkans, Turkey would have to examine her political fences to determine whether they are strong enough to withstand attack from the invader. For Kemal [the Turkish president] cannot afford the luxury of an isolation that would give his enemies a favored position in a diplomatic and military combination that would force the descendants of Mohammed II back into Asia Minor. If Hitler's Drang nach Osten [thrust toward the east] shows increasing momentum, Turkey will surely be compelled to weigh the danger of being caught on the losing side.

Read "Hitler Looks Eastward" here.

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75 years ago, on May 6th 1937, Nazi Germany's prized LZ-129 Hindenburg airship crashed and burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey, creating the iconic photo to the right.

The disaster had many ramifications, not only ending 36 staff and passenger's lives, but also ending the era of the airship and proving incredibly embarrassing for the Nazis.

Named after German President Paul von Hindenburg, the airship was huge — three times the length a modern Boeing 747

(Source)

For the Nazis, it was not just a feat of engineering, but a propaganda vehicle — the country had just began to occupy the demilitarized Ruhr Valley.

(Source)

After just a few test flights, Nazi propaganda boss Dr. Joseph Goebbels ordered the airship to fly to every major German city to drop Nazi campaign pamphlets and to blare patriotic music.

(Source)

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Now, we all all know “austerity” from deep spending cuts (not the tax hikes, of course) is killing Europe’s economy and would do the same here in America, right?

Well, here’s a story about austerity that critics such as President Obama, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein never seem to mention: From 1944 to 1948, Uncle Sam cut spending by a whopping 75% as World War II came to end. Spending as a share of GDP plunged to 9% in 1948 from 44% in 1944.

Superstar economist and devout Keynesian Paul Samuelson—later to become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics—predicted such shock austerity would cause “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” That dire, disastrous prediction was widely held by his fellow Keynesians, with one even predicting an “epidemic of violence.”

Except the doomsayers were wrong, even though Washington obviously ignored Samuelson’s call for gradual spending reductions. Despite cuts which dwarfed those seen in the EU today—not to mention those Republicans are calling for here at home—the U.S. economy thrived. There was no mass unemployment despite rapid demobilization of the armed forces. As George Mason University economist David Henderson explains is his 2010 paper, “The U.S. Postwar Miracle” (which this entire post draws upon):

As demobilization proceeded rapidly, employers in the private sector, full of the optimism … scooped up millions of the soldiers, sailors, and others who had been displaced from the armed forces and from military industries. … The number of unemployed people did increase, rising from 0.8 million to 2.3 million, but with a civilian labor force of 60.1 million, the 2.3 million unemployed people implied an unemployment rate of only 3.8 percent. As President Truman said, “This is probably close to the minimum unavoidable in a free economy of great mobility such as ours.

Of course, liberals are quick to point out the U.S. economy suffered its worst one-year downturn in history in 1946, a drop of 12%. To many Americans, it surely must have seemed like Samuelson was right, that the Great Depression had returned. But no one thought that back then, especially with jobs plentiful unlike during the 1930s. The drop in output was a statistical quirk caused by the removal of price controls. As Henderson explains:

For example, imagine that the free-market price of a pound of filet mignon during the war would have been $1.40 a pound. But imagine further that the government had set the price at $1.00 a pound. Then, when the price control was removed, the price would have shot to $1.40 a pound. Inflation statistics would have recorded some amount of inflation due to this large price increase. But those statistics would have overstated the real price increase because getting beef at $1.40 a pound is better for many of the people who couldn’t, because of the shortage, get it at $1.00 a pound.

Second, those sky-high output figures during the war measured government spending on goods and services, lots of it military hardware, at their cost. But what was all that stuff really worth, in purely economic terms, vs. post-war consumer purchases of homes and cars and nylon stockings? While total output fell by 12% in 1946, private-sector GDP rose by nearly 30%.

Or look at it this this way: Real U.S. output in 1947 was 17% higher than in 1941 despite the decline in government spending. Why was the economy prospering in way it never did during the Great Depression? Taxes were cut a little, and government interference—including price and production controls and rationing—was reduced a lot. But perhaps just as important, Truman dumped many of FDR’s most radical New Dealers. That change boosted business confidence, and companies started to invest again in America.

The typical Keynesian response mostly centers around dismissing the immediate post-war boom as a one-off event complicated by many unique factors. But it happened again, as Henderson notes! After the Cold War ended, overall federal spending fell to 18% of GDP in 2000 from 22% in 1991. But again the economy boomed. Real U.S. GDP grew by 40% with an average annual growth rate of 3.8%. Henderson speculates that perhaps the decline in defense spending freed up knowledge workers to help make technological miracles happen in the private economy.

The lesson here: Spending cuts might well produce prosperity instead of austerity, especially if accompanied by less government interference in the economy and less fear in the private sector of anti-market government policies.

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"WHAT is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?" asked Adolf Hitler in 1940. With hindsight, this ranks as just about the most foolish rhetorical question posed during the second world war. But it did not seem so at the time.

As Arthur Herman shows in his wartime history, when Hitler mocked its prowess America had experienced not so much a double-dip as a double-dive depression.

Yet somehow the country's moribund military-industrial complex was able to respond with great force to President Franklin Roosevelt's call to arms. The production statistics cited by Mr Herman, a think-tank scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, still astound. Preparations for war got off to a stuttering start.

But everything changed in 1941 when Germany invaded Russia and then Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbour. By the end of 1942 America's output of war materiel already exceeded the combined production of the three Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan. By 1944 its factories built a plane every five minutes while its shipyards launched 50 merchant ships a day and eight aircraft carriers a month.

As a combative anti-Keynesian, Mr Herman scorns the notion that such triumphs resulted from the dictates of an interventionist Roosevelt administration. He often cites instead the free-market ideas of Adam Smith to support his claim that it was the profit motive that inspired America's feats of mass production.

The business heroes in his history are mostly immigrants or high-school dropouts and often both. Two tower above the rest: William "Big Bill" Knudsen, a General Motors executive who was once a teenage clerk in a bicycle business in Copenhagen, and Henry Kaiser, who began work at 16 as a travelling salesman for a dry-goods store in Utica, New York. Knudsen headhunted corporate innovators and persuaded them to give up their pay and perks to join him as "dollar-a-year men" in Washington. Kaiser recruited a can-do team from such blue-chip American companies as Lockheed, Bechtel-McCone, Chrysler, Boeing and General Electric to produce everything from dams to tanks to ships to steel. Each executive received an annual fee of $1.

Big business did not succeed on its own. It needed the help of small business. The Boeing B-29 bomber, for instance, had 40,540 different parts, and 1,400 sub- contractors provided most of them. The Research Institute of America spurred them on. In a booklet entitled "Your Business Goes to War" it asked its readers to consider switching from making vacuum cleaners to gas-mask parts. Or from shoes to helmet linings. Or from razors to percussion primers for artillery shells.

Among those who gawped in wonderment was Joseph Stalin. When he met Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran in 1943 he raised a glass to toast "American production, without which this war would have been lost." His words were as wise as those of his rival tyrant, Hitler, were not.

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The three-minute animated short on Euro 2012, the soccer tournament between European nations in Poland and Ukraine next month, was produced by China's Now TV.

It features Chinese soccer players in the thick of a game on the field (which is odd in itself, given the participating countries have to be European), but what's worse is the backdrop of war throughout the video: images of a burning Big Ben, Roman Coliseum, and Eiffel Tower, together with tanks, gun-toting soldiers, aircraft dropping bombs, and explosions. We know the competition is intense, but this takes it to another level.

Watch:

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THE MINISTER FOR Defence Alan Shatter is to introduce legislation this year which will formally provide an amnesty to Irish citizens who absented themselves from duty with the Defence Forces to fight for the Allies in World War II.

“The government apologises for the manner in which those men of the Defence Forces were treated after the war by the state,” Shatter said in the Dáil this evening.

Irish soldiers were persecuted for deserting the Irish Defence Forces and fighting with the Allied forces against Hitler. Soldiers were immediately dismissed from the Defence Forces under Emergency Power Order 32 introduced by Eamon de Valera’s government.

The dismissal included a ban from state employment for seven years and blocked their Defence Forces pay and pension rights.

“Individuals were not given a chance to explain their absence,” Shatter said in the Dáil this evening. “No distinction was made between those who fought on the Allied side for freedom and democracy, and those who absented themselves for other reasons.”

“In the almost 73 years since the outbreak of World War II, our understanding of history has matured. We can reevaluate actions taken long ago free from the constraints that bounded those directly involved and without questioning or revisiting their motivations.

“It is time for understanding and forgiveness,” he said, and for the contribution made by Irish soldiers to the Allied effort to be recognised and their rejection understood.

“The Government recognises the value and importance to the State” of all the works performed by all members of the Defence Forces during World War II. However, Shatter insisted that “the loyalty of the Defence Forces is essential” and “especially at a time of crisis”.

The minister said that the legislation will not undermine “the general principle regarding desertion” and will not give rise “to any liability of any nature on the part of the state”.

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Within the last few years, the World War II British propaganda poster "Keep calm and carry on" has become ubiquitous around the World.

What many people don't know is that the poster only saw limited distribution during World War II — the 2.5 million copies printed were held back and intended for us only in times of crisis, which (thankfully) never came.

However, the British government produced a whole range of other posters, many of which did see the light of day.

Recently the UK's National Archives has decided to release over World War II 2,000 art works on Wikimedia. We've had a look through the 330 or so artworks that have been uploaded so far, and included some of our favorite examples of posters we found — some of which made it to print and some which didn't. Inside are orders to keep quiet, stop waste and work hard.

"In Germany..."

"We beat 'em before. We'll do it again!"

"Mr. Hitler wants to know!"

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Seventy years ago the U.S. was transitioning from an epic financial crisis — one that brought high unemployment, plunging farm profits and lost opportunities — to one of the world's deadliest and most destructive wars. 

We've written about the Library of Congress' incredible collection of color photos from the early 1940s before. We decided to take another look, this time highlighting how the country mobilized for World War II.  

Industry was humming with the help of this carbon black plant worker in Sunray, Texas

Men and women prepared for jobs in the Army by learning things like how to create camouflage maps based on aerial photographs

Trains needed to run then more than ever and the "hump master" at the Chicago railroad yard controlled movements of locomotives from his post at the hump office

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A record 48-ton haul of silver bullion has been recovered from a World War II shipwreck off the coast of Ireland.

The treasure, worth 1.4 million troy ounces of silver, was found on the wreckage three miles beneath the Atlantic.

The operation to retrieve the 1,203 bars from the SS Gairsoppa was the heaviest and deepest underwater mission to remove precious metal from sunken vessels.

It was discovered last September and the metal was reportedly valued at around £155 million in today's prices.

The Gairsoppa, a cargo ship, sank in February 1941, 300 miles south-west of Galway in Ireland.

It was being used by the British Government as part of its War Risk Insurance programme.

The boat carried 83 crew and two gunners but only one officer survived the evacuation to reach the shore after it was hit by a German torpedo.

The silver belongs to the UK after the Government paid £325,000 to the owners of the cargo.

It was recovered by deep ocean exploration firm Odyssey Marine Exploration.

Greg Stemm, Odyssey chief executive, said: "Our capacity to conduct precision cuts and successfully complete the surgical removal of bullion from secure areas on the ship demonstrates our capabilities to undertake complicated tasks in the very deep ocean.

"This technology will be applicable to other modern shipwreck projects currently being scheduled as well as our deep ocean mineral exploration activities."

The haul has been moved to a secure location in the UK.

The firm will also try to rescue 600,000 ounces of insured silver believed to be on another shipwreck, the SS Mantola, 100 miles away from the Gairsoppa.

Odyssey said the recovered Gairsoppa haul was about 43 per cent of the insured silver bars, or a fifth of the total silver cargo which its research indicated may have been on board.

The deep sea operation will feature on television specials on the Discovery Channel in the US and Channel 5 in the UK.

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His chunky 5-foot-8 frame gave no hint of the giddyup in his short strides, but it was said of Foy Draper that he could run a hole through the wind.

His speed led to Gold, when he helped run a hole through the Nazis’ “master race” myth, which is why the best dateline for an Olympics story today is not London, but Tunis.

At the North Africa American Cemetery near Tunis today, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will pay tribute to the 2,841 U.S. servicemembers buried there after the World War II battles across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps.

Panetta also will also stop at the tree-lined terrace of the Memorial leading to Wall of the Missing, where 3,724 names are engraved.

Among them is that of Capt. Foy Draper of the U.S. Army Air Force, who was lost on a mission as the pilot of an A20 Havoc bomber on Jan. 4, 1943.

At the XI Olympiad in Berlin in 1936, Hitler was infuriated as the German team fell short  against the Americans led by the African-American Jesse Owens, who won Gold in the 100 meters, 200 meters and the long jump.

The U.S. team of Draper, Frank Wykoff, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman was also considered a strong favorite in the 400 meter relay but the team was shaken up the night before the race.

In one of the most shameful incidents in sports history, Stoller and Glickman, the only  Jewish-Americans on the U.S. team, were replaced by Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. There are several theories on why that happened, but one was that U.S. Olympic Committee Chairman Avery Brundage wanted to avoid giving offense to Hitler.

Draper and the others did their best to offend Hitler anyway. Despite their lack of practice together, the Americans blew away the competition.

Owens led off and gave the Americans a slight lead. Metcalfe built upon it and Draper held off a surge by the Italians to give Wykoff a perfect flying start. The Americans won by 15 meters in world record time of 39.8 seconds.

Foy Draper was speeding again seven years later to help another American team win against Hitler when he was lost over North Africa. On the Wall of the Missing, a verse from Ecclesiastes has been adapted into a mosaic: “Some there be which have no sepulchre. Their name liveth for evermore.”

(Photo: U.S. 400 meter relay champions in 1936 Olympics. From left, Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, Foy Draper, Frank Wykoff.)

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