A senior Nazi SS coordinator who became a late-war negotiating envoy
On 8 March 1945, Wolff met Allen Dulles in Switzerland to discuss terms for the surrender of German forces in northern Italy.
Karl Wolff was a senior Nazi SS officer who served as Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and stood close to the regime’s central decisions and crimes. As the highest SS and police leader in occupied Italy, he oversaw a system marked by the deportation of Jews, forced labor, and repression of the resistance, responsibilities not erased by his later negotiations. In 1945 he conducted the secret Operation Sunrise talks with OSS chief Allen Dulles in Switzerland, helping secure the early surrender of German forces in northern Italy, though his influence and motives were limited. After the war he was convicted for facilitating mass murder.
Career timeline
1917–1920Officer candidate in the Imperial German Army’s 115th Infantry Regiment, serving on the Western Front
1931Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1935–1943Chief of the Reichsführer-SS Personal Staff
1943–1944Highest SS and Police Leader in Italy
1944–1945Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy
1945German negotiating representative in Operation Sunrise, involved in the surrender in northern Italy
1964–1969Convicted by a Munich court for facilitating the murder of 300,000 Jews and sentenced to 15 years, released in 1969
Riga docker who used his contract work for the Luftwaffe to smuggle dozens of Jews out of the ghetto and camps and hide them
Born in Jelgava, he served in the Latvian Army’s artillery during the War of Independence in 1919–1920 and then worked as a docker in the port of Riga. Having witnessed the persecution of Jews in the streets, he resolved to save them, became a contractor for the Luftwaffe and from late November 1941 smuggled Jewish workers out of the Riga ghetto and nearby camps. With his wife Johanna and friends he hid them in warehouses and a bunker dug in his yard until the Red Army arrived in October 1944. The number saved is given as forty to about 55. After the war the KGB questioned him repeatedly. In 1966 Yad Vashem recognised him and his wife as Righteous Among the Nations, and when he died in 1987 the Jews of Riga arranged his funeral.
Career timeline
1919–1920Artillery service in the War of Independence
1941–1944Smuggled Jews out of the Riga ghetto and camps and hid them
Konoe's confidant and the spy who helped save Moscow
I would like to go and die splendidly as a communist.
Hotsumi Ozaki was a journalist for the Asahi Shimbun and a committed communist who became the most vital Japanese asset in Richard Sorge's Tokyo spy ring. As an advisor to Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and a member of his inner 'Breakfast Club,' Ozaki accessed the highest-level cabinet secrets, and in September 1941 he supplied Sorge with the decisive intelligence that Japan would strike southward rather than invade the USSR, enabling Stalin to transfer Siberian divisions that turned the Battle of Moscow. Arrested in October 1941, he was the only Japanese civilian hanged for treason during the war; his prison letters to his wife and daughter, published postwar as Love Is Like a Falling Star, became a bestseller.
Estonian Vaps politician who headed the collaborationist Estonian Self-Administration under German occupation in 1941–1944
Born at Tuhala in Harju County, he studied in Berlin, Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz and took doctorates in geophysics (1927) and constitutional law (1930). After standing twice for parliament he joined the Vaps movement as its propaganda chief; sentenced in 1935 to twenty years’ hard labour, he was amnestied in 1938, went to Germany and took German citizenship. In May 1941 he founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki, and returning with the German army that year he headed the Estonian Self-Administration from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he fled to Austria, where the Western Allies cleared him of Nazi crimes and he later advised the Austrian government. In the 1990s Estonia’s International Commission named him among the Estonians chiefly responsible for crimes committed by Estonian police and SS units.
Career timeline
1927–1930Doctorates in geophysics (Innsbruck) and constitutional law (Graz)
1935Sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour as a Vaps leader
1941Founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki
"For the old Communists," he told Teresa Torańska, "serving the party was not merely a goal, but an inner need in life."
Jakub Berman was a communist leader who supervised ideology, culture, and the security apparatus in postwar Poland. Together with Bolesław Bierut and Hilary Minc, he formed the regime’s ruling Stalinist triumvirate after 1948, combining socialist construction with political repression. After Bierut’s death, Berman was forced out of power in 1956 and expelled from the party the following year, becoming a symbol of de-Stalinization. He acknowledged partial responsibility for abuses while maintaining his commitment to the communist cause.
Career timeline
1928Joined the Communist Party of Poland; worked among intellectuals
1939–1941Edited Polish-language communist press in Soviet-occupied territory
1941–1944Instructor at the Comintern International Lenin School
1944–1948PPR Politburo member; oversaw security and political affairs
1948–1956PZPR Politburo member; responsible for ideology, culture, and security
1956Resigned from the Politburo and Central Committee
1957Expelled from the Polish United Workers’ Party
1958–1969Editor at Książka i Wiedza publishing house
The Trinidadian Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist intellectual who revived the Haitian Revolution for Marxist historiography
“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” — Beyond a Boundary preface, inverting Kipling
Trinidadian Marxist historian. The Black Jacobins (1938) reframed the Haitian Revolution as liberation from below. He debated Black self-determination with Trotsky, co-developed the state-capitalist theory of the USSR, and analysed empire through cricket in Beyond a Boundary.
Career timeline
1901Born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, first child of schoolteacher Robert Alexander James and Ida Elizabeth
1910–1918Wins scholarship to Queen's Royal College; later teaches English and History there (Eric Williams among his pupils)
1932Moves to Lancashire; cricket correspondent for The Manchester Guardian; begins anti-colonial writing
1934–1936Joins ILP; Trotskyist activism; play Toussaint Louverture staged with Paul Robeson; publishes Minty Alley
1937–1938Publishes World Revolution and The Black Jacobins — praised by Trotsky, Orwell, and E.H. Carr
1938–1939US speaking tour at SWP invitation; debates the 'Negro Question' with Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico
1941–1951Forms Johnson–Forest Tendency with Dunayevskaya; state-capitalist analysis of USSR; Notes on Dialectics
1953Deported from US; writes Mariners, Renegades and Castaways on Melville while detained at Ellis Island
1957–1960Visits independent Ghana, writes on Nkrumah; edits The Nation, PNM party paper in Trinidad
1963Publishes Beyond a Boundary — cricket memoir exploring colonialism, class, and race
1970–1980Teaches at Federal City College (UDC), Washington D.C.; four volumes of selected writings published
1989Dies of chest infection in Brixton, London, aged 88; buried at Tunapuna Cemetery, Trinidad
The emperor who carried Japan through war and constitutional transformation
“Enduring the unendurable”, a phrase from his 1945 rescript announcing Japan’s surrender
Hirohito was Japan’s 124th emperor from 1926 to 1989, occupying both the sovereign position of the imperial constitution and the symbolic role defined by the postwar constitution. He stood at the apex of the state that authorized Japan’s aggression and Pacific War, while the extent of his responsibility for the war and its crimes remains contested. After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet entry into the war left the Supreme Council deadlocked, he intervened to accept the Potsdam terms and announced the surrender by radio. After the war he renounced imperial divinity and remained a symbolic head of state, while continuing his research in marine biology.
Career timeline
1901Born in Tokyo
1916Proclaimed Crown Prince
1921–1926Regent of Japan
1926–1945124th Emperor of Japan, exercising imperial authority under the imperial constitution
1941Approved the decision to enter war against the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands
1945Decided to accept the Potsdam terms and announced Japan’s surrender
1947–1989Symbolic emperor under the Constitution of Japan
At Kufra in 1941, he had his men swear not to lay down their arms until the French flag flew over Strasbourg Cathedral.
Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque was a French general who joined de Gaulle's Free French after the 1940 defeat and forged colonial troops and exiles into a fighting force. He set an objective that ran from Kufra to Strasbourg and transferred the mobile warfare learned in Africa to the 2nd Armored Division. In August 1944 he challenged the Allied plan to bypass Paris, driving on the capital and making its liberation French-led alongside the Resistance. After the war he recognised in Indochina that military victory could not settle the conflict, but died in a 1947 air crash before he could develop that judgement.
Career timeline
1924Graduated from Saint-Cyr military academy
1925–1939Cavalry officer, service in Morocco and graduation from the War College
1940Joined Free France and was sent to Africa under de Gaulle
1940–1943Military commander in Cameroon and Chad, leading the Kufra and Fezzan campaigns
1943–1945Commanded the 2nd Armored Division in Normandy and the liberation of Paris and Strasbourg
1945–1946Commander of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps and French representative at Japan's surrender
1946–1947Inspector General of Land Forces in North Africa
The Kwantung Army staff officer whose Border Defense Guide sparked the Nomonhan Incident
After the war, General Ryukichi Tanaka testified that 'the most determined single protagonist in favor of war with the United States was Tsuji Masanobu.'
An operations staff officer of the Kwantung Army, Masanobu Tsuji drafted the 'Border Defense Guide' that touched off the 1939 Nomonhan Incident, pushing the border war with the Soviet Union forward by gekokujō, insubordination from below. After the defeat, his encounter with Soviet firepower turned him against war with the USSR, yet he became the most forceful advocate of war against the United States. A planner of the Malayan campaign and an instigator of the Bataan Death March and Sook Ching massacres, he evaded a war-crimes trial, returned to Japan, and was re-elected to the Diet.
Career timeline
1934Active in the Tōseiha (Control Faction), helped block the Kōdōha coup
1937–1939Kwantung Army operations staff officer
1939.04Authored the 'Border Defense Guide', instigating the Nomonhan Incident
1941General Staff Operations Section, advocate of war against the United States
1941–1942Planned the Malayan campaign; Sook Ching massacres after Singapore's fall
The Turkish revolutionary poet who survived a 28-year sentence with verse: giant of 20th-century letters who fused modernism and communism
“Bury me under a plane tree in any village cemetery in Anatolia” — his last wish, Moscow, 1963
Born in Ottoman Salonica, Nâzım Hikmet encountered Mayakovsky and Lenin in 1921 and became a lifelong communist, returning to Turkey to pioneer free verse and transform its poetry. From "835 Lines" to the 16,000-line epic "Human Landscapes from My Country," his vast body of work sang the lives of ordinary people and the War of Independence. A military court sentenced him to 28 years; he served 12, his imprisonment sparking a global campaign by Picasso, Sartre, and Robeson. After escaping to the USSR in 1951 he spent 13 years in the peace movement and anti-colonial solidarity. His poetry is translated into over 50 languages; UNESCO declared 2002 the 'Year of Nâzım Hikmet.'
Career timeline
1913Publishes first poem, "Feryad-ı Vatan" (The Cry of the Homeland)
1918Graduates from the Ottoman Naval Academy; serves as naval officer
1921Travels to Anatolia to join the War of Independence; meets Mustafa Kemal
1922–1924Studies at KUTV, Moscow; joins the Bolshevik Party
1924–1925Returns to Turkey; edits Aydınlık, organ of the illegal Turkish Communist Party
1929Publishes "835 Lines" — revolutionises Turkish poetry with free verse
1933–1935First imprisonment for "Gece Gelen Telgraf"; writes "The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin" in Bursa Prison
1938–1950Sentenced to 28 years for inciting mutiny; serves 12 years across four prisons
1939–1960Writes 16,000-line epic "Human Landscapes from My Country" in prison
1950Amnestied after international campaign and hunger strike; awarded International Peace Prize
1951–1963Exiled in the USSR; Bureau member of World Peace Council, anti-colonial and anti-war activism
1963.06.03Dies of a heart attack at his dacha in Peredelkino; buried at Novodevichy Cemetery
Vincent Badie was a French Radical Socialist lawyer and politician who worked in local government and parliament, defending veterans and republican institutions. In July 1940 he accepted that constitutional revision might be considered, but rejected transferring power to Pétain in a way that would abolish the Republic; he tried to present a motion signed by 27 parliamentarians and then voted against the grant of full powers. After Vichy suspended him as mayor, he joined the Resistance, was arrested, and deported to Dachau. After the war he returned to parliament and twice served as minister for veterans, while also defending French colonial rule and overseas presence.
Career timeline
1923Lawyer at the Montpellier bar
1931–1938General councillor for Montpellier and Gignac, Hérault
1936–1942Deputy for Hérault
1938–1941Mayor of Paulhan
1944–1971Mayor of Paulhan
1945Member of the Provisional Consultative Assembly
1946–1958Deputy in the Fourth Republic's National Assembly
1955–1956Minister for Veterans and War Victims
1958Minister for Veterans and War Victims
1957–1958Chair of the Radical Socialist parliamentary group
The student founder of the Cuban Communist Party martyred at 25: a face of Latin American anti-imperialism
December 1928, at a tense party meeting in Mexico City, Vittorio Vidali shouted at Mella: "Never forget — there are only two ways out of the International: expelled or dead!" A month later, Mella was assassinated on the street.
Student leader who co-founded the Communist Party of Cuba, organizing anti-imperialist student struggles at the University of Havana and establishing Cuba's first Marxist-Leninist party with Carlos Baliño in 1925. Exiled in Mexico for resisting the Machado dictatorship, he was assassinated at 25 in 1929 and became a foundational martyr of the Cuban revolutionary left, later claimed as a precursor by the Castro movement.
Career timeline
1922Enters University of Havana law school — co-founds FEU, serves as secretary
1923Becomes FEU president — convenes First National Student Congress, founds José Martí Popular University
1924Joins Havana Communist Group, creates Cuban section of the Anti-Imperialist League
1925Co-founds the Communist Party of Cuba with Carlos Baliño — Central Committee member; arrested, conducts 18-day hunger strike
1926Expelled from university and party — flees via Honduras and Guatemala to Mexico City
1926–1927Founds ANERC — writes for Cuba Libre and other revolutionary papers
1927Attends World Congress Against Colonial Oppression in Brussels — Moscow for RILU Fourth Congress
1929Shot dead on 10 January walking home in Mexico City — aged 25
Member of the Hungarian Communist leadership hanged with Imre Sallai after a summary trial that used the Biatorbágy bombing as a pretext
Born in Rum to Jewish parents, he worked as a clerk at a rubber factory in Budapest, belonged to the clerical workers’ union and joined the Communist Party in 1926. Repeatedly arrested from 1928 and released for lack of evidence, he lost his job; in 1930 he joined the party leadership and was soon arrested again. In 1932, under the summary jurisdiction proclaimed after the Biatorbágy bombing, he was sentenced to death together with Imre Sallai. Despite a campaign by the Hungarian Red Aid and protests by Attila József and others, he was hanged on 29 July.
A Fascist diplomat who became a witness to the regime's internal collapse
On 25 July 1943, Ciano voted for Grandi's motion, the act that helped bring down his father-in-law Mussolini.
Galeazzo Ciano was Mussolini's son-in-law and a leading diplomat of Fascist Italy who helped drive the regime's expansion and dependence on Germany before turning against a war he saw ending in catastrophe. He supported the Ethiopian war, the invasion of Albania, and the attack on Greece, while keeping diaries and diplomatic papers during his years as foreign minister. In July 1943 he voted for Dino Grandi's motion at the Fascist Grand Council, helping remove Mussolini, but miscalculated that his privileged position would survive the regime's change. After fleeing to Germany and being handed to the Italian Social Republic, he was executed after the Verona trial; his diaries remain a major record of Fascist responsibility and internal collapse.
Career timeline
1925After earning a law degree, entered the diplomatic service
1935–1936Minister of Press and Propaganda; served as a bomber pilot in the Ethiopian War
1936–1943Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Italy
1939Participated in signing the Pact of Steel with Germany
1943.02–07Ambassador to the Holy See
1943.07Voted for Grandi's motion at the Fascist Grand Council
1944.01Executed by firing squad after the Verona trial
The democratic socialist who came back wounded from the POUM militia and dissected the language of totalitarianism
Homage to Catalonia, on reaching Barcelona in December 1936: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”
Born Eric Arthur Blair. Five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and his reportage on destitution in Paris and London made him a writer; in December 1936 he went to Spain, joined the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party, spent four months on the Aragon front and was shot through the throat at Huesca. The street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona while convalescing in May 1937, and the outlawing of the POUM that followed, broke him with Soviet communism for good, and he crossed the border with his wife with a warrant out for him as a Trotskyist. Homage to Catalonia, his account of it, sold 683 copies in its first six months. Orwell called himself a democratic socialist to the end, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four anatomize the hardening of a revolution into a new rule, and the language that holds it up.
Career timeline
1903Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India, son of an official of the colonial opium department
1917–1921King's Scholar at Eton College
1922–1927Served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and resigned, disillusioned with imperial rule
1928–1932Down and out in Paris and London: dishwasher, schoolteacher, bookshop assistant
1933Published Down and Out in Paris and London under the pen name George Orwell
1936Wrote The Road to Wigan Pier from the northern coalfields; married Eileen O'Shaughnessy
1936.12Reached Barcelona and enlisted in the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party
1937.01–05Served on the Aragon front at Alcubierre and Huesca; shot through the throat at Huesca in May
1937.05Caught in the Barcelona May Days while on leave, standing guard on a POUM building
1937.06Wanted after the POUM was outlawed; escaped with his wife into France
1938Published Homage to Catalonia, which sold 683 copies in six months
1941–1943Produced broadcasts to India in the BBC Eastern Service
1945Published Animal Farm
1949Published Nineteen Eighty-Four
1950.01.21Died of tuberculosis in a London hospital
Korean revolutionary military leader who fought alongside Kim Il Sung in the Manchurian anti-Japanese guerrillas
Kim Il Sung kept a small safe in his office throughout his life. When Kim Jong Il opened it after his father's death in 1994, he found only one photograph inside — a faded picture of Kim Il Sung with Kim Chaek.
Beginning with the Korean Communist Party and Chinese Communist Party in 1920s Manchuria, he committed himself to armed anti-Japanese struggle and rose to command guerrilla operations in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army alongside Kim Il Sung and Choe Yong-gon, the three known as the 'Manchurian partisan troika.' After returning to Korea in 1945, he became Kim Il Sung's closest comrade, leading the creation of the North Korean branch of the Communist Party and orchestrating the campaign to install Kim as paramount leader. When the DPRK was founded in 1948, he became its first Deputy Premier and Minister of Industry, directing postwar industrial reconstruction. He commanded Korean People's Army forces at the front during the Korean War and died of exhaustion in January 1951; the DPRK posthumously named a city, a university, and a steel complex after him.
Career timeline
1927Joined the Korean Communist Party; arrested and imprisoned in the Kando Communist Party incident
1930Joined the Chinese Communist Party; Secretary of the Dongjing District Committee
1933–1940Political commissar of the 3rd Route Army, Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army; Secretary of the North Manchuria Provincial Committee
1942–1945Political commissar, 3rd Battalion, 88th Special Brigade, Soviet Far East
1945–1946Led creation of the North Korean Branch of the Communist Party; first president of Pyongyang Academy
1946–1948Vice-chairman of the North Korean People's Committee; Political Committee member of the Workers' Party of North Korea
1948–1951Deputy Premier and Minister of Industry, concurrently Deputy Minister of National Defence
1950–1951Frontline commander of the Korean People's Army during the Korean War
The SS general who commanded the repression of the Warsaw Uprising
In a report during the Warsaw Uprising, Reinefarth wrote: “We have more prisoners than ammunition to kill them.”
Heinz Reinefarth was a lawyer who joined the Nazi Party and the SS before becoming a commander in Germany's occupation war. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he led a battle group combining combat, police, and security units, playing a central role in the command structure of the 5 August assault on Wola and the mass killing of civilians. Despite Polish demands for his extradition, he escaped prosecution and conviction after the war and served as a mayor and state legislator in West Germany. His career links command responsibility for war crimes with postwar impunity in a single life.
Career timeline
1927Completed his law training in Jena and began working in the legal profession.
1932Joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
1942Served as SS general inspector of civil administration in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
1944Became Higher SS and Police Leader in Wartheland.
1944.08Commanded Kampfgruppe Reinefarth in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
1945Commanded the fortress of Küstrin and was captured by U.S. forces.
1951–1964Served as mayor of Westerland.
1962–1967Served in the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag.
Nazi official who led SS intelligence and police agencies in implementing the Holocaust.
At the 1942 Wannsee Conference, Heydrich coordinated German state agencies for the murder of Europe’s Jews.
Heydrich joined the SS in 1931 and built and led its Security Service (SD); in 1936 he took command of the Security Police, including the Gestapo and criminal police. When the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was established in 1939, he became its chief, unifying the Security Police and SD under an agency central to Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews and political opponents. Appointed acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941, he oversaw executions of resistance figures and the ghettoization and deportation of Jews. He chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference to coordinate ministries in the murder of European Jews; wounded in an attack by Czech resistance agents in May, he died on June 4.
Career timeline
1931–1942Chief of the SS Security Service (SD)
1936–1942Chief of the Security Police, titled Chief of the Security Police Main Office, 1936–1939
1939–1942Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
1941–1942Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
The only Korean to complete the Long March, Eighth Route Army artillery commander who led the Korean Volunteer Army and the Yan'an faction
Of some thirty Koreans who set out on the Long March, Mu Chong alone survived to reach Yan'an.
He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1925 and became the only Korean to complete the Long March, rising to artillery commander of the Eighth Route Army. In northern China he organized the Korean Independence Alliance and the Korean Volunteer Army, serving as its commander-in-chief and emerging as the military leader of the Yan'an faction. After liberation he returned to North Korea, serving as KPA artillery commander and II Corps commander during the Korean War, but lost his power struggle with Kim Il Sung and was purged in December 1950 on charges of battlefield failure and murder. His downfall signalled the elimination of the Yan'an faction.
Career timeline
1925Joined the Chinese Communist Party
1934–1935Participated in the Red Army's Long March
1937–1940Artillery Commander, Eighth Route Army
1942Commander-in-Chief, Korean Volunteer Army
1946Second Secretary, Workers' Party of North Korea
1948Deputy Minister of National Defence, KPA 2nd Command
In 1945 he challenged electoral rules that left opposition groups too little time to organize.
Albanian educator and politician from Shkodra. After literary studies in Paris and antifascist resistance, he served as education minister from October 1944 to January 1945. Opposition to postwar electoral restrictions preceded his arrest in 1946 and death in custody. The dates follow AIDSSH; conflicting accounts are discussed below.
SS diplomat who, as Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary in 1944, pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz
Born in Bad Kissingen, the son of a schoolteacher, he studied political science in Munich and took his doctorate in 1928. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and took part in forcing the resignation of Austria’s Chancellor Schuschnigg, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, he became Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary when Germany occupied it in March 1944, with authority over all occupying forces except the Wehrmacht, chiefly the Gestapo, and pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz. In June he cabled Ribbentrop that some 340,000 Jews had been delivered to the Reich, and in October he helped the Arrow Cross take power. Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial in 1949, he was released in 1951 and died in Darmstadt in 1977.
Career timeline
1928Doctorate in political science, Munich
1932Joined the Nazi Party
1939Worked on dismembering Czechoslovakia
1941Arranged the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in Zagreb
1944Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary
1949–1951Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial; released 1951
The scientific adviser who made bombing a field of operational research
From his analysis of the Sicilian railways, he concluded that disabling locomotives and repair facilities could halt the network as a whole.
Solly Zuckerman was a British zoologist and public servant who helped pioneer operational research by bringing scientific observation and experiment into government policy. During the Second World War he studied bombing effects and drew on Mediterranean evidence to devise the Transportation Plan, which targeted the French railway system before the Normandy landings. The plan helped delay German reinforcement, while also leaving a record of civilian casualties and continuing controversy over bombing's effectiveness. After the war he became the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government, institutionalising the place of science in public policy.
Career timeline
1926Graduated in zoology from the University of Cape Town
1928–1932Research anatomist at the Zoological Society of London
1934–1945Professor of anatomy at the University of Oxford
1943–1945Scientific Director of the British Bombing Survey Unit and Allied air adviser
1946–1968Professor of anatomy at the University of Birmingham
1960–1966Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence
1964–1971First Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government
1977–1984President of the Zoological Society of London
1971Created Baron Zuckerman of Burnham Thorpe, a life peer
Internationalist socialist who fought across the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Revolution, subject of Song of Arirang
"Even in death, I want to see Korea's independence and the victory of the socialism I have believed in all my life." — to Nym Wales in Yan'an, 1937
Kim San was an internationalist socialist who fought across the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Revolution. He left twenty-two interviews with American journalist Nym Wales in Yan'an that became Song of Arirang (1941), a first-person account of that struggle; in 1938 he was executed on false spy charges and rehabilitated by the CCP in 1983.
Career timeline
1919Participated in March First Movement; detained by Japanese police for 3 days
1921Studied in Tokyo, then moved to China
1922Joined the Chinese Communist Party
1923Joined Communist Youth League; published magazine Revolution
1925–1927Studied at Whampoa Academy & Sun Yat-sen University; fought in Guangzhou Uprising
1936Founded Alliance for Liberation of the Korean People in Shanghai; elected Korean revolutionary representative
1937Lecturer at Yan'an Anti-Japanese Military Academy; interviewed by Nym Wales
1938Arrested by Kang Sheng's security apparatus; executed on false espionage charges
Underground Communist leader who organised anti-war demonstrations through the Independence Committee and was executed in 1942
Born in Kassa (Košice), he joined the labour movement as a university student in Prague. After the First Vienna Award of November 1938 he went underground and worked in Hungary, linking up with the Communist Party’s representative. From December 1940 he organised the party’s anti-war struggle and led the Independence Committee, which staged the demonstrations of 6 October and 1 November 1941. He prepared the Christmas 1941 issue of Népszava and wrote the editorial of the first issue of the underground Szabad Nép on 1 February 1942. Arrested on 6 July 1942, he was sentenced to death by the special court of the Chief of the General Staff and executed on 9 October.
Career timeline
1920sStudent in Prague; joined the labour movement
1938Went underground in Hungary after the First Vienna Award
1940–1942Organised the party’s anti-war work; led the Independence Committee
1942Wrote the editorial of the first Szabad Nép
1942Arrested, sentenced by a military special court, executed
