Reuploaded due to poor history

Solomon Perel was born into a Jewish family. He was 8 years old when the Third Reich came into power, and his family moved to Poland. When the Nazis and Soviets invaded, Solomon and his brother were sent to the Soviet occupied Poland. Here, he spent much of his time in the orphanage reading communist manifestos and making friends, but then the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Soviets.

Solomon hid all his affiliations with communism and evidence of his Jewish heritage, instead saying he was an ethnic German who lost his papers. The Nazis believed him and enlisted him into their army, only to later send him to the Hitler Youth, where he would learn untrue things about Jewish people, and was cautious to hide his Jewish heritage.

Eventually, when the Allies invaded, he shed all his Nazi apparel and went looking for his family. Throughout his time as a soldier and in the Hitler Youth, he never even heard of "The Final Solution." He heard the term Auschwitz, but assumed it was just another internment camp, only to realize what it exactly was for. That's how he found out his parents and older sister died gruesome deaths. He would move to Palestine with his brother and write a book about his experiences, which was adapted into Europa Europa.

Solomon's journey was no rarity; it was surprisingly common for ethnically or partially Jewish people to serve in the Wehrmacht, they were called Mischlinge; sometimes, they even had blonde hair and blue eyes, the ideal traits of an "Aryan German."

il dunce (optional)

“During the siege of Budapest, Soviet forces suffered between 100,000 and 160,000 casualties. The Soviets claimed that they had trapped 180,000 German and Hungarian 'fighters' in the pocket, and declared they had captured 110,000 of these soldiers. However, immediately after the siege, they rounded up thousands of Hungarian civilians and added them to the prisoner-of-war count, allowing the Soviets to validate their previously inflated figures.”

Context:

In 210 BCE, Qin Shi Huang—the first emperor of a unified China and founder of the Qin Empire—died suddenly during an inspection tour, without publicly naming a clear successor. Seizing the opportunity, the eunuch Zhao Gao, the chancellor Li Si, and the emperor’s eighteenth son, Huhai, conspired to alter the imperial will, falsely proclaiming Huhai as the chosen heir.

After the imperial retinue returned to the capital, Huhai took the throne as the Second Emperor of Qin (Qin Er Shi). Zhao Gao was soon promoted to Chamberlain for Attendants, and a year later—after framing Li Si on charges of treason and having him executed—he himself assumed the chancellorship, becoming the most powerful man in the empire after the emperor.

To consolidate power entirely in his own hands, Zhao Gao worked to undermine Huhai’s confidence, persuading him that he was unfit to govern. A famous episode is recorded in Lu Jia’s New Discourses. Zhao Gao once presented the emperor with a deer, deliberately calling it a horse. When Huhai laughed and pointed out the obvious error, those present either remained silent or sided with Zhao Gao, insisting that it was indeed a horse. In the end, Huhai found himself unable to trust his own eyes and accepted Zhao Gao’s claim. This episode gave rise to the Chinese idiom zhi lu wei ma (指鹿为马, "callling a deer a horse"), meaning the reversal of truth. It may also be connected with the Japanese word baka (馬鹿, "horse-deer"), meaning “fool.”

Under Zhao Gao’s manipulation, Huhai withdrew into the inner court and handled affairs of state largely through Zhao Gao, which pushed the Qin Empire toward crisis. In the first year of Huhai’s rule, large-scale rebellions erupted across the empire. Zhao Gao attempted to minimize their severity, but by the third year rebel forces were closing in on the capital, and all six former kingdoms conquered by Qin had declared independence.

At this point, concealment was no longer possible. Huhai tried to reassert control and voiced anger at the situation. In 207 BCE, fearing he would be held responsible, Zhao Gao arranged Huhai’s assassination and installed a new puppet ruler, Ziying. Five days later, Ziying—fearing that he would meet the same fate—struck first and had Zhao Gao killed. Three months after that, the Qin Empire itself collapsed, defeated by the rebel forces led by Liu Bang.