50 facts about Afghanistan that will give you goosebumps

January 26 is the day of the commemoration of all the victims of the Holocaust, on this occasion Bemorepanda has prepared some hot and worth watching movies about the harsh reality.

Although Europe is thriving, its politicians and writers are worried about death. The mass murder of European civilians between 1930 and 1940 is the point of reference for today's confusing discussions about memory and the cornerstone of European shared ethics. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass deaths, human beings to the point of dying. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark forests and falsified the archives of the regions where they starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers who would bury and burn the bodies of the Jews, victims of huge fires. Auschwitz, generally regarded as the proper or even the most important symbol of the evil caused by mass murder, is, in fact, only the beginning of knowledge, a starting point for a true reckoning with the past, which is only now being shown.

The main reasons why we know something about Auschwitz distort our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors there, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a concentration camp and a death factory at the same time. These were mostly Western European Jews, because they were usually sent to Auschwitz. After World War II, Jewish Jewish survivors in Western Europe were free to write and publish as they wished, while Eastern European Jews, prisoners behind the Iron Curtain, could not. In the West, memories of the Holocaust could (albeit very slowly) enter historical writing and the public consciousness.

This form of survivor history, for which the works of Primo Levi are the best example, inadequately captures the reality of mass murder. Anne Frank's diary talks about assimilated European Jewish communities, such as the German and Danish communities, whose tragedy, though horrific, was only a small part of the Holocaust. In 1943 and 1944, when most of the crimes took place among Western European Jews, the Holocaust was largely complete. Two-thirds of the Jews killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, Polish Jews and Soviet Jews, were killed by bullets fired from death nests or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines, pumped. in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

1.Leningrad (2009)

The action of the film takes place in November 1941. The city is under a continuous siege, the bombings do not stop, but the most disturbing for the 2,887,000 is the fact that the city was surrounded, completely canceling the connection with the rest of the world.

2.Anne Frank

Died of typhus at the age of 15, just two weeks before the release of the camp, Anne Frank, who could have become a great writer, became the best-known Holocaust victim and the voice of an entire generation.

3.Colditz

In World War II, Officer Jack Rose is taken prisoner in the famous Colditz Castle in Germany. Here, he gathers around him the greatest team of escape specialists, only to find that in the end the greatest betrayal awaits him outside prison.

Auschwitz, as a symbol of the Holocaust, excludes those who were at the center of the historic event. The largest group of Holocaust victims - Orthodox Jews and Yiddish speakers in Poland or, in German vocabulary, Ostjuden - was culturally alienated from Western Europeans, including Jews from Western Europe. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized in the memory of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory was built on the territories now part of Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with modern-day Poland by anyone who visits it, although relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two large groups of victims are almost missing from the memorial symbol.

An appropriate view of the Holocaust should place Operation Reinhardt - the killing of Polish Jews in 1942 - at the heart of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, and Warsaw was the largest Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. About 1.5 million Jews were killed in these three places, 780,863 in Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these death factories. Belzec, although in third place in Holocaust crimes, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is little known. 434,508 Jews perished in that death factory, and only two or three survived. Another million Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some in Chelmno, Majdanek or Auschwitz, many others shot dead in the eastern half of the country.

All in all, even though the number of Jews killed by bullets was not as high as those killed by gassing, they died of bullets in places forgotten in a hazy memory. The second very important part of the Holocaust is mass shooting in Eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with the shooting of Jewish men by the SS Einsatzgruppen in June 1941, followed by the killing of Jewish women and children in July and the extermination of the entire Jewish community in August and September. At the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliary troops and Romanian troops) killed one million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltic States. It is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with consistent local support) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the populations of Soviet Jews under their control had ceased to exist.

4.Stalingrad

The plot of the Russian feature film is based on "a dramatic love story, set against the backdrop of a great battle." The action took place in 1942, when German troops occupied the banks of the Volga River.

5.The Devil's Arithmetic

Sixteen-year-old Hannah Stern (Kirsten Dunst, "Spiderman") accompanies her parents to visit Aunt Eva for the Jewish holiday celebration of Passover, but Hannah is uninterested in her uncle's stories of the Holocaust. Reluctantly taking part in the tradition of Seder, she opens the door to prepare for the arrival of the prophet Elijah and is mysteriously transported to Poland in the year 1941.

There were Soviet Jewish witnesses and chroniclers, such as Vasili Grossman. But he, like others, was forbidden to present the Holocaust as a Jewish event. Grossman discovered Treblinka as a journalist with the Red Army in September 1944. Perhaps because he knew what the Germans had done to the Jews in his native Ukraine, he was able to guess what had happened there and wrote a book about it. He called Treblinka a "hell" and placed it at the center of the war and the century. But for Stalin, the mass murder of the Jews was to be seen as the suffering of the "citizens." Grossman helped draw up a Black Paper on German crimes against Soviet Jews, which the Soviet authorities later banned. Stalin erroneously argued that if a particular group suffered especially under German occupation, it was the Russians. Thus, Stalinism obstructed our correct view of Hitler's mass murders.

In short, the Holocaust meant, in order: Operation Reinhardt, the Shoah with Bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the approximately 5.7 million Jews killed, three million were pre-war Polish citizens and another million were Soviet citizens: taken together, 70% of the total. (After the Soviet and Polish Jews, the next large group of Jews killed were from Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. If we take them into account, the Eastern European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

Even this corrected picture of the Holocaust leads to an incomplete sense of the extent of the mass murder policies of Germans in Europe. The "final solution," as the Nazis called it, was at first only one of the extermination projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. If things went as expected by Hitler, Himmler and Göring, German forces would have implemented a "Hunger Plan" in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941-1942. While agricultural products from Ukraine and southern Russia were sent to Germany, nearly 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia and Soviet cities were starved to death. The "famine plan" would have been just a prelude to the "Generalplan Ost", the settlement plan for the western Soviet Union, which aimed to eliminate 50 million people.

6.The Pianist

The Pianist is the true story of a brilliant Polish pianist who, due to his Jewish origins, is forced to lead a fugitive life during the Nazi occupation of Poland in order to escape deportation.

7.Uprising

Using the photo archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, this "interview" by Jon Avnet talks about the memoirs of Marek Edelman and the role he played in the 1943 imprisonment there against the Nazis.

The Germans have succeeded in pursuing certain policies that bear some resemblance to these plans. They expelled half a million non-Jewish Poles from the territories annexed to the Reich. An impatient Himmler ordered the implementation of a first stage of the "Generalplan Ost" in eastern Poland: ten thousand children were killed and one hundred thousand adults were expelled. The Wehrmacht intentionally starved nearly a million people during the siege of Leningrad and another hundred thousand in Ukrainian cities. Nearly three million captured Soviet soldiers starved to death in German camps with prisoners of war. These people were intentionally killed: during the siege of Leningrad, there was a plan and intent to starve people to death. If the Holocaust had not taken place, they would have been called the most horrific war crimes in modern history.

In the actions against the partisans, the Germans probably killed 750,000 people, of which 350,000 in Belarus alone, and a smaller but comparable number in Poland and Yugoslavia. The Germans killed more than a hundred thousand Poles during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. If the Holocaust had not existed, these "reprisals" would have been considered one of the greatest war crimes in history. German occupation policies have killed non-Jewish civilians in other ways, for example, by hard labor in prison camps. Again, most of them came from Poland and the Soviet Union.

The Germans killed just over ten million civilians in the largest mass killings, nearly half of them Jews and half non-Jews. Both Jews and non-Jews came mostly from the same part of Europe. The plan to kill all the Jews was, in essence, realized; the plan to destroy the Slavic populations was only partially implemented. Auschwitz is just an introduction to the Holocaust, and the Holocaust is just a suggestion of Hitler's final plans. Grossman's books - Rhei's Slope and Life and Destiny - rename terror, Nazi and Soviet alike, and remind us that even a full characterization of German mass murder policies is incomplete as a history of European atrocity in the middle of the last century.

8.Der letzte zug

The Last Train is a 2006 German film directed by Joseph Wilsmeier and Dana Vavrova and starring Gedeon Burkhard, Lale Java and Lena.

9.Saving Private Ryan

Captain Miller must lead his men behind enemy lines to find Private Ryan. In the face of overwhelming enemy forces, the soldiers question the orders. Why do eight soldiers risk their lives to save one?

10.Escape from Sobibor

During World War II, those concentrated in extermination camps could only hope for survival by trying to escape. In the case of Sobibor, this was only possible if all 600 prisoners escaped.

It omits the state that Hitler was deeply intent on destroying, that is, the other state that massively killed Europeans in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. During the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies cautiously killed over five million Europeans. Thus, when one analyzes the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one must consider three groups of relatively equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed. by the Soviet state. As a general rule, the German regime killed civilians who were not German citizens, while the Soviet regime killed civilians who were Soviet citizens.

Soviet repression is identified with the Gulag, just as Nazi repression is identified with Auschwitz. The gulag, despite all the horrors of forced labor, was not a mass murder system. If we accept that the mass murder of civilians is at the heart of political, ethical and legal concerns, the same historical feature applies to the Gulag and Auschwitz. I found out about the Gulag because it was a bearing system, not a set of death factories. The gulag detained 30 million people and shattered about three million lives. But a large majority of these people, who were sent to the camps, returned alive from there. Precisely because we have a literature of the Gulag - the best known book being Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago - we can imagine its horrors to a greater extent than we can imagine the horrors of Auschwitz.

Just as Auschwitz distracts us from the even greater horrors of the Treblinka, the Gulag distracts us from Soviet policies that killed people directly and premeditatedly by starvation and bullets. Among the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the famine of collectivization in 1930-1933 and the Great Terror in 1937-1938. It remains unclear whether the Cossack famine of 1930-1932 was intentional, although it is clear that more than a million Cossacks starved to death. It is well established that Stalin starved the Soviet Ukrainians to death in the winter of 1932-1933. Soviet documents revealed a series of orders from October to December 1933, given with obvious malice and intent to kill. In the end, more than three million people of Soviet Ukraine died.

11.The Grey Zone

Based on actual events, "The Grey Zone" is the story of the Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando - one of the thirteen consecutive "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of helping to exterminate fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life. Stars Michael Suhlbarg, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne.

12.Out of the Ashes

Christine Lahti is the protagonist of this shocking film, inspired by the real case of Dr. Gisella Perl, one of the first women gynecologists in Eastern Europe, who was imprisoned in the Auschwitz camp during the Nazi occupation. When the Nazis decided to use her as a doctor, she was forced to become the assistant to the famous war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele. But through an amazing combination of defiance, humanity and strength, she managed to restore hope to thousands of people.

13.Sorok pervyy

An unexpected love story is woven between a Red Army sniper and a White Army officer …

What we read about the Great Terror also distracts us from its true nature. The great novel and the great memoir about this period are Dark at Noon by Arthur Koestler and The Defendant by Alexander Weissberg. Both focus on a small group of Stalin's victims, communist city leaders, educated people, some of whom are known in the West. This image dominates our understanding of the Great Terror, but it is incorrect. Taken together, the purges of the communist elites, the secret police, the army officers amount to no more than 47,737 dead.

The biggest action taken in the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was directed mainly at the "kulaci", ie peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. 386,798 lives. Several national minorities, together representing less than 2% of the Soviet population, accounted for more than a third of the victims of the Great Terror. In an operation against ethnic Poles who were Soviet citizens, for example, 111,091 people were shot. Of the 681,692 executions during the political crimes of 1937 and 1938, Operation Kulaci and those against national minorities killed 633,955, more than 90 percent of the total. These people were secretly shot, dumped in mass graves and forgotten.

The focus on Auschwitz and the Gulag minimizes the number of Europeans killed and moves the geographical center of crime to the German Reich and eastern Russia. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag with its well-known Siberian camps takes us away from the geographical center of Soviet assassination policies. If we focus on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we do not notice that in a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, about 12 million victims of Soviet and Nazi mass murder policies perished in a certain region of Europe, one defined more or less by Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia today. In general, when we consider the Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrants or totalitarian states. But such a view of Berlin and Moscow's thinking and politics tends to overlook the fact that mass killings took place mainly in European territories between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia.

14.The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Set during World War II, the story is told through the innocent eyes of Bruno, the 8-year-old son of a concentration camp commander. The boy befriends a Jewish boy, behind the fence of the camp.

15.The Book Thief

The film tells the story of a lively and courageous girl named Liesel who transforms the lives of everyone around her when she is sent to live with an adoptive family in World War II Germany.

Mass killings is Eastern Europe, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States, lands that have been the subject of sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The people of Ukraine and Belarus, especially Jews, but not only, suffered the most when they came to the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and were subjected to the worst German repression in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower calls it, a "dark continent," Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

Historical assessments that can be seen as objective, such as counting the victims of mass killings, could help restore a slightly lost historical balance. Germans who suffered terribly under Hitler and during the war are not at the center of the history of mass murder. Even if we include ethnic Germans killed during the flight from the Red Army, those expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945-1947, and those who fell victim to the bombing of Germany, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparable. little.

The main victims of direct killing policies among German citizens are the 70,000 "euthanized" patients and the 165,000 German Jews. The main German victims of Stalin remain the women raped by the Red Army and the prisoners of war detained in the Soviet Union. About 363,000 German prisoners died of starvation and disease in Soviet captivity, as did about 200,000 Hungarians. At a time when German resistance to Hitler is beginning to garner media attention, it must be remembered that some of the participants in the plot against Hitler in July 1944 were right at the center of mass murder policies: Arthur Nebe, for example. , who led Einsatzgruppe B in the Belarusian territories during the first wave of the 1941 Holocaust; or Eduard Wagner, the general superintendent of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a lively letter to his wife about the need to deny food to millions of hungry people in Leningrad.

16.The English Patient

At the end of World War II, Count Almasy suffered a terrible burn in a plane crash. Watched by a devoted and sensitive nurse, he remembers his life.

17.Sophie's Choice

Sophie, a Polish Catholic, is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Here she lost her husband, children, and parents. Arriving in New York to write a book, young Stingo meets her and falls in love with her.

18.Sophie Scholl - Die Letzten Tage

Oscar® 2005 nomination - Best Foreign Language Film. Most important awards: European Film Award - German Film Award - German Film Award - Audience Award German Film Award Best Bavarian Film The main question raised by this film is what can be done when you realize that the Nazi regime has Go crazy - do you resist, even though it is clear that it is useless or not?

It's hard to forget Anna Akhmatova: "The Russian land loves blood." However, Russian martyrdom and heroism, now vehemently proclaimed in Putin's Russia, must be placed on as broad a historical background as possible. The Soviet Russians - like any other Soviet citizen - were indeed victims of Stalinist policy: but the risk of being killed was lower than in the case of Ukrainians or Soviet Poles or members of other national minorities. During World War II, several severe acts of terror were extended to eastern Poland and the Baltic states, territories absorbed by the Soviet Union. In the best-known case, 22,000 Polish citizens were shot in 1940 in Katyn and four other places; Tens of thousands of other Poles and Baltics died during or immediately after deportations to Kazakhstan and Siberia. During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but proportionally fewer than the Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention the Jews. The death toll from Soviet civilians is estimated at 15 million. On average, 1 in 25 Russian civilians was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to 1 in 10 in Ukraine (or Poland) or 1 in 5 in Belarus.

Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for much of the war, with German and Soviet armies crossing their entire territory twice in attack or retreat. German armies have never occupied more than a small part of Russia's territory for short periods. Even if we take into account the siege of Leningrad and the destruction of Stalingrad, German control of Russian civilians was much less than that of the Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Jews. The Russians claim the death toll in Belarus and Ukraine as belonging to Russia and treat Belarusians, Ukrainians and Jews as Russians: this leads to an imperialism of martyrdom, to the implicit claim to territory by explicitly claiming the victims. This seems to be the line proposed by the new historical commission appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev to prevent "falsifications" of Russia's past. Under the legislation being debated in Russia today, statements such as the above would be a criminal offense.

19.In Darkness

It is the year 1941. Leopold Socha, a dumpster and petty thug, comes across a group of Jews fleeing the ghetto who want to hide in the city's underground canals, which he knows very well. As such, he agrees to help them for a fee. What begins as a bargain turns into something unexpected, as for 14 months of maximum danger, they try together to fool death.

20.Schindler's List

The true story of Oskar Schindler, a womanizer and profiteer who saves the lives of more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust. An emotional testimony about the horrors of war and the alteration of human characters in time of war.

21.La rafle.

1942. Joseph is 11 years old. This June morning, she has to go to school with a yellow star sewn on her chest. Between benevolence and contempt, Jo and other Jewish friends like him and their families learn how to live in a busy Paris.

If there is one general political lesson in the history of mass murder, it is the need to be cautious about so-called privileged development: attempts by states to achieve a political expansion that designates its victims, that motivates prosperity through mortality. The possibility of killing one group to the advantage of another cannot be ruled out, or at least that is the case. It is a version of the policies that Europe has witnessed and can continue to do. The only acceptable answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, namely that an individual is worth more in life than in death, and the above plans become unthinkable.

Today's Europe is especially remarkable for its unity and prosperity, with social justice and human rights. Probably more than any other corner of the world is immune, at least for the time being, to such soulless concerns for economic growth. However, memory has produced some strange deviations from history, at a time when history is needed more than ever. Europe's recent past may resemble the near future of the rest of the world. This is another reason to make the most accurate assessments.

22.A Bridge Too Far

War film, evoking the assault of American, Polish and British troops, to capture an important bridge behind the German front lines. The assault was carried out by a complicated action of paratroopers and armored troops

23.The Bunker

We are in 1944. The German army is retreating. Chased across the country by US allied forces, a company of Nazi soldiers seeks refuge in an anti-tank bunker. In the maze of tunnels below the bunker, strange, terrifying things begin to happen. One by one, the soldiers start cracking nervously or being killed. Paranoia dominates the whole group. Did the Americans infiltrate or is there a force of evil lurking within the walls of this complex?

24.Dresden

Germany, January 1945. Young nurse Anna Mauth (Felicitas Woll) works at a hospital in Dresden and has a romantic relationship with Dr. Alexander Wenninger (Benjamin Sadler). When an English plane is bombed, the only survivor, the pilot Robert Newman (John Light), hides in the hospital attic. Here he is accidentally discovered by Anna. At any risk, she decides to help him!

25.Pearl Harbor

On a quiet Sunday morning, Japanese fighter jets flew across the sky, launching a surprise attack on U.S. military forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This day has plunged the United States into a war, changing the course of history.

26.Flags of Our Fathers

February 1945. One of the bloodiest battles of World War II takes place on the island of Iwo Jima. At the beginning of the battle, an American flag appears on Mount Suribachi, and the image of the 5 soldiers who raised it surrounds the USA.

27.Jakob the Liar

In 1944, in Nazi-occupied Poland, Jacob, the owner of a long-closed cafe in a Jewish ghetto, accidentally overhears a news bulletin on a banned radio station. Although full of joy, he cannot share the news.

28.Vilniaus getas

1942, Vilnius. Nazis kill 55,000 Jews, and 15,000 of them are locked up in a 7-pavilion ghetto. At the age of only 22, the sadistic commander Kittel has the mission to manage the ghetto in the Lithuanian capital, becoming master of people's lives. Kittel discovers that Hayyah stole a pound of beans and sentenced her to death. When he finds out that Hayyah is a successful former singer, he decides to put on a show in the old ghetto theater. Will it be a spectacle of life or death?

29.Zwartboek

The Netherlands, 1944. A former famous Jewish singer, Rachel, now a refugee in rural Holland, tries to reach the territories liberated from German influence. A patrol captures the group of refugees it is in and only it manages to escape with its life. Arriving safely at her destination, Rachel joins the Resistance and, under the name of Ellis de Vries, manages to infiltrate the German Intelligence Service. He seduces Officer Muntze and he, seduced, offers him a job.

30.Inglourious Basterds

In German-occupied France, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) watches helplessly as her family is executed by Nazi colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Shosanna escapes through the ears of the needle and flees to Paris, where she creates a new identity.

31.Valkyrie

During World War II, German Colonel von Stauffenberg is wounded in Africa and returns to the country. Dissatisfied with Nazi abuses, Stauffenberg agrees to lead Operation Valkyrie, which aims to assassinate Hitler.

32.Saints and Soldiers

Four American soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II are separated from the rest of US troops during the Malmedy massacre. The small group remains isolated and without any help behind enemy lines.

33.We Were Soldiers

In 1965, the first battle between the Americans and the Vietnamese took place. 400 American soldiers entered Vietnamese territory and found themselves surrounded. Harold Moore, commander, and reporter Galloway also found themselves facing this situation.

34.Defiance

Inspired by real facts. 1941. Jews in Eastern Europe are massacred by the Nazis. Succeeding in escaping from a camp, three Jewish brothers take refuge in the forest. There they manage to turn a struggle for survival into something much more important.

35.Life train

One evening in 1941, Schlomo, the village madman, brings terrible news to his fellow Shetl (an Eastern European Jewish village): Germans kill and deport Jewish residents of neighboring Shetl to unknown destinations

36.Katyn

In 1940, the Soviet secret services killed thousands of Polish prisoners of war. A subject hitherto considered taboo is analyzed by the famous Andrzej Wajda, who enters one of the darkest periods in the history of Poland.

37.Rosenstraße

In the spring of 1943, German and Jewish women gathered on Rosenstrasse in central Berlin to protest against sending Jewish husbands to concentration camps. The painful memories, which have become family secrets, have been preserved in modern-day New York. Ruth continues to perform Jewish mourning rituals for her late husband. Her daughter, Hannah, learns the story of her mother, a war orphan Selected in the official competition of the Vene Festival.

38.Naples - Elite fur den Fuhrer

We are in 1942. Friedrich Weimer, a 17-year-old hardworking boy from a working-class district of Berlin, loves boxing. His only problem is that he is always reluctant to give the final blow that could knock out his opponent. During a boxing match, he is spotted by a Naples recruiting officer who offers to help him. 'NaPolA' is the acronym for 'National Politische Erziehungs Anstalt' or 'National Institute of Political Education'.

39.Enemy At The Gates

As the German and Russian armies clash, Vassili, the sniper, ambushes his enemies. Vanity pushes him into a duel with the best German sniper, Major Konig, and the two find themselves engaged in a personal battle.

40.Into the White

WWII. Two planes, one British and the other German, crash into an isolated land. Driven by the freezing cold, both pilots seek shelter in the same hut. Although enemies, they will be forced to cooperate in order to survive.

41.Band of Brothers

This terrifying World War II saga closely follows the journey of the 147 members of Easy Company's paramilitary troops, from the first training sessions to the memorable day of landing in Normandy.

42.De Tweeling

After the death of their parents, twin sisters Anna and Lotte Bamberg have been brutally separated since the age of six. Anna stays in Germany, where she grows up in quite difficult conditions on the farm of her uncle Heinrich and his wife, Martha. Lotte, who is ill, has a happy life in the Netherlands, with her parents' more distant relatives - the Rockanjes family. In the years following the separation, the twins did their best to get in touch.

43.The Pacific

See all 10 installments of HBO's acclaimed World War II miniseries 'The Pacific' plus a 'making of' special, 'Anatomy of the Pacific War' featurette and 'Marines of the Pacific' featuring profiles of six WWII heroes.

44.The Great Escape

In 1944, a group of Allied prison officers organized the escape from Stalag Luft III, one of the best guarded prison camps in Germany. The preparations lasted a year and involved the participation of over 600 people.

45.Europe Europe

The film is based on real events between 1938 and 1945. Salomon "Solly" Perel is a Polish Jew from Germany, whose life changes radically when the Nazis break into his wife's apartment. Separated from her parents and siblings, Solly is saved only by the Nazi uniform she wears. This gesture is the forerunner of his future "career". From here, Solly is subjected to many attempts, but the biggest one is to kill the Jews.

46.Flames & Lemons

Drama centered on two fighters from the Holger Danske resistance group during World War II.

47.Max Manus

The film is based on the true story of resistance fighter Max Manus and follows the hero from the beginning of World War II until the summer of 1945. After fighting the Russians in the Finnish Winter War, Max returns. in Nazi-occupied Norway. He soon joined the resistance movement and became one of the most famous members of the so-called Oslo Group.

48.Letters from Iwo Jima

Over 60 years ago, American and Japanese soldiers fought on the island of Iwo Jima. Decades later, hundreds of letters are unearthed at Iwo Jima, letters that give face and voice to the men who fought there.

49.Hiroshima

Documentary made by British television, which describes through reconstructions the catastrophic moments during the bombing and after it.

50.Hiroshima my love

"In the elements of the story there seems to be more of an excuse for the film than the film itself, which always amazes and surprises, offering developments that the mind cannot immediately perceive. There is always in the film an atmosphere of guilty meanings, Hiroshima, war, love lost, the anxiety that remains separate elements and does not even intend to crystallize. " - Peter Harcont 1974 (Film Comment).

Much water has flowed under the bridge since the end of the Second World War. But for a long time, pain and sorrow will haunt humanity after a terrible war. Also, many archival documents of that time have not yet been declassified. As well as many facts about this great tragedy of the whole world are not known. Russia was alwasy an active fighter, that's why Bemorepanda collected top 10 facts about Russia during World War 2.

We decided to remember the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War, having collected for you ten facts that you may not know.

1. President Roosevelt used Al Capone's limousine

On the day of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the Secret Service realized they did not have a bulletproof vehicle to safely transport President Roosevelt to Congress, where he was to deliver a speech of shame. A quick-witted presidential security agent recalled that the U.S. Treasury seized Al Capone's bulletproof limousine in 1931. It was decided to take the President to Congress in this car.

Fortunately, the criminal leader's car was still in working order, and as a result, the head of the United States was safely taken to Congress. According to some reports, when Roosevelt was informed that he would be transported in a car seized from the bandit, the US President said: "I hope Mr. Capone will not mind."

2. Nadezhda Popova (1921-2013)

Nadezhda Popova (top left) was only 19 years old when she became a pilot; she was motivated by revenge after her brother was killed by the Nazis in 1941. She conducted 852 missions (!!!) together with other girls-pilots, whom the Germans called "night witches" (the girls got this nickname for the whistling bombs they dropped on German military targets at night).

"Night witches" flew only in the dark and "did not have parachutes, guns, radios or radars, only maps and compasses. When tracer bullets hit, their planes burned like paper. Sometimes the pilots made 18 missions in one night. But most of the sorties were carried out by Popova. Almost every sortie took place under enemy fire. (After one flight, Popova counted 42 bullet holes in her plane. FORTY. TWO!)

 

The Night Witches were so deadly that they dropped 23,000 tons of bombs on the Nazis over four years. As a result, the German command awarded its soldiers with the Iron Cross for just one downed plane of the "night witches".

All the missions of Soviet pilots were dangerous and difficult. “When the wind was strong, he threw the plane violently. In winter, when visibility is poor, you had to lean out of the plane to better see the target. As a result, the pilots often got frostbite, our feet froze in our boots, but we continued to fly, - said Nadezhda Popova. - The main thing was not to surrender and not be captured. The task is to complete the mission by all means. Those who surrendered were shot and burned alive in their plane. Those who jumped out of the downed plane crashed because the pilots did not have parachutes. "

Popova's planes were shot down several times, but she always survived, and later she became deputy commander of the 588th regiment of night bombers. Seriously, you should read about this aviator in more detail. You will be amazed at her courage, her desire to defend her homeland from the Nazis. You can do it here and here. You can also read it here.

3. In 1942, American radio DJs were prohibited from accepting listener requests. The government feared that enemy spies would embed secret messages in such requests of listeners.

4. The SS operated a brothel called Salon Kitty, which was frequented by foreign diplomats. They collected information by eavesdropping and teaching prostitutes how to get information from clients.

5. Russia and Japan have never signed a formal peace treaty with each other to end World War II.

  

6. Nearly 80% of men born in the Soviet Union in 1923 did not survive the Second World War.

7. Russia is also the country with the highest number of casualties in the Great Patriotic War - an estimated 26.5 million people.

Despite the fact that 74 years have passed since the end of the Great Patriotic War, it is still not known exactly how many people actually died in our country. At the moment, official figures say about 26.6 million people, of which 8.7 million are military personnel. But, according to historians, who are based on historical scientific data, the death toll of military personnel is 13.6 million people.

  

8. Board games "Monopoly" helped thousands of Allied POWs to escape from German camps

Germany allowed the Red Cross to send parcels to prisoners of war, and board games were among the items that could be sent. Special monopoly boxes with a double bottom were created, in which there were items that helped the prisoners escape:

- German, French and Italian currency has been hidden under the fake bottom of the board game box

- A small compass was also hidden in the game

- Maps of the prison and its location hidden inside the playing field

9. Lyudmila Pavlichenko (1916-1974)

By the age of 25, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, born in Ukraine, was already an accomplished and professional sniper with 309 confirmed killings credited to her name. Three hundred and nine enemy soldiers were eliminated by a Soviet sniper! (In addition, most of them were German soldiers! INCLUDING GERMAN OFFICERS and 36 enemy snipers!) Some of her missions lasted several days, she had to carefully camouflage herself in various environmental conditions. Including in severe frost. Lyudmila received four wounds in battles.

It is noteworthy that at first Pavlichenko was actually not allowed to join the Red Army, but after she was rejected, she decided to prove that she could be a valuable soldier. So, in one of the units of the Red Army that defended the height, she was handed a pistol and tasked to eliminate two Romanian Nazi soldiers. She successfully completed the task. She was allowed to join the army. She later became a lieutenant. According to her, she was not afraid to kill the Nazis, since every surviving German could continue to kill Russian women, children and old people.

 In 1942, Pavlichenko came to the United States at the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; journalists asked her a lot of questions. For example, were Soviet female soldiers allowed to wear makeup? Her response: "There are no rules against this, but who has time to think of her shiny face when the battle is going on?"

In American newspapers, yellow-press journalists began to criticize Lyudmila for not wearing makeup and wearing an olive-green uniform that does not suit a girl. To which she commented: “I wear the uniform with honor. He is wearing the Order of Lenin. He was covered in blood in battle. Obviously, for many American women, it is important whether female soldiers wear silk underwear under uniforms. What it means to wear a uniform, they have yet to learn. "

The Washington Post wrote about Lyudmila at the time: “Isn't this part of military philosophy - that a warrior is proud to wear a military uniform and that it doesn't matter how you look, the main thing is pride? Isn't this Joan of Arc in modern guise? "

10. The term "Third Reich" was first used by the German author Arthur Möller van den Bruck in his 1923 book "Das Dritte Reich" ("Third Reich")

 

Moeller van den Broek wrote that there were two previous Reichs:

- The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806)

- The Second Reich was the German Empire (1871-1918)

In his opinion, the Third Reich is also coming. As a result, Hitler took many things and terms from this book for his state. It is noteworthy that the term "Third Reich" was used as the unofficial self-designation of the German state. But by 1939 the term was recognized as "monarchist" and banned.

Much of what we know about the military conflict of 1914-1918 is untrue, writes historian Dan Snow.

None of the wars in history has caused as many controversies and myths as the First World War.

For the soldiers who took part in the battles, it was in some sense better than previous conflicts, and in some way worse.

If you just label it as terrible, you can lose sight of the realities of not only World War I, but wars in general. There is also a danger of belittling the ordeals that the military and civilians have gone through in countless other conflicts in human history up to the present day. Bemorepanda collected this myths for you.

1. The conflict at that time became the most bloody.

Dead soldiers.

50 years before the start of World War I, an even bloodier conflict erupted in China. According to the most conservative estimates, between 20 and 30 million people died in the 14 years of the Taiping Uprising. A total of 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed in World War I.

Although in absolute numbers, World War I claimed more British lives than any other conflict before or after it, in percentage terms, the bloodiest civil war in the British Isles was the 17th century civil war. During the First World War, 2% of Britons died, in the civil war the death rate in England and Wales was supposedly 4%, in Scotland and Ireland it was even higher.

2. Most of the soldiers were killed.

British soldiers.

In Great Britain, approximately 6 million people were drafted to participate in hostilities. Of these, 700 thousand people did not return from the war. This amounts to approximately 11.5%.

In fact, British soldiers were more likely to die during the Crimean War (1853-1856).

3. The soldiers lived in trenches for several years.

The trench of the First World War.

The living conditions in the trenches on the front line did not allow them to stay in them for a long time. Often it was damp and cold there, there was no protection from fire in them. Soldiers with a long stay in the trenches could quickly lose their fighting spirit.

In this regard, the British army constantly replaced soldiers in the trenches. During between major battles, the military unit, as a rule, was in the trenches for about 10 days a month, and of these, the soldiers were directly on the front line for no more than three days. There were frequent cases when the soldiers did not send the front line for a whole month.

In critical moments, for example, during an offensive, the British military could be on the front line for a week, but much more often they were changed after a couple of days.

4. Representatives of high society got off lightly.

Hearse.

Although most of those killed in World War I were of the working class, members of the political and secular elite also suffered significant losses. Their sons became junior officers who were supposed to lead people into the attack and thereby expose themselves to the greatest danger.

About 12% of ordinary soldiers died during the war, while for officers this figure is 17%. For example, more than a thousand people from the elite Eton College graduates perished on the battlefields, which amounted to approximately 20% of those who went to the front. The then British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost his son in the war, and the future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Lowe lost two sons. Another future head of government, Anthony Eden, lost two brothers, another brother was seriously wounded, and his uncle was captured.

5. "Lions under the command of donkeys".

The landing of the allied army.

This statement is attributed to German commanders. It supposedly refers to the brave British soldiers under the command of worthless old aristocrats in French castles. In fact, this phrase was invented by the historian Alan Clarke.

During the war, more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Most went to the front lines every day. In battles, they were much closer to the center of the battle than the generals of our day.

Naturally, not all generals coped with their duties, but some were skilled military leaders, such as the Canadian Arthur Kerry. He came from the middle class, and in civilian life he could not achieve much success in the field of insurance agent and developer.

Few times before did military leaders have to adapt to the conditions of war that were so technologically unusual for them.

In the British army, commanders were taught to wage small colonial wars. And they found themselves drawn into a large-scale industrial conflict, which the British army had never encountered before.

Despite this, in three years the British have essentially invented the method of warfare that is still generally used today. By the summer of 1918, the British army was at the peak of its power, and one after another struck at the German army.

6. Australians and New Zealanders took part in the Dardanelles operation.

Monument in Australia.

More British soldiers fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula than Australians and New Zealanders combined.

Britain lost four or five times more men in that operation than its Australian and New Zealand allies. There were also more French deaths than Australians.

The Australians and New Zealanders honor the memory of those killed in the Dardanelles operation with particular zeal, but this is understandable, because their losses have become a significant loss in percentage terms both for their armed forces and for the small population of these countries.

7. Tactics on the Western Front remained unchanged despite repeated setbacks.

Airplanes of the First World War.

Never before have tactics and technology changed so radically in four years of war. It was a time of outstanding innovation. In 1914, generals pranced across the battlefield on horseback, and soldiers in caps went on the attack without the slightest fire cover. Both sides were mainly armed with rifles. Four years later, the troops went on the attack in steel helmets and under the cover of artillery fire.

They were armed with flamethrowers, light machine guns and could fire grenades from rifles. In 1914, airplanes seemed like a miracle of technology - by the end of the war, they could engage in aerial duels. Some aircraft were equipped with experimental wireless radio transmitters and could conduct real-time reconnaissance.

Heavy artillery guns could fire with high accuracy, based only on aerial photographs of the area and mathematical calculations. The process of creating tanks from the drawing board to finished samples on the battlefield took some two years. These machines changed the course of hostilities forever.

8. There were no winners.

Artillery of the First World War.

Vast territories in Europe were turned into ruins, millions of people died or were injured. Those who survived for the rest of their lives were forced to carry the most severe emotional trauma. Great Britain went bankrupt. It is strange to talk about the winners in such a situation.

From a military point of view, however, Britain and its allies won an overwhelming victory. German warships were blocked by the British Royal Navy until riots broke out among the German sailors.

The German army was defeated as a result of coordinated attacks by the allies, who managed to break through the seemingly invulnerable defenses.

By the end of September 1918, the German Kaiser and his chief military adviser, Erich von Ludendorff, recognized that there was no hope of victory and Germany needed to ask for peace. Armistice Day on November 11, 1918 became, in fact, Germany's surrender.

Unlike Adolf Hitler in 1945, the German government did not continue the futile struggle until the Allies entered Berlin. Thanks to the truce, thousands of lives were saved, but it also became a reason for demagoguery that Germany did not lose the war.

9. The Versailles Peace Treaty was unreasonably harsh.

The offensive of the forces of the German army.

The Versailles Peace Treaty took about 10% of the territory from Germany. Even so, Germany remains the largest and richest country in Europe.

Most of the German lands escaped occupation. The requirement for Germany to pay reparations was tied to its ability to pay and was practically not fulfilled.

The terms of the peace were much softer than the requirements of treaties concluded both after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and after the Second World War. Following the results of the first war, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine, which had long belonged to France, were ceded to Germany, where the French mining and metallurgical industry was concentrated. France also had to pay a considerable indemnity, and immediately.

After World War II, Germany was occupied and divided into parts. The country's industrial capacity was systematically destroyed or exported. Millions of German prisoners remained in captivity for several years after the war and worked for the winners for free. Germany lost all the lands acquired in the interwar years, and even vast territories beyond that.

The Versailles Treaty was not at all cruel to the vanquished - it was Hitler who presented it as such. He needed to create anti-Versailles sentiments in order to then use them to come to power.

10. Everyone hated the war.

Buckingham Palace.

As in any war, it all depends on luck. You can become a witness of terrible tragic events that will forever leave a mark on life, both psychological and physical. And you can get out of this without a single scratch. This could be the best or worst time in your life.

Many soldiers in the First World War liked it. With the best of luck, they did not get into violent combat, and in most cases their living conditions in war were better than at home.

British soldiers were fed meat, which was an unaffordable luxury at home. They were supplied with cigarettes, tea and rum. They were supposed to consume 4 thousand calories a day.

The percentage of those on sick leave was barely above the peacetime indicator. It is an important indicator of a soldier's morale. Many young soldiers enjoyed guaranteed pay, strong friendships, responsibility and much more sexual freedom than in Britain.

Ukraine's eighth day of war has been difficult but optimistic, said President Zelensky's adviser Aleksey Arestovich last night. Near Nikolaev, the invaders were bombed from Grads facilities. In Kherson, the Ukrainian Armed Forces destroyed about 1,000 assailants, 20 helicopters, 200 cars. In Gostomel, two street fights took place, Ukrainian defenders destroyed a concentration of troops.

 

Bemorepanda collected 10 videos that are showing the reality behind the situation in Ukraine.

 

Russian troops arrived in the center of the Ukrainian port of Kherson on Thursday, the first major accomplishment of the invasion launched last Thursday, and in the capital Kyiv and other big cities, the occupation forces continued the destructive bombing, without significant troop movements, probably due to logistical problems. . A Ukrainian delegation has left for a second round of talks with Russian ceasefire officials. A fire broke out on Friday morning at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest of its kind in Europe, after a bombardment by Russian troops, causing concern around the world.

 

 

 

The United Nations says one million people have fled their homes in Ukraine to Poland and other neighboring countries.

 

The United Nations has overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine and calling for the immediate withdrawal of its forces, in a global expression of outrage that has highlighted Russia's growing isolation.

 

At an emergency session of the UN General Assembly, 141 of the 193 member states voted in favor of the resolution, 35 abstained and five voted against.

 

 

 

The only countries that voted in favor of Moscow were Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea and Syria.

 

Russia's longtime allies, Cuba and Venezuela have joined China in refraining.

 

It is the first time in the last 40 years that the Security Council has sent the General Assembly to discuss a crisis and the 11th emergency session since 1950 and so far, writes The Guardian.

 

The General Assembly was convened after the Security Council, due to the lack of unanimity of the permanent members, failed to exercise its main function of acting appropriately for the maintenance of international peace and security.

 

 

 

"It will not stop the Russian forces in their tracks, but it is a big diplomatic victory for the Ukrainians and the United States and for all those who supported them," said Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group.

 

The Russians have captured the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, while the International Court of Justice has opened an investigation into the allegations of genocide and will hold public hearings starting next week. Kyiv resists the siege of Russian troops, and the city of Mariupol is surrounded. One million Ukrainians have left the country since the beginning of the invasion, and Russia has changed its military strategy and is pursuing the slow annihilation of the Ukrainian army.

 

 About 150 public radio stations in Europe will broadcast the song "Give Peace a Chance" on Friday at 07:45 GMT, the European Radio and Television Union (EBU) announced.

 

 

The famous song, composed by John Lennon, will be heard in more than 25 countries, including Ukraine, and private radio stations can join the initiative, according to EBU.

 

Ukrainian authorities say Russian bombings in the city of Toretsk (Donetsk region) have hit a gas pipeline, leaving more than 15,000 people without heat. 400 homes, 8 schools, 9 kindergartens and 10 hospitals are affected, according to the Emergency Service

 

 

women, a lot of children, people who want to escape the horror of war. In the city, since 4 in the morning, anti-aircraft sirens sounded, a sound that is heard more and more often in the city. Many people have nowhere to flee and are trying to find a safe place.

 

Inside the Odessa train station, the images are even more dramatic, with thousands of children fleeing the horrors of war. I don't know when they will return and if they will have a place to return.

 

 

 

Many Ukrainians who are at the station on Friday at noon say they want to go to Poland and look for accommodation there.

 

To find their loved ones alive is the greatest wish of the Ukrainians who are now fleeing, hoping that they will escape the war. It is extremely difficult for them, because they leave behind their house, their fortune, their grandparents and they pray to survive until they manage to buy a ticket back, with which to return home, to their relatives, to their homes.

 

 

Images from the Odessa train station are painful and difficult to describe in words. It is an atmosphere of deep pain and emotion. People say that they do not know what is happening to them and why they have to witness this conflict that they do not understand and they wonder when this nightmare that they are living will end.

 

There are a lot of simple people in Odessa who say they can't go to other cities because they don't have enough money to get safely elsewhere.

 

 

They end up playing a lottery, where the price is their own life and they pray to God to survive.

 

In Odessa there are also tourists, but also foreign students who came to study at the Maritime University, a prestigious university, and who want to save their lives, it is very difficult for them to keep in touch with relatives, parents, because the phone signal is very weak and frequently falls in the area.

 

There are a lot of armed soldiers on the streets, ready to open fire if they don't understand clearly who you are and why you are in the area. There are soldiers who want to protect their families. There are a lot of volunteers in the army, defense groups of the city, made up of simple people, who went out on the street at night with hunting weapons and who say they are not ready to give up, do not want to give up and will defend their country and each centimeter of territory.

 

 

There are one trillion species of living beings on the planet today. This is slightly inferior to the number of trees, which are about three trillion on Earth. Each type of animal is unique and has its habits and characteristics. For example, did you know that chinchillas have the thickest fur of any land mammal and that turtles were the first animals to fly around the moon? We still know little about the natural world, and intelligent people still have much to learn. But we already know a lot.

 

Animal Facts You Won't Find in Textbooks

 

At Bemorepanda collected facts about animals and discovered that our smaller brothers hide a lot from us.

 

 

1. The average length of a giraffe's tongue is 45-50 cm. And they can grab branches with it, sticking it out 35-45 cm.

 

By the way, their tongue is dark in color (some scientists believe that the color of the language protects it from burning in the sun).

 

2. Sea lion cubs communicate with their mother using a unique set of vocal sounds so they can recognize each other.

 

Moreover, such vocalization is unique and does not resemble the sounds of other females and cubs. So the mother and her children do not confuse the sounds of other relatives. Also, each puppy and female has a unique smell that helps to recognize each other. For example, a female can find her cub by unique sounds even among hundreds of others, and when she sees it, she sniffs it as the last check.

 

3. "Puppy eyes" - the result of the joint evolution of dogs and people.

 

“Puppy eyes” or “puppy eyes” are round eyes, raised brow ridges, and a piercing, mimic look directed into a person’s eyes.

 

Domestic dogs have evolved two muscles that exaggerate the size of their eyes, making them appear larger and more expressive—in other words, cuter and cuter.

 

4. Newborn baby elephants can't see well, so they recognize their mother by touch, smell, and sound.

 

5. Male giraffes use their very long tongues to catch the female's urine to find out if she's ovulating.

 

6. The fins of the octopus Dumbo (Grimpoteutis) are like the ears of an elephant. 

 

That's why Disney named his iconic baby elephant after the cute octopus. By the way, it is one of the world's cutest octopuses.

 

 

7. Hippos have pink sweat.

 

When hippos are hot, they produce unusual sweat (an oily secretion), a reddish substance that acts like sunscreen.

 

8. Wolves are afraid of strangers and hide. Because of this, they make poor guard dogs.

 

9. Ostriches swallow pebbles to grind food in their stomachs.

 

With no teeth, ostriches swallow pebbles, so their food is digested normally. An adult ostrich can eat about 1 kg of stones at a time.

 

10. Giraffes can run at speeds up to 55-60 km / h, which is quite fast for an animal that practically walks on high stilts.

 

Usually, their average walking speed is 15-17 km/h. Compared to a person, their relaxed walking for us is the sprint speed of a runner at maximum speed.

 

11. Goats and cows have their regional accent.

 

Cows, as a rule, moo differently depending on the country, region, and area where they live. The same applies to goats, but unlike cows, goats, once in a new place where their foreign relatives live, quickly adopt their unique “accent.”

 

12. Penguins settled in an abandoned minefield protected from poachers. 

 

Penguins are too small to detonate mines, but poachers can't get through.

 

The mines were planted in the Falkland Islands when Argentine commandos occupied the territory in 1982 during a conflict with British forces. Magellanic penguins have lived in the area ever since. And since the rooms are well marked and fenced off, no civilian was harmed by mines.

 

13. Cats can feed hedgehogs.

 

In 2017, at the Sadgorod zoo in the suburbs of Vladivostok, a cat “adopted” them and began to feed them. Thanks to the care of the mother cat, the little orphaned hedgehogs were brought up.

 

14. Giraffes can live longer without water than camels.

 

15. Giraffes have twice the blood pressure of humans.

 

In just a second or two, a giraffe can raise its head from ground level up to a height of about 4.5 meters and not faint due to a lack of blood in the head. If a person could do something like that, he would immediately faint. A hard-working heart and high blood pressure keep the giraffe from fainting.

 

By the way, their blood pressure regulation system became a hint to aviation engineers to create a plan for maintaining astronauts' life support systems.

 

16. No two giraffes have the same spotting pattern, but those living in the same area tend to have the same coat.

 

 

17. Seagulls often stomp on the ground - called their "rain dance" - to attract earthworms and other insects.

 

Their stomp imitates vibrations from real rain, which lures insects to the surface, who think it has begun to rain, and, to protect themselves from moisture, crawl to the surface, where cunning birds are waiting for them.

 

18. Cats are responsible for the complete extinction of 33 animal species.

 

Let's be clear: we are talking about the street (feral cats) and not about your pets ...

 

Every year, billions of living creatures become the prey of street cats, and as a result of their hunting, 33 species of animals and birds have disappeared from our planet forever.

 

19. Dogs prefer to go to the toilet facing the North Pole.

 

One study showed that dogs use the Earth's magnetic field when they pee. While observing the dogs, the scientists found that the dogs preferred to "defecate with their bodies aligned along the north-south axis" and wholly avoided the east-west direction.

 

20. Your dog is probably dreaming about its owner.

 

According to Deirdre Barrett, a clinical and evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, there is reason to believe that animals dream the same way humans do. It is likely that dogs also have dreams where they dream of ordinary "dog joys," such as walks or the joy of the owner.

 

 

21. Zebra mothers keep their cubs in the center of the herd to keep them safe from predators.

 

22. The oldest living creature was a mollusk that lived 507 years.

 

The mollusk specimen was named Ming. It washed ashore in Iceland. Age was determined by the rings on the shell, counting their number. One call - one year of life.

 

23. Millions of years ago, penguins lived about 2 meters tall and weighed 115 kg.

 

Scientists named the giant penguin Palaeeudyptes klekowskii.

 

24. Ants can survive falling from any height. 

 

Even from an airplane! The fact is that because they weigh almost nothing, they fall very slowly. In addition, they have an exoskeleton.

 

25. Some fish can recognize the face of their master.

 

Not all fish can do this. But some can learn to recognize familiar faces even though they don't have the area of ​​the brain that humans use to recognize faces. In the study that found this fact, scientists used only archer fish. But, as biologists believe, other small fish in the world may be capable of this.

 

26. Giant pandas are no longer an endangered species. The tiger population is also growing.

 

Bamboo bear populations have increased by 17% over the past ten years, changing their status from endangered to vulnerable. Not everything is terrible with the tiger population, either. For example, in India, home to 60% of the world's wild tiger population, their number in the wild has increased by 33%.

 

 

27. When a baby elephant is born in a herd of elephants, other females trumpet to announce to the entire social group of animals about the appearance of the baby elephant.

 

Elephants tend to stay in close "family" groups their entire lives. Elephant herds usually consist of females (males often leave the group to mate with females from other packs but sometimes team up with other solitary males to search for elephants together).

 

28. Pregnant dolphin mothers sing to their babies.

 

According to a study by the University of Southern Mississippi, USA, mother dolphins emit an "unusual whistle" for their baby until it is born. This whistling sound is believed to be a kind of "name" that the future dolphin remembers. Thanks to this sound, they can easily find each other after birth. After the calf's birth, other nearby adult dolphins will make less of their sounds, probably helping the calf learn to correctly identify its mother's whistle and use it to call for its mother.

 

29. The first animals to circle the moon were turtles.

 

We know from school that our country was the first in the world to send animals into space. We are talking about launching dogs into Earth's orbit. Did you know we were the first to send animals around the moon?

 

In 1968, turtles were sent on a space flight around the moon (not in lunar orbit) aboard the Zond-5 spacecraft.

 

30. Giraffe in Latin is "Camelopardalis," a reference to the era of the Romans, who believed that these animals looked like a mixture of a camel and a leopard.

 

31. Your dog loves you, not just because you give and walk his food.

 

Studies that measured dogs' levels of oxytocin (a hormone that helps build social bonds - also called the hormone of affection and love), heart rate, and other biometric indicators showed that hormone levels increased. Heart rate decreased as in dogs: humans and their dogs after interacting. When you pet your dog, you and your pet release more of the same hormone in the brain that makes you fall in love with each other, making you less nervous and more relaxed.

 

 

32. Filmmakers often add tails to actor dogs.

 

This is done when the dogs in the frame often wag their tails. For example, computer graphics experts give some husky dogs virtual seats in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This was necessary so the dogs did not look too friendly because they actively moved their tail during filming.

 

33. Dogs can approximately determine what time their owner can return home.

 

Have you ever wondered how your dog can tell when you will come home? It turns out that they do this by the remnant of the smell of a person who is not at home. If you or someone you live with come home at about the same time every day, you have probably noticed how your dog, shortly before the arrival of a family member, sits at the door or window and waits. According to research, a dog correctly determines the arrival time of its owner or family member by how much the smell of a person in the house has decreased in his absence.

 

34. The fur of chinchillas is so dense that it is impossible to get wet. So instead of bathing in water, they bathe in the sand.

 

These funny furries have ultra-plush fur. They have an average of 60-70 hairs per follicle, which makes their fur the thickest among all land mammals. For comparison: in most mammals, including humans, there is only one hair per follicle!

 

Because their fur is very thick and dense, if it gets into the water, it will dry for a very long time, which is not safe for funny rodents. This is because moisture can get close to the skin, leading to several skin conditions, including pyoderma (skin infection) and dermatitis (skin inflammation). Instead of soap and water, chinchillas are "bathed" in fine dust, which helps evenly distribute skin oils, cleans dirt and debris from fur, and leaves it silky soft.

 

35. Giraffes give birth standing up, which means that the first thing a baby giraffe will experience is a fall from a height of almost two meters onto cold, hard ground.

 

 

36. Hundreds of trees - if not more - grow yearly due to squirrels forgetting where they buried their food.

 

According to Rob Swihart, a wildlife professor at Purdue University, gray squirrels bury their food (nuts, acorns, etc.) everywhere but often forget where they set up their hiding place. These buried squirrel "treasures" have a good chance of eventually becoming mature trees.

 

37. Scorpions glow in the ultraviolet.

 

Scientists don't know why this happens, but they have many theories about it.

 

38. It turns out that the wasps taught us how to make inexpensive paper.

 

They scrape wood from trees and stumps and recycle it into the paper to build a nest. The French scientist René Réaumur noticed this, and this idea became revolutionary to reduce the cost of paper, which in the 1700s was made from cotton and linen rags, ropes, old sails, etc., which made the piece too expensive.

 

The idea of making paper from wood was not realized immediately. Still, after a while, the German priest Jacob Schaffer wrote a treatise on producing paper from alternative fibers in 1765-1771. In his work, he talked about paper samples from wasp nests, comparing them in more detail from different types of wood.

 

39. Sharks "taste" everything.

 

Like your three-year-old nephew or small child, sharks also put everything in their mouths. And most often because they are curious. So most shark attacks are actually because predatory fish are very interested.

 

40. Lions love to cuddle.

 

This is how they build and maintain a friendship with each other.

 

41. Eels swim for a long time only to mate and die.

 

Eels migrate from freshwater to salt water to mate; this journey will be the first and last of their lives. For example, European eels, living in fresh and brackish waters of Europe and North Africa, go to spawn at the end of their lives. To do this, they swim more than 6 thousand kilometers across the Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea, mate, lay eggs and then die.

 

42. Pregnancy lasts 15 months for giraffes.

 

 

43. Wolves mourn when one of the pack dies.

 

Wolf packs are a big family; when one dies, they begin to “sing” (howl) mournfully.

 

44. Alligators pretend to be trees to attract birds.

 

American alligators have been observed using baits for hunting birds. They carry sticks and branches on their heads, thus attracting birds that are looking for nest materials.

 

45. Giraffes sleep a maximum of two hours a day, usually no more than 10 minutes at a time.

 

46. ​​Dead ends make a couple for life.

 

After the birth of offspring, they equally share their parental responsibilities. Before mating, the birds do an unusual ritual: rub their beaks against each other.

 

47. Sheep are born with long tails.

 

48. Alex the parrot is the only animal in the world that asks a question about itself.

 

When a mirror was placed in front of him, seeing his reflection, he asked an existential question: "What color am I?"

 

49. Among cows, there are optimists from birth or pessimists - everything is like in people.

 

In the study, the scientists found that the fearfulness of cows is closely related to pessimism and is not a temporary mood of the animals.

 

50. Ginger cats are predominantly male, and tricolor cats are primarily female.