During WWII, "2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent...were forcibly deported to internment camps in the US"

One of my political geography students is doing their project on this historical event: Peru deported over 2,000 Japanese people to the US to be placed in internment camps during WWII; many of them ended up at a work camp in NJ. I study this stuff and I had never heard of this.

— Austin Kocher, PhD (@ackocher) September 28, 2022

BBC from 2015:

an estimated 25,000 people of Japanese descent lived in Peru

...

after the outbreak of World War Two, the Japanese community in Peru became a target, and their assets were confiscated.

"In May 1940, as many as 600 houses, schools and businesses belonging to citizens of Japanese descent were burned down," she says.

Following Japan's 1941 attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the US government asked a dozen Latin American countries, among them Peru, to arrest its Japanese residents.

Records from the time suggest the US authorities wanted to take them to the US and use them as bargaining chips for its nationals captured by Japanese forces in Asia.

...

After World War Two ended, another 1,000 were deported to Japan after their Latin American home countries refused to take them back

Great story about an "Aryan-looking" young Jew that ended up in France at the start of WW2 and became a prolific member of the resistance

Just one anecdote from the NYTimes: 

He was soon rounded up with others and sent to a transit camp outside Lyon. A guard divulged that they were being transferred to a camp in Poland.

“I knew a labor camp in Poland wasn’t good,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “I knew I had to find a way not to go.”

A fellow internee was a medical student. He asked her what illness might necessitate admission into a hospital, and she said peritonitis, a disease of the stomach lining. He interrogated her about the symptoms.

Biding his time until enough guards were nearby, Mr. Rosenberg commenced a performance of writhing and moaning. He was taken to the infirmary, where he rubbed a thermometer until it registered a fever. When he next awoke, he was missing his appendix. He also learned that he was going to Poland anyway.

He pleaded with a nurse to let him mail a letter.

Mr. Rosenberg’s message, as he had hoped, found its way to a secret network of priests connected to the Resistance. A rebel priest soon visited the hospital, concealed a parcel of clothes for him behind a toilet and parked a bicycle beneath a window. Mr. Rosenberg then darted off on it, blood leaking from his belly.

After he healed, he joined the Resistance. 

Ten Nightmares

My bf was telling me how delicious and moist this cinnamon roll I made was, but I figured out he ate one that I couldn’t fit in the pan and forgot to throw away . It had been sitting out for a day so it formed a crust and he thought it was baked. I’m gonna puke.

— Dinabean (@dinarosecima) April 3, 2019

"One surefire way to be called ‘scum’ in Russia: Expose a heroic World War II story as a myth"

WaPo:

And one of the finest hours of that history is the legend of Panfilov's 28 men, which produced a line every Russian learns as a child and never forgets: “Russia is vast, but there's nowhere to retreat — behind us Moscow.”

For seven decades, these words were attributed to a Red Army officer during the 1941 Battle of Moscow, urging his comrades, armed with little more than rifles and handheld firebombs, to stop a breakthrough by the Wehrmacht's tanks. According to the story, Panfilov's 28 men — the name refers to the general in charge of the division — all died, but they destroyed 18 tanks, and halted the German advance.

And then suddenly, last year, while the movie about “Panfilov's 28 Men” was in production, Russia's chief archivist published a top secret 1948 memo by Stalin's senior prosecutor stating that Panfilov's 28 men had been made up by Soviet journalists looking for a propaganda coup.

There was a battle, but there were more than 28 men, everyone didn't die, and some surrendered.

That didn't stop the filmmakers. Nor did it deter Russian officialdom. The archivist later lost his job. Medinsky argued that the legend is true.

"The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs"

TG:

including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect . . . on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940

...

It was during this period that Hitler’s inner circle established an image of him as an unassailable figure who was willing to work tirelessly on behalf of his country, and who would permit no toxins – not even coffee – to enter his body.

...

Drug use also began to be associated with Jews. The Nazi party’s office of racial purity claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug-dependent.

"The Cards Against Humanity super PAC will be called the Nuisance Committee, a name that Temkin says comes from a chapter in his own family's history"

DD:

During World War II, Temkin says his grandfather flew dozens of combat missions on a B-24 bomber over Nazi Germany before being shot down and spending about a year in a POW camp. He joined with a group of other Jewish POWs in the camp, Temkin said, who were frustrated about being sidelined in the fight against Adolf Hitler.

“They formed a group called ‘the Nuisance Committee’ to covertly disrupt operations in the camp and force the Germans to divert increasing resources away from the front lines and into the prison,” Temkin said. “They came up with little protests, pranks, and daily annoyances that drove the Nazis insane. So that's the name we're going with.”

Link roundup

1. "I began to realize that almost everything the Germans made was over-engineered, from the tanks to gas-mask cases to the field jacket of the lowly landser."

America built 74,000 Sherman hulls and engines; Germany built just 1,347 Tigers.

2. "Welcome to the arms race for anti-drone weaponry"

law enforcement agencies are still surprisingly out-gunned if they need to take down a hostile drone. Short of shooting it down, what can a police officer or prison guard do?
...
The jamming itself is also illegal, presenting an even trickier legal problem. The FCC has a blanket ban on jamming devices, and there's no carveout expected for anti-drone technology.

3. "One of the worst eco-disasters on the planet is currently unfolding in Indonesia. Over the past two months, thousands of forest and peatland fires have been raging out of control, choking the entire region in a thick, toxic haze."

On at least 38 days in September and October, Indonesia's fires were spewing more daily emissions than the entire United States economy.

Ian Fleming "hated" Alan Turing

According to the screenwriter of The Imitation Game:

"Fleming's job was to come up with preposterous spy stories, that weren't real, but would be believable to the Germans," he said, referring to the spycraft necessitated by Turing and team's breaking of the German codes.

"Turing thought that Fleming's plots were just ridiculous . . . . He kept rejecting Fleming's plans, and so Fleming got really irritated with him."

Hitchcock made a concentration camp documentary

"It's a little known fact that the great director made a film about the Nazi death camps – but, horrified by the footage he saw, the documentary was never shown. Now it is to be released." The plan is to release a restored version, along with a new documentary about it, in 2015.  Via.