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Obi Wan Kenobi Took On the Third Reich and Other Lesser Known World War II Facts

Khalid Elhassan September 14, 2022 38 min

KRT ENTERTAINMENT STORY SLUGGED: OSCARS-COUNTDOWN KRT PHOTOGRAPH VIA ZAP2IT.COM (November 21) Alec Guinness, who played Colonel Nicholson in the 1957 Academy Award-winning war drama "The Bridge on the River Kwai," won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the film. (ZP) NC KD 2002 (Horiz B&W Only) (lde)

The Greatest Teenage Spy of WWII

Otto Skorzeny with Hitler. Aventuras na Historia

The Tehran Conference, November 28^th to December 1^st, 1943 was the first meeting of the “Big Three” Allied leaders of WWII, FDR, Stalin, and Churchill. Over the course of multiple sessions major issues of common strategy were hammered out. Chief among them was a solid commitment by Roosevelt and Churchill to invade France in 1944 in order to open a major second front against Germany. Also addressed were the envisaged postwar settlement, and smaller issues such as operations in Yugoslavia, relations with Iran and Turkey, plus Japan. All in all, it was a successful conference that bore fruit and advanced the Allies’ cause.

It almost ended in disaster. The Germans got wind of the planned conference, and put their extensive intelligence network in Iran to report on the security measures in place to protect the Allied leaders. German agents were parachuted into Iran to lay the groundwork for a commando strike led by Otto Skorzeny, Germany’s premier special forces operative, to take out the Big Three. It did not happen, because the Nazis’ plans were foiled by a teenage Soviet spy, Gevork Vartanian (1924 – 2012).

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.