Eighty one years ago today, on 27th January 1945, at about 9am, the first Soviet soldier from a reconnaissance unit of the 100th Infantry Division appeared on the grounds of the prisoners' infirmary in Monowitz. The entire division arrived half an hour later. The same day a military doctor arrived and began to organize assistance. In the afternoon soldiers of the Red Army entered the vicinity of the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau. Near the main camp, they met resistance from retreating German units. 231 Red Army soldiers died in close combat for the liberation of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz. Two of them died in front of the gates of Auschwitz main camp. One of them was Lieutenant Gilmudin Badryjewicz Baszirow. The first Red Army troops arrived in Birkenau and Auschwitz at around 3 p.m. and were joyfully greeted by the liberated prisoners. After the removal of mines from the surrounding area, soldiers of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front marched into the camp and broug...

 

A reboot of the 1970's British Space Opera cult classic "Blakes Seven" is officially in development. Blakes Seven was set in  a dystopian future, in which a band of rebels opposed the totalitarian Terran Federation. It ran for four seasons each of thirteen fifty-minute episodes. Initially conceived as "the dirty dozen in space" if has much the same feel of a small group of flawed heroes opposition a huge, powerful and tyrannical state as the much more recent Star Wars project, Andor. There were some brilliant acting performances, particularly from Gareth Thomas as the eponymous hero Roj Blake, an idealist who leads the crusade against the evil Federation for the first two seasons, Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon, an apparently cynical and coldly rational computer genius who takes over from Blake as leader of the rebels for the third and fourth seasons, and Jacqueline Pearce as Supreme Commander (later President) Servalan, the show's main antagonist. According to De...

This video is a fascinating account of the production of the ITV television version of C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels. It also brings out some of the real historical events and characters which inspired both the books and the TV series. The Horatio Hornblower books were, of course, one of the inspirations for David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, as David Weber has made quite clear. One thing which struck me on watching this video was that the duel at the climax of the fourth Honorverse novel, "Field of dishonour" has some significant similarities, although the plot is not identical, to the ITV version rather than Forester's original version of the duel in "The Even Chance." The video ends with a comparison between the Hornblower books and TV series, and the Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell and the TV series made of those books. The comparison is well done but misses one significant trick. C.S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels, ...