National WW II Museum New Orleans:

The role of women in the Polish resistance movement and the Warsaw Uprising was crucial. Women held a variety of important positions, ranging from traditional female roles—cleaning, making beds, cooking, and delivering food—to serving as couriers and liaison offices. Polish wives, mothers, and grandmothers provided a social infrastructure, worked as nurses, and comforted soldiers.

Women were also involved in heavy fighting—one in seven combatants were women. The women’s unit “Dysk,” for instance, was one of five elite “Kedyw” battalions led by Jan Mazurkiewicz. During the first week of the uprising, these well-equipped soldiers succeeded in taking a huge chunk of northern Wola (a district in the western part of Warsaw).

On August 2, 1944, “Dysk” attacked the Waffen SS supply depots at Stawki, where a year and a half earlier the Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto had been held before being sent to Treblinka. They killed all the German guards and freed a number of Jewish forced laborers. These SS warehouses contained enormous qualities of food, which would help keep the people living in the Old Town sector of Warsaw alive in the weeks to come.

Special sapper units, made up entirely of young women called minerki, saw the most hand to hand combat fighting during August and September.

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As a result of their combatant roles, several women attained high ranks within the AK, such as Mariai Tarnowska, who helped in negotiation talks with the Germans concerning the evacuation of civilians from the city center and the terms for capitulation. One of the most famous, Wanda Gertz, who fought in the Polish Legion attached to the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, became an officer and commander of an all-female battalion, and was eventually promoted to the rank of Major in September 1944.

Guardian:

Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin to a drug dealer who managed to hook western nations on Russian supplies of oil and gas, ahead of a trip to the Middle East in an attempt to diversify the sources of Britain’s energy imports.

The UK prime minister urged European countries to “get ourselves off that addiction” and said he wanted support from “the widest possible coalition” to help offset the pressures caused by spiralling oil and gas prices.

Independent:

Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin to a drug dealer who has western nations hooked on his supply of oil and gas.

The prime minister added that Russia’s „brutal“ and „indiscriminate“ bombing of Ukraine is „quite unbelievable“ as he vowed the president will not succeed in his aim.

“Vladimir Putin over the last years has been like a pusher, feeding an addiction in western countries to his hydrocarbons,” Mr Johnson on Tuesday.

„We [must] wean ourselves off Russian hydrocarbons.“

Guardian:

A detainee at a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan was used as a living prop to teach trainee interrogators, who lined up to take turns at knocking his head against a plywood wall, leaving him with brain damage, according to a US government report.

The details of the torture of Ammar al-Baluchi are in a 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, newly declassified as part of a court filing by his lawyers aimed at getting him an independent medical examination.

…

According to the inspector general’s report, the CIA was aware that the 2003 rendition of the detainee, Ammar al-Baluchi, from Pakistani custody to the “black site” north of Kabul was conducted “extra-legally,” because at the time he was in Pakistani jurisdiction and no longer represented a terrorist threat.

The report said that interrogators at the site, known both as Cobalt and the Salt Pit, went beyond the CIA’s guidelines in torturing Baluchi, using two techniques without approval: using a stick behind his knees in stress position that involved leaning back while kneeling, and dousing with ice-cold water.

It would be difficult to fit the word „German“ in here more often.

„German concentration camp in Ravensbrück“ – the change in language had been quite apparent to me before this, but this exhibit really drums it in.

The contrast is made especially clear in repeated placards about the responsibility for remembrance, where historical plaques uniformly read „Nazis“, „Hitler’s occupation“, and the museum placards just as uniformly say „German“, with the word „Nazi“ rarely seen at all.

This is clearly visible from the road, though it is not marked at all.

That memorial is to the right of the road, about where the lumber truck is. The graves are up the track to the left. The entrance here is completely unmarked. I knew where they were because I spent quite some time scrutinizing this area on Google Maps back in Berlin.

There’s nothing on the path up and over the hill, until you see this.

Wikipedia explains the significance of Józefów. The German article is short, but points out the uniqueness.

When I was here in 2018 this was all construction site. Very glad the museum is open.

The distinction made here between Nazi policy and the German public is quite unusual for Polish installations. There are several mentions of the Trawniki men. I was impressed at the extent of the displays given to Dutch and French transit camps as well.

I’d assumed that with the museum renovation complete the entire site would be open. This morning I’d planned to walk the path in the middle of the photo here. Alas, this is not to be the case. When I asked the docent if I’d be able to walk through the site this summer she said no, originally everything had been scheduled to be completed by now, but currently she thinks perhaps it’ll be open next year.