So it's been an open secret in my family for a few years that my grandfather, who served as a paratrooper in the SAS between 1949-52, was part of covert operations related to the denazification of Germany. Until recently we'd thought that he was just involved in the tracking down of fugitives for trial, but he's recently confessed that the missions were more in the ballpark of assassinations. As far as I'm aware, nothing like this has been declassified, and it even caused issues when attempting to confirm his service record for his local RSL (eventually we got the records but with large parts redacted). Searching on Google has only brought up information about wartime assassinations, and a recent Guardian article about Churchill's aversion to the Nuremburg trials. So I'm wondering if there has been any academic work done on covert operations in the postwar years involving the extrajudicial killing of Nazis / collaborators, especially by British forces?

Stalin did some bad things. When did Western (read: basically US & UK) governments/intelligence learn of most of them? Most of the anticommunist rhetoric up until the secret speech and the Khrushchev thaw seems to be communism = bad rather than Soviets are mass-executing people. Was this because governments were unaware?

When did the Western public learn of them? My parents remember Solzhenitsyn but there must have been revelations before that. Just looking for a general outline; timeline of the key "revelations".

Not sure if my numbers are correct, but Magellan was extremely outnumbered yet he was confident he could win against at least hundreds and at most over 1000 soldiers of Lapu Lapu. What tactics/prevailing wisdom at the time led him to believe that would work?

I'm thinking of things like grime around chipped tiles, dirty alleyways, etc. Especially in any shot of a Soviet hospital, everything is always absolutely filthy looking. It seems odd that this would be true. The USSR was certailny much poorer than the West, but what would have prevented people from cleaning, or failed to provide the incentives to clean?

During the 1900s and 1910s, Mussolini worked for his local Socialist Party, was jailed for participating in a socialist protest against war in Libya, and edited the socialist newspaper Avanti!

By 1922, of course, he had founded fascism.

It seems to me that this open and enthusiastic support for socialism, even if it ended, would be a major skeleton in the closet for anyone trying to become a right-wing politician. Yet Mussolini wasn't just that, he was the creator of one of the furthest-right ideologies ever.

Did Mussolini's critics (or allies) ever use this reversal in ideology against him? Did anyone suspect him of being a socialist plant? How did Mussolini defend it? How did he come to be not just right-wing, but perhaps the most right-wing leader in the world at the time, with this background? If it didn't cause problems for his political career at all, why was that?

I was thinking today about how strange it would be to see your former primary school teacher plunge the country into brutal dictatorship. Do we have any accounts from his former students, either about him as a teacher or their later views of him as a political figure? What do we know about what subjects he taught, and what age group?

I have been subscribing to /r/AskHistorians for a while now and while the deleted comments are somewhat annoying, at least it means that answers are reliable and great. Are there any other subs like it? Ones with great moderators who strictly enforce the rules and maybe are educational?

When I look at the map of lands taken from Germany has ww1 the Danzig corridor stands out to me as insanely short sighted. I assume the area on the other side of the corridor, Konigsberg was largely German and thus the area of the corridor was as well. Is this the case? Was there a similar flight of Germans out of that area (and from the taken German lands more generally) as the flight following ww2?

I recently heard a rather radical opinion from a historian friend of mine that the entirety of traditional Chinese historiography is bunk, starting from Sima Qian and going up to the works commissioned by Kangxi. All histories of China written by the Chinese themselves are garbage, as the historians cannot be trusted due to imperial censorship, meaning that all Chinese history pre-European contact is an indecipherable mess where the probability of any event being a total falsification is no better than random chance since there's no external sources to corroborate with. Archaeological evidence is also invalid due to the massive fake antique industry in China, which has advanced to the point of producing fakes indistinguishable from real artifacts, such as the Sword of Goujian. I suppose the crux of his argument lay in the fact that, unlike Roman historians (his specialty), who were of the Senatorial class and usually opposed to the Emperor, the Chinese historians worked under the direct commission of the Emperor, and this lack of counterbalancing meant that Chinese historiography is no better than pure propaganda.

How accurate is his argument?

At this point, everyone knows how badly Thomas Edison screwed over Tesla, and how prolific and powerful his genius actually was. However, I’ve also heard stories about his plans to make power free to everyone, to generate free, infinite electricity from some kind of tower, and other such things that seem unfeasible or even impossible today. My question to the historians is how much do we actually know about what Tesla did, what was stolen or hidden from the public, and the potential of projects he was working on prior to his death?

Was it like joining the police or army? Did you have to be asked? I can't find anything that answers this question. Thanks

On the face of it, commanding soldiers to walk directly into machine gun fire from an opposing trench seems like an appalling tactic, why was it so common in WW1?

Were the generals simply uncaring and/or incompetent, or is there some merit to it as a tactic?

I’m quite fascinated by the medieval knightly armour types, and was wondering just how much a full set of plate armour (perhaps also including the various weapons that might come with it) would cost? Thinking around the year 1500 +/- 100 years.

Also, would one buy a full set right away, or was it more common to but certain parts before others? And thus build up to a full set over an extended period of time?

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Were they mostly the same? I've heard that there were big differences.