Today is the 71st anniversary of the uprising at the death camp of Sobibor and in this AMA I will try to answer all your questions about this camp and the two other Operation Reinhard death camps, Treblinka and Belzec. These camps are far less well-known than Auschwitz but in many ways they are actually the ultimate expression of the world view and policies that led to the genocide we know as the Holocaust.

You don't have to know anything about these camps to ask a question here. Even the most basic questions are welcome and even encouraged. I will try to answer all of them, though as I am in Europe there will be a scheduled break at the appropriate time to allow for some sleep after which I will resume answering your questions.

EDIT: I mean the Italian Mafia in America

In ancient times it appears that the region of Italy that we call Calabria now was actually Bruttium, and the northern part of Apulia was Calabria (the toe and heel of the boot). When did the switch happen and why?

Edit: I'm foolish and should have double checked the names before posting.

I know that it was McArthur who was pushing for it,but was anyone with him? How close did we come to using it?

I was told that to become a well-rounded person, one should look at the ancient Greek education system. This got me interested and made me wonder, what were the ancient Greeks educated in? As children, I know they were taught things like morals. Then they were taught physical education. In secondary school, I think they got taught things like rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, etc. However I would love more detail and I would love to know if I'm even correct!

I ask this question not as someone who doubts or as someone who is trying to malign him. I'm simply asking as someone who would like to listen to historians and see what they have to say about him as an academic, as an author, speaker, educator, etc. etc.

What criticisms about him exist? Those that do exist: are they simply attempts at not portraying the Western world's reality of colonialism, slavery, genocide and its continuing manipulation and exploitation of people the world over?

Did he have academic integrity? I specifically ask this because everyone has flaws in their work and if we don't know them anything they may have said may be open to criticism if we ever use their works.

In all my travels and reading, I never see this addressed. What if Fat Man or Little Boy had failed to detonate? It's conceivable that the mechanisms in place to initiate detonation could have failed.

What plans were in place to mitigate having just delivered a semi working example of the West's most highly guarded secret to the Japanese?

Hi /r/AskHistorians:

I'm taking a class on russian history and I'm loving it. I want to extend my knowledge on it, but there's so many books and essays on so many different parts of russian history that I don't really know where to start. Any recommendation would be hugely appreciated.

I'm going through all the russian history threads in this and other subs, but I wanted to ask directly anyway. Thank you!

Does anyone have any information about the christianisation of Norway?

All of the above are fairly long literary works, and I would imagine they would take considerable time to recite them, so how was this done? And during what social circumstances? Were the epics broken up over a course of several days, or were epic never recited in its entirety but only told in smaller episodes? (E.g. "Let me tell you guys about Ulysses and the cyclope's island", or "have I told you about when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh about how he survived the flood?")

Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The sacred books are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce.

That is another one coming from him. He also said that religion is a "fable invented by the ancients" and it "exploits the credulous masses."

His remarks somehow sounds so "modern" (in lack of better words), similar to what some atheists today would say to dismiss religion. Do we have other thinkers in antiquity whose teachings resemble Al-Ma'ari?

I play quite a lot of WW2 flight sims and was wondering if anyone could point to some popular songs from the era, for all major nations participating: UK, USA, Germany, Italy, Soviet Union, Japan, Finland.

Ideally I would love to see some Spotify or YouTube playlists for all the nations. I know I would put them on whenever I get in the game :)

When I was little my mom told me that late in the War when the Germans were retreating, the Germans would leave paintings crooked in abandoned houses and booby trap them so that a bomb would go off when a British soldier would straighten the painting. It was said apparently that the British couldn't bear to leave a crooked picture untouched.

...If so, are there any good articles about them online?

My first thought was that it was the intonation that implied the meaning, not the sound itself. But that's not the case. Regardless of how you say "uh huh" it still means "yes" or a similarly affirmative statement. The same applies for "uh uh" and the negative.

Also are these sounds found outside of the English language? What about outside the Germanic and/or Latin based languages?

I'm reading excerpts from two books (focusing on North Korea) which have drastically different descriptions of the period before the split and WWII. I'm aware that China, then Japan, controlled the Korean peninsula. Here is what confuses me:

[After WWII, w]hat by international standards had been an enviably placid history was not remembered as a long litany of suffering and humiliation at foreign hands. In depictions of the colonial era, novelists and painters focused on the forced labor of little girls and boys, thus reinforcing the impression of a child race abused by an adult one. Because Koreans truly were as the perfidious Japanese had only claimed to be, i.e. inherently virtuous, never evil by nature, all atrocities they had committed during the Pacific War were ascribed to duress and quickly erased from the collective memory. Koreans had done nothing under the Japanese but suffer.

From B.B. Myers' The Cleanest Race, page 34. Contrast this with the following:

The South Koreans were a disgrace because of their dependence on the United States [to the North Koreans]. "Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one's own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one's own brains, believing in one's own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance," [Kim Il-sung] expounded in one of his many treatises. This was seductive to a proud people whose dignity had been trampled by its neighbors for centuries.

From Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, page 44.

Which is it? Did Koreans view themselves as trampled people with a nationalist bent that was being denied prior to WWII? How would one reconcile the two quotes?

Thanks in advance, hopefully an expert can clarify a little more on what the consensus is for pre-WWII Korean nationalism :).

Is Traditions and Encounters a good choice?