Bob's Briefing A Saturday note from Bob, for readers who brought a friend. | Issue 4 July 25, 2026 |
FROM BOB
This week we take on the hardest subject in our library. We just published a 15-question quiz on the villains of World War Two: the dictators, the deputies, and the propagandists who set the world on fire. History does not ask us to forgive these men. It asks us to understand how they rose, what they did, and how it ended for every one of them, because that understanding is the best insurance we have.
So this Saturday we face it squarely: the courtroom that judged them, the war they unleashed, the country they occupied, and the young voice they could not silence. Pour the second cup. This one earns your full attention.
Bob
THIS WEEK'S TOP STORY
The courtroom that judged the Third Reich
On November 20, 1945, in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, twenty-one men sat in a wooden dock under the eyes of the world: Goring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Speer, and the rest of what remained of Hitler's inner circle. Four nations that had just spent six years destroying the Reich chose, at that moment, not vengeance but law. American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson opened with words that still ring: that staying the hand of vengeance and submitting captive enemies to the judgment of the law was "one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."
What stays with me is how they were convicted: largely by their own paperwork. The Nazis documented everything, and the prosecution simply read it back to them. When the verdicts came down in October 1946, twelve were sentenced to death, seven imprisoned, and three acquitted. Goring cheated the hangman by hours with a smuggled cyanide capsule. The trial gave the world a new phrase, crimes against humanity, and a precedent that leaders answer for what they order. This week's quiz looks at the men themselves, and none of the fifteen questions is easy to look away from.
THREE MORE STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME
STORY 2
The war they unleashed
The men in this week's quiz did not stop at speeches. From the blitzkrieg that swallowed Poland in five weeks to the street fighting in Berlin six years later, their ambitions were paid for in battles whose names we still speak with a hush: Stalingrad, Midway, Normandy, the Bulge. Thirty questions on the clashes that decided the largest war in human history, and the price of stopping the men who started it.
STORY 3
Occupation, collaboration, resistance
In June 1940, France, home of the largest army in Western Europe, fell in six weeks. What followed was a four-year test of character that no citizen could sit out: a collaborationist government in Vichy, swastikas over the Champs-Elysees, and a Resistance that ran messages, hid families, and waited for the day de Gaulle's broadcast from London would come true. Thirty questions on a nation living under the villains' shadow, and the people who refused to bow.
STORY 4
The voice they could not silence
Against the men in the dock at Nuremberg, history offers a thirteen-year-old girl with a checkered diary. Anne Frank wrote for twenty-five months in a hidden annex above an Amsterdam warehouse, and the regime that hunted her lasted twelve years while her words have now lasted eighty, in some seventy languages. If the top story is about the judgment of the villains, this one is about the witness who outlasted them all. Fifteen questions on Anne, her family, and the diary the world still reads.
WHAT I'M READING THIS WEEK
The Dungeon Crawler Carl saga continues at my house. I finished book one and went straight into the second, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, without so much as a coffee break in between. Jeff Hays's narration somehow gets better, and I have started rationing chapters the way you ration the last slices of a good pie. If you took my recommendation two issues ago, you already know. If you did not, book one is still waiting for you.
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YOUR QUIZ THIS WEEK
Villains of World War Two
Fifteen questions on the men behind the century's darkest chapter: who they were, how they rose, what they ordered, and how each of their stories ended. It pairs with this week's top story, and it is not an easy fifteen. Take your time, and see how you stack up against the rest of the readership.
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