This blog is about a casual history of WWII through sites, objects and family connections. I started it in 2013 when I was donated a German bayonnet picked up by a distant American relative in the Ardennes’ “Battle of the Bulge”… But my interest in WWII goes both much further back and much deeper: not only did I explore many German WWII fortifications in the neighborhood I was growing up in the 1980s in the Southern French city of Marseille, but I also slowly uncovered more and more of my family’s history on the German side, ranging from my conversations with my great-uncle Hans, a surviving Luftwaffe-Flak officer, and an almost unbelievable story about his cousin, known to us as “Tante Ini” who supplied the brief case used by Stauffenberg in 20th July bomb attack on Hitler, to clues and connections about my German grandfather who was reported “missing in action” in Hungary just a few weeks before the end of the war.