This would be an interesting board game to play. Apparently Hitler youth under the Third Reich would play a board game invented to teach them military tactics against the British.

Specifically designed in 1941 to prepare young members of the Hitler Youth ‘for an attack on the Fatherland’, the box illustration shows a British plane being shot down by a German gunner – indicating exactly where the manufacturers thought such an attack might come from.

Players take turns to roll a die with six symbols on it to decide the success or failure of each military move with points awarded for each successful military move.

A roll of a red cross means ‘damage to people’ – the highest scoring type of damage in the game.

As well as the die, the game comes with little model airplanes to symbolise aerial attacks.

Various positions on the board represent valuable bombing targets, in a similar way to Battleships, a game familiar to many British children.

Barrage balloons and flak guns helped defend the positions and the game was like a smaller version of the popular pastime of Risk.

The object of Eagle Air Defence was to attack airfields, barracks, gas and electricity works, iron works and radio stations.

And the instruction booklet included with the board and pieces explain that the game was ‘developed by an officer of the Luftwaffe with the aim of the defence of our airspace.’

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Newly released photographs reveal that Sean Dempsey, a famous Irish musician, played for Adolf Hitler in 1936.

Dempsey, an uileann piper, was invited to play for Hitler and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels during a visit to Berlin in 1936 after being told that Hitler was an Irish folk music fan.

When he arrived to play however, there was no room for him to sit, which he needed to do to play, and it looked like it would be canceled.

however, Hitler jumped up and demanded that an S.S. member get down on his hands and knees and that Dempsey sit astride him while he played.

Dempsey played what was described as a ‘haunting air’ as Hitler listened with rapt attention. After he performed, Hitler presented him with a gold fountain pen while Goebbels clapped wildly.

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The diaries of Josef Mengele, the Nazi ‘Angel of Death’, are expected to fetch over $60,000 at auction.

Known as the ‘Angel of Death’, he consigned arrivals to the gas chambers and carried out appalling medical experiments on Jews, most of whom died in agony without anaesthetic.

He escaped to Brazil at the end of the war and began his memoir in May 1960, musing on eugenics, art, religion, women’s rights and predictions for the future of mankind.

Auctioneer Alexander Autographs of Connecticut refused to identify the seller who acquired the diary after Mengele died in 1979 but said the source was ‘close’ to the Mengele family, and still lives in Germany.

Auction house president Bill Panagopulos said: ‘Make no mistake about it – I have no sympathy for these monsters. My father’s home town was wiped out by the Nazis in a reprisal action.

‘But it is of vital importance that such documents remain available as tangible evidence of the evil deeds of the past, as well as to provide further pieces of history’s puzzle.’

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The descendants of Nazi leaders have spoken on camera, for the first time, about the revulsion they have for their ancestors.

They include Bettina Goering, great niece of Adolf Hitler’s second in command Hermann Goering, who says she has had herself sterilised so she would ‘not pass on the blood of a monster’.

Adolf Eichmann’s son Ricardo says he simply cannot find a way to explain why his father became the chief architect of the Holocaust.

While Hitler himself had no offspring, many others at the heart of the Reich had families and some of the children can remember being patted on the head by the Fuhrer.

One is Hitler’s godson Niklas Frank, whose father Hans was Nazi governor of occupied Poland responsible for the death camps in which six million Jewish people were killed.

He says in the documentary Hitler’s Children, by Israeli director Chanoch Zeevi, that he ‘despises’ his father’s past and describes him as ‘a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic’.

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One treasure hunter believes he knows where the famed Amber Room, seized by the Nazis in 1945, is located: under a Nazi bunker in Kaliningrad.

“Believe me or not, it’s there, 12 metres down in the sub-soil,” he said, pointing to the entrance of a bunker that sheltered the Nazi high command in the last hours of the Battle of Koenigsberg.

“This place was built (in February 1945) with two aims: accommodating the headquarters of General Otto Lasch and storing the treasures of Koenigsberg, a city under siege,” the historian turned journalist and lecturer argued.

Koenigsberg, in what was then German East Prussia, is now Kaliningrad, the capital of Russia’s westernmost region of the same name.

The Nazis removed the treasure from a palace that once belonged to empress Catherine the Great outside Saint Petersburg after invading the Soviet Union in 1941.

Once hailed as the eighth wonder of the world, the trophy was brought here and stored in the former castle of the Teutonic Knights in the centre of the city.

But its subsequent fate remains unknown amid the turmoil of war and heavy bombardment of the city by the Allies.

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