Some former German soldiers who were accused of involvement in the massacre of Italian POWs portrayed in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” could face prosecution after a diary was found in which boasts of the murders.

The find has raised hopes in Italy that there might finally be some justice for the 6,000 Italian officers and men who were slaughtered by German forces in a savage reprisal for a revolt on the idyllic Greek island of Cephalonia in Sept 1943.

Italian investigators are said to have stumbled across a dispatch allegedly written by a military chaplain, Father Luigi Ghilardini, soon after the massacre, in which he claimed that two German soldiers who had been taken prisoner bragged of their involvement in the mass killing.

“The soldiers … who had previously been prisoners of ours … boasted that they shot 170 unarmed soldiers who had surrendered”, the chaplain allegedly wrote.

His account was said to have been found in the Italian army’s archives in Rome by prosecutors who were investigating the alleged involvement in the slaughter of a German officer, Lt Otmar Muelhauser.

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Documents which suggest that Baden-Powell, better known for founding the Boy Scouts, illegally executed a prisoner of war have been sold at auction.

Papers relating to the Second Matabele War in 1896 say Baden-Powell, then a Colonel in the British Army, ordered the shooting of an African chief.

The chief, Uwini, had been promised his life would be spared if he surrendered.

The papers reached double their expected price at auction in South Cerney, Gloucestershire.

An inquiry at the time of the conflict into the affair exonerated Baden-Powell.

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The BBC has an interesting article about Denis Avey, a British soldier who smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the horror there.

He arranged to swap for one night at a time with a Jewish inmate he had come to trust. He exchanged his uniform for the filthy, stripy garments the man had to wear. For the Auschwitz inmate it meant valuable food and rest in the British camp, while for Denis it was a chance to gather facts on the inside.

He describes Auschwitz as “hell on earth” and says he would lie awake at night listening to the ramblings and screams of prisoners.

“It was pretty ghastly at night, you got this terrible stench,” he says.

He talked to Jewish prisoners but says they rarely spoke of their previous life, instead they were focused on the hell they were living and the work they were forced to do in factories outside the camp.

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Coded plans for “The Great Escape” have been found in the diary of a British prisoner of war.

Ted Nestor was a prisoner of war (POW) at the camp where 77 Allied officers managed to dig a tunnel and escape.

His journal includes stories of camp life, cartoons and even a coded reference to the mass breakout.

Now, 20 years after his death, his daughter Sharon Cottam has visited Stalag Luft III in Poland and learned that her father was a war hero.

“My dad never talked about anything to do with the war when I was younger,” said Ms Cottam, from Stockport.

“But I remember as a child picking up dad’s diary and being fascinated by all these little drawings of planes and little stick figures and at that time, I didn’t realise the significance of what my dad had done in the war.”

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The Auschwitz death camp memorial museum has launched a Facebook page to reach young people around world.

The memorial museum at Auschwitz has launched a Facebook page, hoping that the popular social networking site will help it reach young people around the globe and engage them in discussions about the former Nazi death camp and the Holocaust.

The site, which opened earlier this week, already has more than 1,800 “fans” who have subscribed, with the number growing by the hour — some 500 signed up Thursday morning alone. Many have left messages in English, Hebrew and Polish, the majority expressing the sentiment: “Never again.”