A fire that swept through the Nazi death camp of Majdanek has destroyed more than half of a barrack that houses 10,000 shoes belonging to victims of the Holocaust.

In Israel, the director of the Yad Vashem museum, Avner Shalev expressed sorrow that the historic site and valuable artifacts had been damaged or destroyed.

“The damage to these irreplaceable items is a loss to a site that has such historical value to Europe, Poland and the Jewish people,” Shalev said.

Shalev offered assistance to the museum at the Majdanek camp, which is on the outskirts of Lublin in eastern Poland.

The museum said there were 10,000 shoes in the barrack, but that it was too soon to say how extensive the damage was.

Former death camps across an area once occupied by Nazi Germany are falling into a state of disrepair decades after the end of World War II. There have also been recent cases of vandalism at some of them.

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During World War II, the Tell Halaf archaeological museum in Berlin was bombed, smashing ancient artifacts into smithereens. Now, after nine years of work, 60 artifacts have been pieced together from 27,000 fragments found in the ruins of the building.

The ancient treasure — monumental deities from Aramaean civilisation and relief slabs depicting hunting scenes — will soon be back on public display.

A century after it was first discovered in the Syrian desert and nearly 70 years after its bombed and broken shards were dumped into crates and buried anew in the cellars of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, the story of its salvation is itself an unlikely tale.

“We have reconstructed more than 90 percent of the artifacts from the Tell Halaf museum,” said German archaeologist and restoration manager Lutz Martin, 56.

“Of the 27,000 pieces, there are only 2,000 left over” that could not be fitted back, he added.

The labour of love, undertaken by a small technical team, was financed by the banking family of Max von Oppenheim, the archaeologist who first discovered the Aramaean palace of Tell Halaf shortly before the outbreak of World War I in an area today located in northern Syria, on the border with Turkey.

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The publication of a soldier’s war diaries contain an account clearing up the mystery surrounding Nazi Heinrich Himmler’s last moments.

Corporal Harry Oughton Jones wrote an account of his top-secret encounter with the head of Hitler’s SS police force while he was stationed at a prison camp at the end of the war.

According to his personal recollections, Hitler’s number two bit on a cyanide capsule and dropped down dead.

And while Himmler’s final words are widely believed to have been: ‘I am Heinrich Himmler’, according to the diaries he laughed in the face of a young officer before swallowing the pill.

Unbeknown to the British, Himmler was among the German soldiers captured after the Nazi surrender – disguised in a sergeant’s uniform with a patch over one eye.

But his ruse was blown by his own shocked comrades who immediately informed their British captors of Himmler’s presence.

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The grave of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg has been found in some woods in Germany.

Stauffenberg and other co-conspirators were summarily executed after a bomb the army officer planted at Hitler’s east Prussian HQ failed to kill him on July 20 1944.

The plot to kill him and overthrow the Nazi state called Operation Valkyrie, which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise as the doomed nobleman, was hatched by disillusioned army officers who knew Germany had no chance of winning the war and who were disgusted by atrocities they witnessed on the eastern front.

Stauffenberg and several others were shot dead in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the army HQ in the centre of Berlin, in the hours following the coup attempt. Their last resting place was never found until now.

A former cemetery inspector at the Gueterfelde graveyard in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin left behind a will stating that he had been told of a “mysterious action” in the night of July 20 and 21, 1944 by his predecessor who died in the 50s.

This man told him how he was woken from his sleep by a detachment of “excited” SS men who asked to be “guided to an area where they could dig a grave big enough to take 10 bodies.” After the cemetery inspector showed them where to dig he was dispatched back to his quarters and warned to “say nothing” of the night’s proceedings. He was convinced, following news of the failed plot in the following days, that Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators had been buried there.

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According to a new book, the Nazis tried to turn sand and soil into gold at a secret alchemy unit in Dachau.

Heinrich Himmler, head of Hitler’s SS police force, was tricked into thinking that precious metals could be produced in this way – and then used to buy weapons to strengthen the Third Reich.

The Nazis set up a secret unit in the Dachau concentration camp before the Second World War, and appointed Karl Malchus, an alchemist, who convinced Himmler that he could make gold from stones, soil and even paraffin.

But Malchus may have been working for British intelligence in 1938 when he tricked Himmler into believing his claims, according to Helmut Werner, author of Hltler’s Alchemists: The Secret Attempts to Manufacture Gold in Dachau.

Werner said: ‘He was living in England up until the first months of that year and on his return made contact with Himmler about his unique talents – but of course, it was all a huge swindle.

Malchus got whatever he wanted and Himmler installed him in Dachau, not as a prisoner but as a technician whose work could be carried out in secret.’

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