As hundreds of scientists from around the world were conscripted in the Manhattan Project during the thick of Word War II, the best and brightest were passed along to the top-secret research site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secrets of the world’s first atom bomb would soon be unlocked.
After the project disbanded in 1946, however, Fuchs switched sides and spent the next two years passing secrets to Soviets that included a method for refining uranium and diagrams for the construction of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was projecting that the Soviets would be incapable of going nuclear until the mid-1950s. When the USSR conducted their first successful atomic test in 1949, a stunned President Truman initially declared that the explosion must have been an “accident.”
Founded in 1897 by French playwright and director, Oscar Metenier, the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was Paris’s smallest theater – and its most infamous. Drawing on his experience a “chien de commissaire” – the French term for one who leads the condemned to their execution – Metenier set about transforming the former convent and chapel at the end of a Parisian cul-de-sac into a showcase for stories of thieves, prostitutes and murderers at their worst.
However, the Grad Guignol’s provocative subject matter made it an easy target for censors. The theater’s stage adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi was temporarily halted after police shut down the production for daring to present the saga of a lady of the night — the first such on-stage portrayal in the history of French drama.
Nonetheless, the Grand Guignol proved to be a huge success and the following year, under the tutelage of director Max Maurey and novelist Andre de Lorde, the theater began to expand its repertoire into even more risqué territory. Soon, Guignol productions would trace the paths of necrophiliacs, rapists, torturers, cannibals, and thrill killers — but all meted out with an ample dose of black comedy.
In doing so, the Guignol pioneered an assorted array of then-cutting edge special effects and props, including faux severed heads, imitation acids, blunted guillotines, sheep’s eyeballs and gallons upon gallons of fake blood. Maurey is said to have measured the success of a particular play based on the number of people who would faint in a given evening. He even went so far as to hire a house doctor to play up the theater’s macabre reputation.
For the next five decades, the Grand Guignol would remain one Paris’s most popular destinations, just behind the Louvre and Eiffel Tower. Even today, the term “Grand Guignol” remains synonymous with exaggerated and excessive gore and the theater itself is popularly credited for creating an entirely new genre of drama that Hollywood has gone to exploit to great success: the slasher film.
But as the pain and strife of a real world horror story – World War II – played out across France and the greater European continent, the Grand Guignol began a slow but steady decline before finally being shuttered in 1962. As the theater’s last director famously lamented to Time magazine after the Guignol’s final performance, “We could never equal Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”
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There are few dates in recent human history that cause more of an emotional stir in historians than that of September 1, 1939. On this day, Adolph Hitler, then chancellor of Germany declared to his parliament (Reichstag) that enough was enough that Danzig in Poland was a German city full of German people and should be taken back. The culmination of the Nazi ideology of “Lebensraum,” in which all lands currently or formerly belonging to Germany should be returned to Germany and inhabited by German people, would soon signal the death of millions of Jews, Russians, homosexuals, gypsies, agitators, allies and non combatants.
Adolph Hitler fought in World War I and like many Germans felt that the treaty of Versailles was a slap in the face to the German nation making them wholly responsible for a war that involved many nations that came into conflict because of the multitudinous pacts that punctuated European politics.
German troops marched into Danzig to reclaim the city and the Danzig Corridor on September 1 by force. It was not the first act by Germany in regards to nullifying the Versailles Treaty but it would become the most significant. The invasion of Poland was a direct result with Hitler’s Non Aggression Pact with Russia and the secret plan for the two nations to invade Poland and divide her up between the to powers. Because of a pact Britain and France had with Poland, they were forced to declare war on Germany on September 3 and just like the First World War, nation after nation followed suit until the disastrous global conflict was played out once again, only this time religion and ethnic persecution would play a large and deadly role. 
In 880 BC, the Buddha is reputed to have relayed the Kalachakra Tantra – a complex system of philosophy and meditation for attaining enlightenment - to sect of followers in Andhra, India. This document, later adopted by Tibetan Buddhists and elaborated upon in a series of subsequent manuscripts, speaks in depth of a kingdom called Shambhala – an paradise where only most spiritually resplendent of beings can reside.
It is the goal of all Tibetan lamas to one day, after years of intense study and reflection, to perceive the awesome grandness of this ethereal oasis through the achievement of enlightenment and the cycle of rebirth. 
Drawing from these conclusions, Heinrich Himmler deployed as an SS unit to Tibet in May 1938 to not only collect data and artifacts that supported those views on Aryan lineage, but also substantiate rumors of Shambhalah’s existence. Within six months, the squad completed the arduous task of reaching the Tibetan capital of Lhasa - but would eventually fail to locate their mythical conquest before returning to Germany.
America during the red scare was a very different place. The main fears of the day were not the goings on of the Middle East or the walls between countries; rather, people feared the loyalties of their own neighbors. As the Cold War with Russia emerged at the end of World War II, the lure of communistic thought sent shivers down the spines of patriotic Americans. Everywhere one looked someone was being accused of socialist ties, communist sentiments and worst of all, spying for the Russians. One of the most highlighted cases from the post war period was that of Alger Hiss.
As Chambers affirmed his commitment to the Communist ideology, Hiss held a number of important offices in the United States government. Work with the department of Agriculture and State Department led Hiss to serve as Roosevelt’s assistant during the Yalta Conference in 1945 and Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations. In 1949, Hiss left public office to work towards international peace as the president of the Carnegie Endowment. A rich and diverse career would have been Hiss legacy if Chambers and his associates hadn’t made him the target of an FBI espionage investigation.
After two grand jury trials, the first resulting in a hung jury, Hiss was sentence to five years in prison after being found guilty of spying for the Russians. Documents from the Yalta conference in 1945 indicated a Russian American spy was with FDR at the conference.
