Germany

The Battle of Amiens

How a resounding British victory convinced the German military leaders that they had lost the First World War. 

Lenin's Journey

Lenin’s return to Russia by German agency in April 1917, writes David Woodward, was one of the turning points in 20th-century history.

The Austro-Prussian War, 1866

The result of the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866 subordinated the Austrian Empire to Prussian ambitions. Brian Bond describes the last lightning victory in the Napoleonic manner, until Hitler’s blitzkrieg of 1940.

‘A brutally tough place for brutally tough people’

The court martial and acquittal of a senior British Intelligence officer accused of presiding over abuses of German prisoners during the Second World War highlights failings in intelligence policy and accountability, says Simona Tobia.

Gobineau and the Aryan Myth

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.

The Bayreuth Festival

The history of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of the music of Richard Wagner, is mired in controversy and scandal, as Mark Ronan reports.

Antwerp 1914

The intervention of Mr. Churchill and the Royal Naval Division at Antwerp in early October, 1914, failed to save the city, writes David Woodward, but the vital Channel ports were thereby saved.