On January 14th, 1975, Major Peter Makowicka, aged 33, was on a training mission with his Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG 21 plane. During approach on the military airbase Cottbus, German Democratic Republic (Eastern Germany), the plane experienced an open cover latc…
This is a photograph of an East German soldier helping a little boy cross the newly erected Berlin Wall the day it was built. A boy who'd gotten left behind in the chaos of people fleeing and families caught on different sides of the border. The soldier is…
The Germans, as the only colonial power amongst the Central Powers, used plenty of African soldiers of their Schutztruppen in the African theaters of war, but they had never planned to deploy these troops in Europe and would not have been able to do so durin…
The three groups displayed on the poster are, from top to bottom, "ostbaltische Rasse" ("East Baltic race"), "ostische Rasse" ("Alpine race"), and "dinarische Rasse" ("Dinaric race"). All these three groups were considered part of the sub-races of the Cauc…
The Reichstag had not been in use since when it burned in February 1933 and its interior resembled a rubble heap more than a government building. During the 12 years of National Socialist rule, it was not used for parliamentary sessions. Instead, the few tim…
The speech is considered one of Kennedy's best, both a notable moment of the Cold War and a high point of the New Frontier. It was a great morale boost for West Berliners, who lived in an enclave deep inside East Germany and feared a possible East German occ…
Three German girls skate home from school past blocks of houses destroyed by Allied air raids in Essen, Germany, Feb. 14, 1949. These kids can't remember a time when their city didn't look like that, because they weren't old enough or even born when the city…
Those who witnessed the scene were awe-struck: a politician actually displayed his emotions by confessing to guilt and begging for forgiveness. With his head bowed low, he froze in this position for twenty or thirty seconds. "I have been often asked what the…
The Battle of Verdun is considered by many the most blood-stained battlefield in world history. Never before or since has there been such a lengthy battle, involving so many men, situated on such a tiny piece of land. The battle, which lasted from 21 Februar…
In January 1923 France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr, an industrial area of German bordering their own countries. The occupation of Ruhr was in response to the Weimar Republic's failure to continue its reparation payments in the aftermath of World War I. This…
In October 1961, border disputes led to a standoff and for 16 hours the world was at the brink of war while Soviet and American tanks faced each other just 300 feet (100 meters) apart. On August 1961 Washington and its British and French allies had failed …
At the end of World War II the city of Dresden was in ruins, all its buildings destroyed and thousands of civilians dead. The scale of the death and destruction, coming so late in the war, along with significant questions about the legitimacy of the target…
Post First World War Germany was hit by one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in recent history. The German mark fell from 4.2 marks to the dollar to 8.91 marks per dollar during the First World War but paying war reparations caused an economic collapse…
The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 divided families and neighborhoods in what had been the capital of Germany. The Wall represented a uniquely squalid, violent, and ultimately futile, episode in the post-war world. Life was changed overnight in B…
Berlin after the War was a post-apocalyptic world. One of the largest and most modern cities of Europe was left a wasteland. There were vast piles of rubble everywhere. Other areas were rows of building walls with collaosed interiors — the skeletons of a des…
The 1938-1939 German Expedition to Tibet was a May 1938 – August 1939 German scientific expedition led by German zoologist and SS officer Ernst Schäfer. Schäfer’s primary objective for the expedition was the creation of a complete scientific record of Tibe…
The photo of a German prisoner of war returning to his home town of Frankfurt to discover his house bombed and his family no longer there, shows the kind the depressing moments of dejected subjects we associate with images of war. No stranger to scenes …
The mother of a prisoner thanks Konrad Adenauer upon his return from Moscow on September 14, 1955. Adenauer had succeeded in concluding negotiations for the release to Germany, by the end of that year, of 15,000 German civilians and prisoners of war. Konrad …