Showing posts with the label Germany

Albrecht Berblinger: The Flying Tailor of Ulm

Nov 3, 2022

Albrecht Berblinger was an early aviation pioneer who is best known for designing a hang glider, nearly four decades before British inventor...

Wilhelm Gustloff: The Deadliest Ship Disaster You Never Heard Of

Aug 22, 2022

The sinking of the British ocean liner Titanic in 1912, with over 1,500 fatalities, is probably the most famous shipwreck of all time, but n...

The Thousand-Year Rose of Hildesheim Cathedral

Aug 9, 2022

Climbing the outer wall of Hildesheim Cathedral’s apse is a rose bush, said to be one thousand years old. According to legend, as long as it...

Franz Halder: The Only German to be Decorated by Both Hitler and Kennedy

May 6, 2022

During the Third Riech, Hitler fortified his leadership atop bastions of war, invasion and politics. One of them though dared to traipse acr...

Kugelpanzer: The Mysterious Nazi Ball Tank

Apr 25, 2022

When the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in 1945 after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Red Army recovered a strange vehicle from the pos...

The Lying Stones of Adam Beringer

Mar 15, 2022

Fossils prove the existence of life at its peak, but in Dr Adam Beringer’s case, they wrote nothing but demise. Almost 300 years ago, he dis...

Mensur And Bragging Scars

Feb 25, 2022

This is Otto Skorzeny, often regarded as Hitler’s deadliest general. An Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the SS during World W...

Operation Epsilon: When Allied Forces Locked Ten German Scientists Together in a House

Feb 1, 2022

Near the end of World War 2, the Allied forces arrested ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear ...

The Nazi Gold of Merkers Mine

Jan 31, 2022

When the advancing Third Army of the United States marched into the captured German town of Merkers-Kieselbach towards the end of World War ...

Bertha Benz’s Historic Car Ride

Nov 17, 2021

In the early morning hours of August 5, 1888, the 39-year-old Bertha Benz, wife of automobile pioneer Karl Benz, sneaked out of the house, a...

How Air Raids in Britain Led to Shortage of Sausages in Germany

Nov 4, 2021

“It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb,” proclaimed a British Army recruitment poster publicized during W...

How Two Families Escaped East Germany in a Homemade Hot Air Balloon

Oct 22, 2021

At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of 15 September 1979, constables Walter Hamann and Rudolf Golkel of the Bavarian State Police were patrolling ...

The Chain Boats of Europe

Oct 4, 2021

In his travelogue, A Tramp Abroad , Mark Twain describes an encounter with a curious boat on the River Neckar in Germany.  We ra...

Otto von Guericke's Magdeburg Hemisphere Experiment

Oct 2, 2021

The Magdeburg Hemispheres is a classic physics experiment that demonstrates the incredible pressure the atmosphere around us exerts on our b...

The Bell Cemeteries of World War 2

Jun 21, 2021

Nearly every German family in every German town contributed something to the two World Wars. For many, it was their men. For others, it was ...

The Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937

Jun 14, 2021

Not everybody gets modern art. From Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans to a banana stuck to the wall , there are plenty of examples from the perplexin...

Propeller Driven Railways

May 31, 2021

A locomotive can derive power from many different sources. The earliest locomotives were driven by steam. Then came electric trains powered ...

Gnomonic Blocks, or Multi-faceted Sundials

May 11, 2021

In the park of the Abbey of Epau, in Yvré-l'Evêque in France, you can admire a curious monument in the shape of an obelisk. Built by the...

Nazi Amphitheaters

Apr 28, 2021

Near the summit of a large wooded hill overlooking the town of Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, stands an open-air theater called a...

The Mercy Dogs of World War 1

Mar 26, 2021

Dogs have accompanied men to war since ancient times, as scouts, sentries, trackers and messengers. But the most unique role they ever playe...