Showing posts with the label Germany

1764 Woldegk Tornado: The Strongest in History

May 18, 2023

On June 29, 1764, almost the entire town of Woldegk was in church attending a day of repentance and prayer. Also known as Buß- und Bettag, i...

Why Phyllis Rode Aristotle Around Like a Horse

May 17, 2023

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is a bronze aquamanile, or water jug, dating from the late 14th or early 15th century. ...

The Case of The Radioactive Toothpaste

May 11, 2023

In the late 1943, while the Manhattan project was underway, a team of spies were sent to Europe to gather information about how the Nazis we...

5 Historical Figures Who Were Assassinated in The Lavatory

Apr 24, 2023

When a person is on the toilet, moving bowels, they are in a particularly vulnerable position. They are exposing parts of their body that ar...

Danube Sinkhole: Where a River Vanishes

Mar 2, 2023

The European river system is complex and extensive. Two of its main rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, despite not having their sources relat...

Escape From Colditz Castle

Mar 1, 2023

On a rocky outcrop high above the Mulde River in the small town of Colditz in Saxony, Germany, sits the massive Colditz Castle. Once the for...

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...