Question: what do international sports goods manufacturs do when a war breaks out and their international market collapses? Answer: make war products instead. Adidas, made by the two German brothers Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler ("das") made sprinting shoes (Jesse Owens wore a...

"Jedem das Seine" is a German translation of Suum cuique, the Latin phrase meaning "to each his own". It served as a motto to Prussia's King Frederick the Great, and is still used by the German military police (the Feldjäger). However it also has the idiomatic meaning of &qu...

In an excellent post which deserves a wider audience than a blog entry on the UK's History Today magazine site, Kathryn Hadley reports on an international symposium was organised at the Caen Memorial in Normandy to discuss, for the first time, denunciation (known in French as délation), in Fran...

Few Germans know the global space race started on a remote and sandy island off the Baltic coast, an unremarkable place with wide open skies and a carpet of pine trees. (I would show you my own digipics of the coast but I erased them in error after visiting the nazi holiday camp(!) of Prora) But it ...

Deutsche Bahn, Germany's state railway yesterday caved in to pressure to document its role as the Deutsche Reichsbahn in deporting Jews to Nazi concentration camps, opening an exhibition on the "death trains" in a central Berlin station. The display follows a two-year campaign (see the caf...

French car-maker Citroen has apologised to China for running a full-page advertisement in several Spanish newspapers featuring a poster of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong pulling a wry face at a sporty hatch-back. "It's true, we are leaders, but at Citroen the revolution never stops," the a...

  The Pave the Way Foundation, an organization devoted to inter-religious understanding and reported in the Catholic World News has uncovered evidence to rebut the charge that Pope Pius XII was indifferent to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The Foundation (click here for the report) has ...