Germany

New Light on Hitler’s Apprenticeship

Hitler had taken enthusiastically to his years in the army during the first World War. D.C. Watt describes how, afterwards, the future führer worked with equal zeal — and served his political apprenticeship — as a propagandist for a Bavarian counter-revolutionary army group.

Who Burnt the Reichstag?

The conflagration of the Reichstag provided Hitler with a heaven-sent opportunity. But the theory that the Nazis had planned it themselves now appears to be entirely baseless.

The Berlin Crises

Through a succession of crises, writes Philip Windsor, including those of the Airlift and the Wall, the West has for seventeen years maintained an apparently untenable position in Berlin.

Mutiny at Kiel

At the close of the First World War, writes David WoodwardGerman Sailors were the forerunners of general revolt against the imperial system.

The Great Elector

After a reign of forty-eight years, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, left behind him in 1688 a military and bureaucratic system that endured until 1945. F.L. Carsten describes how it was the army he had founded that accomplished, in 1871, the triumphant unification of the German Empire and fought the battles of the Third Reich.