Germany

The result of the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866 subordinated the Austrian Empire to Prussian ambitions. Brian Bond describes the last lightning victory in the Napoleonic manner, until Hitler’s blitzkrieg of 1940.

The court martial and acquittal of a senior British Intelligence officer accused of presiding over abuses of German prisoners during the Second World War highlights failings in intelligence policy and accountability, says Simona Tobia.

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.

The history of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of the music of Richard Wagner, is mired in controversy and scandal, as Mark Ronan reports.

J. Garston describes how for eleven years, amid political and economic storms, first from Cologne and then from Wiesbaden, the British Army kept watch over the Rhine.

The long Allied occupation of France after Waterloo provides a striking example of how soon a country can return to normal; J. Garston explains how it also offers parallels and contrasts with the state of affairs in Germany today.

The intervention of Mr. Churchill and the Royal Naval Division at Antwerp in early October, 1914, failed to save the city, writes David Woodward, but the vital Channel ports were thereby saved.

As it has fallen to the lot of our generation to relive the experiences of a Jeremiah and Josephus, writes Martin Braun, it is not surprising that a literature of historical self-analysis has sprung up in post-war Europe—most notably in Germany.

By victory in the war of 1870, writes Harold Kurtz, Bismarck secured German unity at the expense of France.

Harold Kurtz offers the background to the Franco-Prussian War.