German Archives

HISTORICALLY SKEWED AND MUSICALLY SUBLIME: AMADEUS AT 40

by History Guild | May 13, 2024 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 9 minutes
In the pantheon of Western classical music an esteemed list of names has captured the admiration and attention of the public for centuries. From the Baroque masters of Bach and Handel, the classical giants of Beethoven and Haydn, and the romantic poets of Chopin and Liszt, much of society’s collective fascination with these composers has extended far beyond just their musical creations. Who were they and how did they write such exquisite melodies? In attempting to learn more about the lives of these men who continue to move so many around the world, personal portraits emerge of seemingly ordinary beings. An ordinariness that vanished when pen was put to paper, and a musical sublimeness was born.

Traitors to King and Country: Inside the British Free Corps, Hitler’s British Legion

by History Guild | Apr 30, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 11 minutes
From the moment it took power, the Nazis ruled over a German state possessed of two armies. One was the inheritor of the imperial lineage of the First World War, and the second was the Waffen-SS, which grew from a tiny band of Hitler’s most hardened antisemites to a force of nearly a million men from over two dozen nations before its demise.

The Blue Division: Franco’s Soldiers on the Eastern Front

by History Guild | Apr 9, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 12 minutes
From 1939 to 1945, scarcely one of the 99 countries on Earth went untouched. Just 14 nations remained neutral throughout the Second World War, and even those couldn’t completely escape the gravity well of war.
Nor did they all want to. A prelude to the European war – bloody, massive, and unspeakably destructive – had played out in Spain from 1936 until just a few months before Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939.

Virginia Hall, SOE Agent to CIA Pioneer

by History Guild | Mar 25, 2024 | Military History, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes

Virginia Hall (1906–1982) was an American woman who served with the British Special Operations Executive in France in 1941–1942. She then joined its US equivalent, the Office of Strategic Services, and became a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Schindler’s List at 30: a look back at Steven Spielberg’s shattering masterpiece

by History Guild | Mar 20, 2024 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes

Schindler’s List, released 30 years ago, remains Steven Spielberg’s most highly acclaimed and emotionally sapping film. Winning seven Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, it was widely praised for its portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust.

“Homosexuals Are Not Cowards”: The Legacy of Willem Arondeus

by History Guild | Feb 21, 2024 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Dutch artist and author Willem Arondeus’ life had always been fraught with insecurity. Despite the modest success of his artwork, he lived in poverty, and friend Frieda Belinfante remembered him first for his timidity. ‘He was very shy,’ she said, ‘and kind of an inferiority complex. He didn’t think he was good enough for this or that.’

Lieutenant Martin Monti, the Only American Defector to the Waffen-SS

by History Guild | Feb 7, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
On May 8, 1945, a battered, broken Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied armies which had crashed across its borders, fighting town by town to topple Hitler’s regime. Two days later, one of Germany’s strangest supporters surrendered, too.

Ireland and the Battle of The Somme

by History Guild | Jan 25, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
The Somme was the first great action by a British Army on a continental scale. It was the longest, bloodiest battle of World War One, a campaign lasting four and a half months, and fought over a twenty-mile front near the Somme. In February 1916 Allied commanders had decided to launch an infantry offensive there,

The debate on the origins of the First World War

by History Guild | Jan 15, 2024 | Military History, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
The way historians have viewed the causes of WWI has changed in the hundred years since war broke out. This article explores the origins of the Great War.

Forgotten: Britain’s civilian mass prison camps from World War I

by History Guild | Jan 8, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes

In 1914, Britain stood at the forefront of organising one of the first civilian mass internment operations of the 20th century. 30,000 civilian German, Austrian and Turkish men who had been living or travelling in Britain in the summer of that year found themselves behind barbed wire, in many cases for the whole duration of World War I.

The Saar Offensive 1939: When France invaded Germany

by History Guild | Dec 21, 2023 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
In September 1939, as German armies overran large swathes of Poland far to the east, the French launched an offensive of their own. Their goal was to capture the Saarland, the area between the French border and the German Siegfried line and force the Germans to transfer divisions away from Poland. The Saar Offensive of 1939 had begun.

How German PoWs staged their greatest World War I escape from a camp now part of a British university

by History Guild | Dec 13, 2023 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Escape was a romantic ideal rather than a rational expectation. Gunter Pluschow, who escaped from another PoW camp at Donington Hall, in Leicestershire, was the only German to make it home in World War I, largely because he managed to adopt a disguise and stow away on board a cargo ship at Harwich.

Tag: German