Hitler and hot jazz

“…Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.)…” The Nazis hated a lot of people: Slavs, Jews, the disabled, Jesse Owens. And they [...]

Closing the Pigeon Gap

Military, economic and indeed political history has often been driven by fear that, on the other side of the hill, some perceived enemy is making all-too-rapid progress in developing dangerous new technology. From the Dreadnought race of the early 1900s to the fictitious Missile Gap that so bothered the Americans in the late 1950s – [...]

The Christmas Truce

Even at the distance of a century, no war seems more terrible than World War I. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, it killed or wounded more than 25 million people–peculiarly horribly, and (in popular opinion, at least) for less apparent purpose than did any other war before or since. Yet there were [...]

The mystery of the five wounds

On September 14, 1224, a Saturday, Francis of Assisi—noted ascetic and holy man, future saint—was preparing to enter the second month of a retreat with a few close companions on Monte La Verna, overlooking the River Arno in Tuscany. Francis had spent the previous few weeks in prolonged contemplation of the suffering Jesus Christ on [...]

One man against tyranny: Georg Elser’s lone attempt to blow up Hitler

Maria Strobel could not believe it of her Führer. Adolf Hitler and his party—a group of senior Nazis that included Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—had spent more than an hour in her Munich bierkeller. Hitler had delivered a trademark speech, and, while they listened, Himmler and the others had run up a large [...]

“Kipper und wipper”: rogue traders, rogue princes, rogue nuns and the German financial meltdown of 1621-23

The great German hyperinflation of 1923 is passing out of living memory now, but that doesn’t mean that it has been forgotten. Indeed, you don’t have to go too far to hear it cited as a terrible example of what can happen when a government lets the economy spin out of control, and the episode [...]