Frederick Taylor

Not since the end of the Roman Empire, almost fifteen hundred years earlier, is there a parallel, in Europe at least, to the fall of the German nation in 1945. Industrious and inventive, home over centuries to a disproportionate number of western civilization's greatest thinkers, writers, scientists and musicians, Germany had entered the twentieth...

13 August 1961 - 9 November 1989The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of...

The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 was an event nearly unprecedented in history. Only the fall of the Roman Empire fifteen hundred years earlier compares to the destruction visited on Germany. The countrys cities lay in ruins, its economic base devastated. The German people stood at the brink of starvation, millions of them still in POW camps....

The Occupation and Denazification of GermanyNot since the end of the Roman Empire, almost fifteen hundred years earlier, is there a parallel, in Europe at least, to the fall of the German nation in 1945. Industrious and inventive, home over centuries to a disproportionate number of western civilization's greatest thinkers, writers, scientists...

Tuesday, 13 February 1945At 9.51 p.m. on Tuesday 13th February 1945, Dresden's air-raid sirens sounded as they had done many times during the Second World War. But this time was different. By the next morning, more than 4,500 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices had been dropped on the unprotected city. At least 25,000 inhabitants...

Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle ClassMany theorists believed a hundred years ago, just as they did at the beginning of our twenty-first century, that the world had reached a state of economic perfection, a never before seen condition of beneficial human interdependence that would lead to universal growth and...