For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity…

Throughout its existence, the Warsaw Pact aimed to portray a unified and allied front against the West, even after the Hungarian and Czechoslovak uprisings of 1956 and 1968. Since these member states were allied nations, the passport holder of a…

Passport Curtiss Aeroplane Company Marietta Ford Russell, the wife of Frank Henry Russell, an early aviator and vice president of the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, owned this fascinating pair of documents. He came to the UK during World War 1 to…

Grand Duchy Oldenburg Passport The Grand Duchy of Oldenburg was a German Confederation region re-established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. During the Danish-German War of 1864, Oldenburg was neutral – neutrality was, however, violated by the Prussian troops…

This article is inspired by Germany’s official statement to take responsibility for killing about 70.000 Herero and Nama between 1904 and 1908. Germany formally declared the killings a genocide on 28 March 2021, promised to apologize, and pledged $1.35 billion…

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (8 December 1815 – 9 February 1905) was a German Realist painter and etchings artist. He is regarded as one of the two most influential German painters of the nineteenth century, alongside Caspar David Friedrich,…

Douglas MacArthur served in the United States Army his whole life, from birth to death. His father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., led an infantry company tasked with defending settlers and railroad workers from the Indian “menace” in remote parts of New…

rare passport of Transnistria This is an internal passport issued by the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic (or sometimes translated as Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, PMR) – the official name of the country Приднестровская Молдавская Республика (ПМР). rare passport of Transnistria Most people…

“No one intends to build a wall.” This sentence has gone down in history. It was uttered in 1961 by GDR head of state Walter Ulbricht (1893-1973). 56 years later, unique documents from the life of the “wall builder” were…