Russia’s President Putin is taking an ever more revisionist view of Russia’s pivotal role in the outbreak of World War II.

German soldiers lifting the Polish-German border crossing on 1st September 1939. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction but with all the internal and external pressures facing the European Union, the Polish parliament’s unanimous vote followed by its 2017 research bureau’s ‘legitimate claims against the Federal Republic of Germany’ for war reparations have to be among the most surreal. No one could have envisaged at the inauguration of what became E.U. with the treaty of

I know the Third Reich is always top of all history curriculums and just as popular these days is refighting the Second World War via on-line computer games. The History of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Prussia and the intricacies of Central European history are rather more complex and harder to absorb. As I mentioned in my book and in various blogs most countries teach their history through the means of carefully selected national curriculums. Curriculums that

See the image of a popular souvenir I’ve seen on sale at any number of souvenir shops in Slask (Silesia) this one in Szklarska Poreba. The Polish text translates as ‘If you always want to have money and for it never to run out, you need to have a Jew at home to look after your money. A Jew for money’. And you are supposed to rub the Jew’s Polish Grosz coin for luck. When I have mentioned this to any number of English, German, American and Polish friends, either after a short

The Order of the Teutonic Knights fought perhaps the most successful of all the crusades along the shores of the eastern Baltic creating a ‘Knights kingdom’ and laying the ground work for the future Prussian state, founding over one hundred towns and over one thousand villages. This monumental achievement would endure for over seven hundred years, three hundred years longer than the so called ‘New World’ has been in existence. One British historian has noted that the Order’s

The first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (Karl the Great as he is known to the Germans) was not French! The Franks were a Germanic tribe originating east of the Rhine from what is modern day central western Germany. Charlemagne’s native tongue was the old high German dialect, which was also the language used at his court in Aachen. The first document to appear in what can be termed the old Gallo Romance ancestor of ‘French’ (the oaths of Strasbourg of 842) was not even writte