Portal:Germany/Selected article/2007
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These articles have appeared on the Portal:Germany page in 2007. They are (or were at the time of listing) Featured Articles.
Contents |
January
The Anschluss, also known as the Anschluss Österreichs (literally meaning connection, or political union) was the 1938 incorporation of Austria in "Greater Germany" under the Nazi Regime.
The events of March 12, 1938 were the first major step in Hitler's long-desired expansion of the Third Reich, preceding the inclusion of the Sudetenland later in 1938 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and finally leading to the Second World War with Nazi Germany's assault on Poland.
Although the Wehrmacht entered into Austria to enforce the Anschluss, no fighting took place, in part because of prior political pressure exerted by Germany, but primarily because of the well-planned internal overthrow by the Austrian Nazi Party of Austria's state institutions in Vienna on March 11, the day before German troops marched across the border. More...
February
Carl Friedrich Gauss (Gauß) (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist of profound genius who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, magnetism, astronomy and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians.
Gauss was a child prodigy, of whom there are many anecdotes pertaining to his astounding precocity while a mere toddler, and made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He completed Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, his magnum opus, at the age of twenty-one (1798), though it would not be published until 1801. This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and has shaped the field to the present day. More...
March
The Eifel Aqueduct was one of the longest aqueducts of the Roman Empire. It shows the great skill of the Roman engineers, whose level of technical achievement was lost in the Middle Ages and regained only in recent times.
The aqueduct, constructed in AD 80, carried water some 95 km (60 miles) from the hilly Eifel region of what is now Germany to the ancient city of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (present-day Cologne). If the auxiliary spurs to additional springs are included, the length was 130 km (80 miles). The construction was almost entirely below ground, and the flow of the water was produced entirely by gravity. A few bridges, including one up to 1,400 m (0.87 miles) in length, were needed to pass over valleys. Unlike some of the other famous Roman aqueducts, the Eifel aqueduct was specifically designed to minimize the above-ground portion to protect it from damage and freezing. More...
April
Karl Dönitz (September 16, 1891–December 24, 1980) was a German naval leader, who was in command of the Kriegsmarine during World War II and for his 23-day term President of Germany after Adolf Hitler's suicide. During World War I, he served on surface ships before transferring to submarines. He remained in the navy after the war's conclusion and rose in the ranks of the Reichsmarine and Kriegsmarine, becoming a Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) and serving as Commander of Submarines (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote, B.d.U.) and later Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine). Under his command, the U-boat fleet fought the famous Battle of the Atlantic. He also served as Reichspräsident for 20 days following Adolf Hitler's suicide.
After the war he was charged and convicted of "crimes against peace" and "war crimes" and served ten years. During his later years, he wrote two autobiographies covering different periods in his life. He died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve, 1980. More...
May
The Franks or the Frankish peoples were one of several west Germanic federations. They were not originally grouped into one official tribe, but "as with the other barbarians, they belonged to much smaller groups that would join constantly changing confederations." The confederation was formed out of Germanic tribes: Salians, Sicambri, Chamavi, Tencteri, Chattuarii, Bructeri, Usipetes, Ampsivarii, Chatti. Most of those peoples were living at the northern borders of the Rhine in what was then called Francia in the panegyrici Latini.
They entered the late Roman Empire from the north and east river bank of the Rhine into modern northern Belgium and southern Netherlands, where they were treated as foederati by Julian the Apostate (AD 358). Later invasions conquered and established a lasting realm (which again was referred to as Francia) in an area which eventually covered most of modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the western regions of Germany (Franconia, Rhineland, Münsterland, Hesse), forming the historic kernel of all these modern countries. The conversion to Christianity of the pagan Frankish king Clovis in the late 5th century was a crucial event in the history of Europe. More...
June
The Sino-German cooperation (Chinese: 中德合作; German: Chinesisch-Deutsche Kooperation) during the 1920s and 1930s refers to the cooperation between the Republic of China and Germany. The cooperation was instrumental in modernizing the industry and the armed forces of the Republic of China, immediately prior to the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Republic of China, which succeeded the Qing Dynasty in 1912, was fraught with factional warlordism and foreign incursions. The Northern Expedition of 1928 nominally unified China under Kuomintang (KMT) control, yet Imperial Japan loomed as the greatest foreign threat. The Chinese urgency to modernize the military and its national defense industry, coupled with Germany's need for a stable supply of raw materials, put the two countries on the road of close relations from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. Although intense cooperation lasted only from the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 to the start of the war with Japan in 1937, and concrete measures at industrial reform started in earnest only in 1936, it had a profound effect on Chinese modernization and capability to resist the Japanese in the war. More...
July
Athanasius Kircher (May 2, 1602–November 27 or 28, 1680) was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology and medicine. He made an early study of Egyptian hieroglyphs. One of the first people to observe microbes through a microscope, he was thus ahead of his time in proposing that the plague was caused by an infectious microorganism and in suggesting effective measures to prevent the spread of the disease.
Kircher has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci for his inventiveness and the breadth and depth of his work. A scientific star in his day, towards the end of his life he was eclipsed by the rationalism of René Descartes and others. In the late 20th century, however, the aesthetic qualities of his work again began to be appreciated. One scholar, Edward W. Schmidt, has called him "the last Renaissance man". More...
August
The Battle of Jutland (German: Skagerrakschlacht) was the largest naval battle of World War I and the only full-scale clash of battleships in that war. It was fought on 31 May–1 June 1916, in the North Sea near Jutland, the northward-pointing peninsular mainland of Denmark. The combatants were the Kaiserliche Marine’s (Germany's) High Seas Fleetand the Royal Navy’s British Grand Fleet. The intention of the German fleet was to lure out, trap and destroy a portion of the Grand Fleet, part of their larger strategy of breaking the British naval blockade of the North Sea and allowing German mercantile shipping to operate again. The Royal Navy, on the other hand, was pursuing a strategy seeking to engage and cripple the High Seas Fleet and keep the German force bottled up and away from their own shipping lanes.
Fourteen British and eleven German ships were sunk with great loss of life. Both sides claimed victory. The British had lost more ships and many more sailors, and the British press criticized the Grand Fleet's actions, but Scheer’s plan of destroying Beatty’s squadrons had also failed. The Germans never again contested control of the seas. Instead, the German Navy turned its efforts and resources to unrestricted submarine warfare. More...
September
Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and a key figure in the 17th century astronomical revolution. He is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy.
Before Kepler, planets' paths were computed by combinations of the circular motions of the celestial orbs. After Kepler, astronomers shifted their attention from orbs to orbits—paths that could be represented mathematically as an ellipse. Kepler's laws also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. Kepler did fundamental work in the field of optics and helped to legitimize the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei. More...
October
The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer) or "Operation Hummingbird," took place in Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime executed at least eighty-five people for political reasons. Most of those killed were members of the "Storm Division" (SA) (German: Sturmabteilung), a Nazi paramilitary organization. Adolf Hitler moved against the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm, because he saw the independence of the SA and the penchant of its members for street violence as a direct threat to his power. Hitler also wanted to forestall any move by army leaders, who both feared and despised the SA, to curtail his rule. Finally, Hitler used the purge to act against conservative critics of his regime, especially those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, and to settle scores with old enemies.
The purge strengthened and consolidated the support of the army, or Reichswehr, for Hitler. It also provided a cloak of legality for the Nazi regime, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extra-judicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. More...
November
The Merseburg Incantations (German: Merseburger Zaubersprüche) are two medieval magic spells, charms or incantations, written in Old High German. They are the only known examples of Germanic pagan belief preserved in this language. They were discovered in 1841 by Georg Waitz, who found them in a theological manuscript from Fulda, written in the 9th or 10th century, although there remains some speculation about the date of the charms themselves. The manuscript (Cod. 136 f. 85a) was stored in the library of the cathedral chapter of Merseburg, hence the name. The spells became famous in modern times through the appreciation of the Grimm brothers. More...
December
In the history of cryptography, the Enigma machine was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. More precisely, Enigma was a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines — there are a variety of different models.The Enigma was used commercially from the early 1920s on, and was also adopted by military and governmental services of a number of nations — most famously, by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. The German military model, the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed. Allied codebreakers were, in many cases, able to decrypt messages protected by the machine (see cryptanalysis of the Enigma). The intelligence gained through this source — codenamed ULTRA — was a significant aid to the Allied war effort. Some historians have suggested that the end of the European war was hastened by up to a year or more because of the decryption of German ciphers. More...
