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German Unification
Germany was unified at the Versailles Palace in the Hall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. -
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German Imperialism
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Germany takes over Namibia
In 1883 Franz Adolf Lüderitz, a merchant from Bremen, Germany, established a trading post in southwest Africa at Angra Pequena, which he renamed Lüderitzbucht. He also acquired the adjacent coastal area, which he named Lüderitzland. These areas were constituted the first German colony under German protection on April 24, 1884. The German occupation subsequently extended inland. -
Germany sets up the SWAC
with the German government's approval, the South West Africa Company acquired the Damaraland concession that Wichmann, a merchant, and Julius Scharlach, a lawyer, on the condition that within a certain period a company would set up for recovery of allowances. The company was granted numerous advantages, of which the most important were the grant of 13,000 square kilometers of land and the mining monopoly in Damaraland. -
Battle of Waterberg
the battle triggered the annihilation decree by German military of the Herero people, the indigenous nomadic inhabitants of the area. An estimated 60,000 to 100,000 people perished during and after The Battle of Waterberg which marked the beginning of Germany's extermination campaign. -
German Genocide
After the Germans had defeated the Herero combatants at the Battle of Waterberg in August 1904, any survivors were either brutally slaughtered or driven into the Kalahari Desert. Von Trotha then built a 200 mile fence to seal off the desert and leave the Herero and Nama to die of thirst and starvation. -
Germany declaring war in WWI
two days after declaring war on Russia, Germany declares war on France, moving ahead with a long-held strategy, conceived by the former chief of staff of the German army, Alfred von Schlieffen, for a two-front war against France and Russia. Hours later, France makes its own declaration of war against Germany, readying its troops to move into the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which it had forfeited to Germany in the settlement that ended the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. -
Germany announces use of U_Boats
Germany announces the renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic as German torpedo-armed submarines prepare to attack any and all ships, including civilian passenger carriers, said to be sighted in war-zone waters. When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners and tension soon arose between the United States -
Zimmerman Note
this was an internal diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January, 1917 that proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico in the event of the United States entering World War I against Germany. The proposal was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. Revelation of the contents outraged American public opinion and helped generate support for the United States declaration of war on Germany in April of the same year. -
The first concentration camp
The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen; commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons—the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy -
Expanision of concentration camps
After Nazi Germany unleashed World War II in September 1939, vast new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners led to the rapid expansion of the concentration camp system to the east. The war did not change the original function of the concentration camps as detention sites for the incarceration of political enemies.
