How Migrants Save a Dying Language

Switzerland is a country with four main languages. 75 years ago, Romansh was recognized as the fourth national language by ballot. Since then, it has been declared a dead language many times over. If you visit the Engadin Valley in Grisons, it will show that the language is alive and kicking. It is alive thanks to the children of migrant workers living there.

Awkward: Gestapo Burial in Berlin Jewish Cemetery

German history researcher Johannes Tuchel made a series of very awkward discoveries. The discoveries shed light on post-war Germany and how it was (not) run by the allies, on the the machinations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and on what happens when sloppy research replaces real hard graft. Now he did the real hard work and here is what he found.

Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Müller

Assassinate Hitler: Maurice Bavaud

On November 9th, 2008, it was 70 years since Maurice Bavaud tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Munich. After prolonged torture, he was murdered by the Nazis on May 14th, 1941, after ‘legal’ proceedings followed by a sentence to death on the guillotine. He was officially rehabilitated by Germany in 1956. 

Cheating Hermann Goering

Hermann Goering was the number two in Nazi Germany after Adolf Hitler. Apart from being an arch Nazi, he was an avid if incompetent collector of art stolen at his behest all over Europe. But sometimes he bought art and paid for it with equally stolen money. One of the pictures he bought was a forgery. It was so cunningly falsified it almost cost its creator his head after the war. 

Wallis Simpson: The Bored Duchess of Windsor

A biography invented and written by Anne Sebba on Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor manages the impossible: The book is more boring than her and of even less consequence. The only amusement to be gained from reading it is following up the constant contradictions contained in it.