Field Marshal Erwin Rommel The legendary German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel once wrote: “The battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.”. Students of military history tend to pay lip service to the importance of logistics, preferring to read about tanks and artillery, mass and maneuver, attack and counterattack. The reasons for that bias are easy to understand.... 

Mamoun Darkazanli German prosecutors have launched an investigation over a magazine report claiming CIA agents and employees of a notorious US private security firm had sought to assassinate a German-Syrian terror suspect. Berlin on Monday denied any knowledge of the CIA’s operation, several days after the report’s publication in Vanity Fair just before Christmas. The controversy centers... 

Germany is trying to counter U.S. and NATO pressure to send more troops to Afghanistan by offering to deploy more police trainers, the Financial Times Deutschland said, citing German government officials it didn’t identify. Germany is leading international efforts to train Afghan police and has as many as 120 trainers in the country, the newspaper reported today. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government... 

“The most notorious American POW camps were the so-called Rheinwiesenlager.” Here, the Americans allowed “anything up to 40,000 German soldiers to die from hunger and neglect in the muddy flats of the Rhine.” … “any attempt to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by death.” This article was published in the Spring 2009 issue of... 

Stalin, the man who committed the largest genocide on Earth is promoted as a Hero in Eastern Europe Was the Soviet Union a force for good or ill during the Nazi years? That question is at the core of a controversy between and among some Jewish groups and former Soviet republics over the issue of Holocaust revisionism, and it erupted last week at a conference in Berlin organized by the World Congress... 

More Billions of Euros for Israel The Israeli government is calling on Berlin to make additional payments, even though Jerusalem signed a written promise, after the end of the compensation negotiations, that the Jewish state would “file no further claims against the Federal Republic of Germany.” Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz will demand between 450 million to 1 billion euros in reparations... 

Vaccines Germany and Spain want to reduce deliveries of swine flu vaccine and potentially return excess supplies to manufacturers, due to low uptake of the shots, in a move that could hit drugmakers’ profits. Germany’s health ministry said on Thursday some German states had been in talks with Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline about reducing deliveries of H1N1 vaccine, but the talks had as... 

Germany plans to send up to 2,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan in response to requests from the United States and other NATO partners, a German newspaper reported on Wednesday. Citing NATO and German Defence Ministry sources, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the United States and NATO members had already received signals to this effect. A ministry spokesman declined to confirm the... 

Holocaust Survivor Rosemarie Pence Charged with felony, theft and fraud A 71-year-old Longmont woman who some believe spun grandiose tales of Holocaust survival to manipulate others to house her and provide her with money is wanted on suspicion of felony theft and check fraud. The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office last month obtained a warrant to arrest Rosemarie Pence, originally of Germany. Pence... 

Visitors watch a visual display about the environment before the opening of the summit in Copenhagen Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough. On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit... 

The EU is to offer “one to three billion euros” in aid to developing countries over the next three years so they can fight the effects of “climate change”, the Financial Times Deutschland reported Sunday. The funding is to be agreed at a European Union summit in Brussels set for Thursday and Friday, which will also coincide with the world climate conference in Copenhagen that... 

The Turkish community is not satisfied by Germany even though Germany allowed millions of Turks in. Once in Germany they are even allowed to build mosques, learn Islam in schools. What more can be done? Perhaps Turks want Germans to sing and dance for them so they can feel accepted in Germany. The vast majority of Turkish immigrants in Germany think their adopted country should do more to accommodate... 

A documentary panned at Cannes in the 1970s for depicting Hitler’s personal life is now being shown in Germany for the first time. David Wroe speaks with the director with the director about the film’s vastly different reception nearly four decades later. When “Swastika” was shown at the 1973 Cannes film festival, fights broke out and somebody threw part of a chair at the screen. “All... 

Volkswagen Group has displaced Toyota for the first time as the world’s largest car manufacturer in terms of production. The German carmaker produced 4.4 million vehicles in the first nine months of the year, overtaking its Japanese rival by 400,000 units, consulting firm IHS Global Insight said on Wednesday. Volkswagen Group owns a variety of models such as Skoda and Seat and high-end lines... 

Crying policemen. Stinking traffic jams of East German Trabis on the posh streets of West Berlin. Strangers falling into each others’ arms. The night of Nov. 9, 1989 was unforgettable. A look into the SPIEGEL archives brings the historic day to life. Wearing nothing but a coat over his pajamas, the man spoke rapidly in his thick Berlin accent: “We live on Bornholmer Street, in the East,...