Search Results: Holmes

Before the days of the Raj, British India was ruled by a private corporation: The Honourable East India Company. The Company, which began in India as a purely mercantile institution, eventually came to control vast territories across the...

Johannes Gutenberg (l. c. 1398-1468) was the inventor of the printing press (c. 1450) who seems to have developed the device from wine and oil presses of the time. Gutenberg’s printing press not only revolutionized book making but literally...

The Messerschmitt Bf 109, also known as the Me 109, was Germany's most important single-seater fighter plane throughout the Second World War (1939-45). Produced in greater numbers than any other German plane, the fighter was a match for the...

The Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend or HJ), named after the leader of the German Nazi Party Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), was designed to indoctrinate 14-18 year-old boys into the party's way of thinking. Its activities promoted physical exercise...

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was the head of the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) organisation. One of the most powerful individuals in Nazi Germany, Himmler built up the SS from a small paramilitary unit to a vast organisation, which included armoured...

The Nuremberg trials (1945-6), held in Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Germany, were a series of trials involving the senior surviving Nazis to hold them accountable for waging war and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Second...

The Gestapo was the secret political police organisation of Nazi Germany. Created in 1933, the Gestapo became one of the most feared instruments of state terror, its members having few or no legal restrictions to their actions. The Gestapo...

The Nuremberg Rally, or the Reich Party Congress, was an annual event held from 1927 to 1938 in Nürnberg, Germany. Organised on a massive scale by the National Socialist Party (Nazi), these operations in pomp, ceremony, and propaganda were...

The Phoney War was the period from the start of the Second World War (1939-45) when Britain and France declared war against Germany on 3 September until the start of significant military action in the West in the spring of 1940. While Poland...

Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), a lieutenant-colonel in the Nazi SS, was responsible for organising the transportation of Jewish people and other victims of Nazism to concentration, labour, and death camps. Eichmann played a key role in the Holocaust...