Germany

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

An attempt to prosecute German war criminals in 1921 failed to such an extent that the entire enterprise is largely forgotten. What went wrong?

Indulgent symbol of papist excess or mouthpiece for God’s second greatest gift? What place was there for the organ in the Reformation church?

An enfant terrible shook up Renaissance medicine by denouncing experts and debunking accepted wisdom. Was Paracelsus as radical as he seemed?

In The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr discovers that it wasn’t just the men in the dock who had scandalous social lives and hidden agendas.

The Cold War forged new international relationships in which physical distance seemed overcome by ideological proximity. In North Korea, East Germany found a fellow traveller – and a fellow victim.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard Evans asks what manner of men made themselves the Führer’s ‘paladins’.

As the last living perpetrators are brought to justice, Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century by Tobias Buck wonders what purpose the prosecution of Bruno Dey serves.

In Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49, Daniel Cowling brings lost stories to light – some of them, at least.