Karl Wolf Biermann is a German singer-songwriter, poet, and former East German dissident. He is perhaps best known for the 1968 song "Ermutigung" and his expatriation from East Germany in 1976.
Argus Motoren was a German manufacturing firm known for their series of small inverted-V engines and the Argus As 014 pulsejet for the V-1 flying bomb.
The Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) was a German government agency based in Berlin which maintained records of members of the former German Wehrmacht who were killed in action, as well as official military records of all military personnel during World War II as well as naval military records since 1871 and other war-related records. Formerly called the Wehrmachtsauskunftstelle für Kriegerverluste und Kriegsgefangene (WASt), the agency also provided information about the fate of foreign and German soldiers as well as prisoners of war in Germany. Such information is used for civil proceedings, for an official register of war graves, for historical research and as biographical and genealogical purposes.
The Cross of Honour of the German Mother, referred to colloquially as the Mutterehrenkreuz or simply Mutterkreuz, was a state decoration conferred by the government of the German Reich to honour a Reichsdeutsche German mother for exceptional merit to the German nation. Eligibility later extended to include Volksdeutsche mothers from, for example, Austria and Sudetenland, that had earlier been incorporated into the German Reich.
Demographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans have been derived by either the compilation of registered dead and missing persons or by a comparison of pre-war and post-war population data. Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 12.0–16.5 million. The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions was estimated at 2.2 million by the West German government in 1958 using the population balance method. German records which became public in 1987 have caused some historians in Germany to put the actual total at about 500,000 based on the listing of confirmed deaths. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims and says that the official figure of 2 million did not stand up to later review. However, the German Red Cross still maintains that the total death toll of the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.
The Berlin Document Center (BDC) was created in Berlin, Germany, after the end of World War II. Its task was to centralize the collection of documents from the time of Nazism, which were needed for the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials against war criminals. The BDC was under American administration until 1994, when the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) was allowed to take control of the BDC. While the paper records remained in Germany, the entire collection was microfilmed and made available at the National Archives in Washington, DC, where researchers have much better access unhindered by restrictive German privacy laws now in effect in Berlin.
The Stasi Records Agency was the organisation that administered the archives of Ministry of State Security (Stasi) of the former German Democratic Republic. It was a government agency of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was established when the Stasi Records Act came into force on 29 December 1991. Formally it was called the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic ; the official German abbreviation was BStU. On June 17, 2021, the BStU was absorbed into the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv).
The German Colonial Society (DKG) was a German organisation formed on 19 December 1887 to promote German colonialism. The Society was formed through the merger of the German Colonial Association and the Society for German Colonization. The Society was headquartered in Berlin.
Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps. A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity. According to German historian Rüdiger Overmans ca. 3,000,000 POWs were taken by the USSR; he put the "maximum" number of German POW deaths in Soviet hands at 1.0 million. Based on his research, Overmans believes that the deaths of 363,000 POWs in Soviet captivity can be confirmed by the files of Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), and additionally maintains that "It seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody."
Statistics for German World War II military casualties are divergent. The wartime military casualty figures compiled by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht through January 31, 1945 are often cited by military historians in accounts of individual campaigns in the war. A study by German historian Rüdiger Overmans concluded that total German military deaths were much higher than those originally reported by the German High Command, amounting to 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria and in east-central Europe. The German government reported that its records list 4.3 million dead and missing military personnel.
Josef "Sepp" Janko was a Volksgruppenführer of the Danube Swabian German Cultural Association in Yugoslavia in 1939, and later was appointed SS Obersturmführer during World War II.
The Bundeswehr Technical and Airworthiness Center for Aircraft or is one of several testing centres of the German Armed Forces. Its tasks are the testing and evaluating of military aircraft and aerial weapon systems. The centre is also responsible for certifications and inspections of modifications made on aircraft already in service with the German Armed Forces. The Bundeswehr Technical and Airworthiness Center for Aircraft is not integrated into the command structure of the military branches of the German Armed Forces but is a branch of Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support which is directly subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Defence. Founded in 1957, the centre is based at Manching Air Base. The unit has a strength of about 650 personnel, 50 of which are members of the armed forces, the rest are civilian.
The Bundeswehr Museum of German Defense Technology also known as Wehrtechnisches Museum Koblenz and Wehrtechnische Studiensammlung Koblenz (WTS-Koblenz) is the official Bundeswehr's Defense Technology Study Collection in Koblenz. It is one of Germany's important technical military exhibitions, with about 30,000 objects on an exhibition area of around 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft). It is known as one of the most extensive collections of its kind internationally. The main focus of the museum is on defense technology and the military science library. It is a subsidiary of the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support.
The Reich Debt Administration was the entity responsible for managing German state debt from 1900-1946.
