The February 2006 issue of the European edition of Time magazine contained a DVD dedicated to the subject of the genocide of the Armenian people. The text introducing the documentary, produced by the French-German TV network arte, said, “‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler posed this rhetorical question on August 22, 1939, before embarking upon his campaign to exterminate six million European Jews and other groups.” The introductory paragraph concluded, “His assumption that no one remembered the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkey must have emboldened the Führer to perpetrate the Jewish Holocaust.”

On the morning of October 25, 1944, eleven foreign workers were transported from their overcrowded cells in the infamous Brauweiler prison to the Cologne neighborhood of Ehrenfeld. Upon arrival the prisoners were forced to mount a gallows constructed in an abandoned concrete lot next to an elevated train line. In front of a large crowd of assembled onlookers and police, the accused were executed for crimes ranging from petty theft to armed resistance. Their executioners cataloged their handiwork from start to finish in a detailed series of photographs that revealed that for one unfortunate, the gallows proved too short, forcing the victim to be “assisted” by a plainclothes Gestapo officer who held his legs until he expired.

When World War II finally came to an end, the Allied forces were primed to face a world of hunger. Since the earliest days of the conflict, experts throughout Europe and Asia had been predicting that the unfathomable scale of the war would result in a massive and permanent restructuring of the global food economy. Military victory itself was cast as inextricably intertwined with control over foodstuffs. In 1940, the British nutritionist and future Director-General of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd-Orr, had warned that “we are only at the beginning of what looks like a long grim struggle, in which food may be, as it was in the last war, the decisive factor for victory.” Even more ominously, such experts foresaw the end of the war as ushering in a world defined less by peace and more by hunger. Australian economist and humanitarian Frank Lidgett McDougall axiomatically declared that “the exigencies of war and of the relief period will in the next few years render almost all men everywhere in the world highly food-conscious.” The recognition of the global ramifications of hunger meant that, as Nick Cullather put it in his recent article on the history of the calorie, “the construction of a postwar international order began with food.”

In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty of additional commotion ensued on East German territory: border soldiers combed the terrain behind the border; officers drove around directing the proceedings; helicopters buzzed overhead. Based on their observation of similar past incidents, West German authorities quickly deduced what had probably taken place: an attempted escape across the heavily fortified German-German border. The main variables not known at the time were whether the attempt had been successful and whether anyone had been hurt.

In the numerous analyses of the economic failings of the German Democratic Republic, considerable attention and blame have attached to the extensive social policy program of Erich Honecker, leader of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) after 1971. The “unity of economic and social policy” encompassed the GDR's entire political economy under Honecker. It was an attempt—a last-ditch attempt, as it transpired—to incentivize higher production, but also to fulfill the party's promise of higher living standards. In sum, the intention was to secure both the GDR's long-term economic viability and popular support via (modest) consumerism and an extensive program of social welfare measures. In so doing, the SED would prove the economic, social, and political theories that underpinned the whole ideology of “real existing socialism.”