5 stories from this place.
For roughly two centuries, Europe was gripped by the fear of premature burial — fed by imperfect diagnosis of death, cholera-era haste, and Poe. The answer was the safety coffin: bells, flags, breathing tubes, and escape hatches operable by the awakened dead, patented by the dozen. Germany built entire 'waiting mortuaries' where corpses lay wired to alarms until they visibly decomposed.
Read the story →Nazi SA stormtroopers and civilians attacked Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes across Germany and Austria on the night of 9-10 November 1938. 267 synagogues were burned. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. About 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 arrested. The German Jewish community was forced to pay a one-billion-mark fine for the damage.
Read the story →Britain, France, Italy, and Germany signed the Munich Agreement at 1:30 a.m. on 30 September 1938. Czechoslovakia was forced to cede the German-speaking Sudetenland border regions. Chamberlain returned to London claiming "peace for our time." Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 and Poland on 1 September 1939.
Read the story →Eight members of the Palestinian Black September Organization entered the Israeli Olympic team quarters at the Munich Olympic Village before dawn on 5 September 1972. They killed two Israelis at the apartment and took nine others hostage. The hostage crisis ended with a failed German rescue operation at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield on the night of 5-6 September that killed all nine remaining hostages, five attackers, and one West German policeman.
Read the story →Max von Pettenkofer was the most prominent 19th-century German opponent of the germ theory of cholera. In 1892 he drank a flask of *Vibrio cholerae* sent to him by Robert Koch's institute. He did not die. He shot himself nine years later.
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