German Empire

State · 1871–1919 CE · at its largest around 1918 CE

The federal German state proclaimed at Versailles in 1871 with the Prussian king as emperor and Otto von Bismarck as chancellor, ended by the revolution of 1918.

Its battles, in Battle View

First day on the Somme (1916 CE)

On its lands while it lasted

Otto von Bismarck (1815 CE – 1898 CE): Prussian statesman who unified Germany through three wars and served as the first Chancellor of the German Empire from 1871 to 1890.
Gregor Mendel (1822 CE – 1884 CE): Augustinian friar and later abbot in Brno, Moravia, whose experiments on pea plants revealed the basic rules of heredity. His 1866 paper was largely ignored until its rediscovery in 1900.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 CE – 1910 CE): Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina at his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, later becoming a moral and religious thinker.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 CE – 1900 CE): German philosopher and classical philologist whose works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, attacked traditional morality and religion and introduced ideas such as the will to power.
Max Planck (1858 CE – 1947 CE): German theoretical physicist in Berlin whose 1900 hypothesis that energy is emitted in discrete quanta founded quantum theory. He won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Vladimir Lenin (1870 CE – 1924 CE): Russian revolutionary who led the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 and headed the Soviet government until his death. He founded Marxism–Leninism.
Joseph Stalin (1878 CE – 1953 CE): Georgian-born dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death. He drove forced industrialisation and collectivisation, led the country to victory in World War II, and oversaw mass repression.
Albert Einstein (1879 CE – 1955 CE): German-born theoretical physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and explained the photoelectric effect, for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Niels Bohr (1885 CE – 1962 CE): Danish physicist who proposed a quantum model of the atom in 1913 and won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics. His Copenhagen institute became a centre for the development of quantum mechanics.
Benz Patent-Motorwagen (1886 CE): Karl Benz of Mannheim patented his three-wheeled vehicle powered by a petrol engine in 1886. It is widely regarded as the first practical automobile.
Adolf Hitler (1889 CE – 1945 CE): Austrian-born dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He started World War II in Europe and bears chief responsibility for the Holocaust. He died by suicide in Berlin.
Einstein's special relativity (1905 CE): In 1905, while working at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity and, in a follow-up paper, E = mc². It transformed ideas of space and time.
World War I (1914–1918 CE): A global war from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies and the Central Powers, fought largely in trenches on Europe's Western and Eastern Fronts. Around 9 million soldiers died, and four empires collapsed.
Battle of Verdun (1916 CE): The longest battle of World War I, fought between the French and German armies around Verdun from February to December 1916, with some 700,000 casualties.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918 CE): Signed on 3 March 1918 between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers, the treaty took Russia out of the First World War at the cost of vast territories, including Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic lands.