Nazi Germany

State · 1936–1944 CE · at its largest around 1943 CE

Hitler's regime fused mass propaganda, rallies and terror into a racist dictatorship that persecuted Jews, Roma, disabled people and political opponents. It purged 'degenerate' art, launched a war of conquest, and murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Its battles, in Battle View

Omaha Beach (1944 CE)

On its lands while it lasted

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.
Winston Churchill (1874 CE – 1965 CE): British statesman who was Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, leading Britain through World War II, and again from 1951 to 1955.
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.
Alexander Fleming (1881 CE – 1955 CE): Scottish bacteriologist at St Mary’s Hospital, London, who discovered penicillin in 1928. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 CE – 1938 CE): Founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, who led the War of Independence and carried out sweeping secularizing and westernizing reforms.
Pablo Picasso (1881 CE – 1973 CE): Spanish painter and sculptor who spent most of his life in France. Co-founder of Cubism, he was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
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.
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.
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 CE – 2022 CE): Last leader of the Soviet Union, from 1985 to 1991. His policies of glasnost and perestroika and his non-intervention in eastern Europe helped end the Cold War.
Yuri Gagarin (1934 CE – 1968 CE): Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human in space when Vostok 1 carried him once around the Earth on 12 April 1961. He died in a training jet crash in 1968.
World War II in Europe (1939–1945 CE): The European theatre of the deadliest war in history, from Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 to its surrender in May 1945. Tens of millions died, including six million Jews in the Holocaust.
Auschwitz concentration camp (1940–1945 CE): The largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, built in occupied Poland. About 1.1 million people, the great majority of them Jews, were murdered there before its liberation in January 1945.
Battle of Stalingrad (1942–1943 CE): From August 1942 to February 1943 the Red Army defended Stalingrad and then encircled the German Sixth Army, which surrendered. It was a turning point of World War II.
D-Day (Normandy landings) (1944 CE): On 6 June 1944 Allied forces landed on five beaches in Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It opened the Western Front and led to the liberation of France.