Germany

Hitler's earliest written statement calling for the removal of Jews predates his rise to power by fourteen years, and historians now largely agree it grew out of a specific wartime myth rather than any lifelong conviction.

The story that Konigsberg residents set their clocks by Kant's daily walks is probably later embellishment, a small warning about how much of his popular biography deserves the same scrutiny.

Kepler's mother was tried for witchcraft and briefly imprisoned in a case historians now read as an attack on Kepler himself through his family, not a routine local accusation.

He negotiated the deal that made him briefly one of Britain's most popular prime ministers, and a single book published the same year Hitler invaded France was enough to make his name a byword for weakness ever since.

The chancellor built the first modern welfare state specifically to stop workers from turning socialist, which makes the safety net's origin story considerably less generous than the thing it produced.

Austria voted 99.7 percent in favour of joining Nazi Germany a month after the invasion, and historians still argue how much of that number reflected genuine sentiment.

1918

An emperor's surrender on a battlefield turned into a revolution back home two days later, which meant France's government changed hands before anyone in Paris had lost a single soldier there.

A German general designed a battle specifically to kill French soldiers rather than to capture ground, a strategy of attrition so explicit it survives in his own recorded planning language.

1923

1948

1961

Only four in every hundred Londoners actually used the Underground as a shelter, which means the famous image of a city sheltering together night after night describes a small minority of the people who lived through it.

1993

1945

No written order from Hitler authorising mass murder has ever been found, which means historians reconstructing exactly when the decision to exterminate Europe's Jews was made are working from bureaucratic traces rather than a single smoking gun.

A telegram edited to sound ruder than it was pushed France into a war it declared and lost within a month, a defeat that finished German unification and started forty-three years of French resentment over two provinces.

1358

1937

Germany staged a fake Polish attack on its own radio station to justify a war it had already secretly agreed to split with the Soviet Union, and the order Hitler gave his forces going in left no doubt the killing was meant to go beyond soldiers.

Hitler compared the Soviet Union to a rotten structure that would collapse the moment Germany kicked the door in, and by the time the door actually held, Germany had lost eight million combatants trying to prove him right.

1938

The same charter that let judges reject a defence comparing Nazi camps to Allied detention centres also barred prosecutors from examining Soviet purges and deportations, a legal boundary drawn to protect the court's own authors as much as to convict its defendants.

Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia's factories more than its territory, and the occupation's relative restraint compared to Poland reflected that economic calculation as much as any racial theory.

Historians can't even agree Luther nailed anything to a church door; the story rests partly on a secretary's note that was not found until nearly four hundred years after the fact.

1991

1957

1919

1648

1871

Britain's insistence that Austria hand Silesia to Prussia as the price of peace wrecked the very alliance the subsidies had been meant to strengthen, and set up an even bigger war within a decade.