Recent content by dummnutzer

1st successful use of poison gas, to be precise. Remember the earlier use of overdosed irritants by the French (stockpiled for crowd control by the Paris PD) and stink bombs by the Brits. You are just envious that we were better at using flamethrowers. :p Sorry, I just read "German...

Correct, we were too soft in 1815 and 1871.

Tell that to the French: They wanted to keep this alleged super weapon secret, so they deliberately limited the number of personal trained in its use and maintenance, largely avoiding field training to avoid the non-existing Prussian spy network. They kept its ballistic performance classified...

Unlikely IMHO, as it was an ergonomic nightmare: Firing a Gatling basically required turning a handle at a constant speed in one direction. A French gunner had to turn the handle clockwise, then counterclockwise (or vice-versa), pushing a lever, cranking the handle again ... a very...

The FRG deployed several hospital ships including the MS Helgoland in the area. Said ships were Civilian vessels, officially chartered by the German Red cross, not military ones. Rumors about close co-operation with military officials are just rumors ... Imagine an attack on such a hospital...

What about better PR? Thatcher once classified the over-sized German contributions to the EU-budget as reparations for WW II, and Germany happily continues to pay said reparations after half a century ... One just has to invent some noble cause post WW I and sugarcoat Germany´s role as a...

Ah, compulsory education, the apogee of human rights abuses. Torture and murder are mere secondary problems, as long as one can protect one´s kids from the evils that is called ´Science´.

The MLF might be a starting point. Franz Josef Strauß was a big champion of going nuclear. Remove some of his scandals ... The nuclear research ship Otto Hahn used a reactor that was optimized for silent running and seems to have been designed to be deployed in a sub (a slender horizontal...

Close AngloRussian cooperation seems unlikely due to the current Russophobia in in London; I fail to see any ´balancing out´. On the contrary, recent problems in FrancoGerman relations (aka Sarkozy) might result in an even closer cooperation between Russia and Germany. Rückversicherungsvertrag...

Sorry about the nit-pick, but it should be PAX ATHENIENSIS, not PAX ATHENA. :o

Oh, I was not defending Germany. I have my doubts about the whole shotgun affair, as I cannot remember reading about it in old German law journals, but there are much more interesting legal issues in WWI. I just remembered a rather obscure factoid - namely US fascination with poison gas in WWI...

At the time, poison gas was often seen as a much more humane weapon than e.g. HE shells, because it mostly wounded, but rarely killed enemy soldiers; its often crippling long-term effects were not yet fully known. Yes, today we consider poison gas to be inherently evil, but its image was quite...

A bunch of barbarians that are so primitive that they are not able to create a legal system cannot form a state. Having a foreign (!) court as a Supreme Court shows a lack independance and advancement. You focus on creating a ´state´ to avoid the problem of prior settlements of Germanic tribes...

Both examples happened after war had been declared. A weak Kaiser and a SPD that was willing to do anything to get accepted as a patriotic party are to blame. Imperial Germany was no modern democracy. But there is a tendency to compare its distorted image created by Allied propaganda with an...

How to define a state, hmmh ... as a jurist, I tend to look at the legal side. Rome is, where Roman Law rules, to quote some dead Roman.´Polish´ cities (often with large or majority German and/or Scandinavian populations) mostly used the Magdeburger Stadtrecht and even appealed to the court at...