Germany

Angela Merkel officially completed her 16-year tenure as chancellor of Germany on December 8, 2021. But she waited several years after leaving office before commissioning an artist to paint a portrait of her for the official gallery of former German leaders. Merkel presented the painting on Tuesday evening. The portrait shows her in front of a golden background, gazing off into the distance in one of her signature blazers, this one a vibrant blue.  Before being added to the Federal Chancellery gallery, where all former postwar German heads of government are immortalized, Merkel's new portrait will be displayed at the Bode Museum in Berlin from July 1 to October 4. A young artist gets a big break For the work, Merkel selected a previously little-known artist, Jeremie Queyras, who was bo...

Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has ruled in favor of the Jehovah's Witnesses in a dispute over a unique archive that meticulously documents the persecution of its adherents in photographs, letters, reports from the Gestapo secret police, arrest warrants and death sentences. The religious community of Jehovah's Witnesses was one of the groups persecuted by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. From 1933 to 1945, around 15,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted across Nazi-occupied Europe. Around 4,500 were sent to concentration camps where they were forced to wear purple triangles. Over 1,800 were murdered. Annemarie Kusserow, herself a victim of Nazi persecution who died in 2005, bequeathed her private archive to a branch of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany. However, in 2009...

Germany's Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) Foundation is this month marking 25 years since it first paid compensation to the last survivors forced to work under the Nazi regime. But some have argued that those payments should have begun much sooner after the end of World War II in 1945, and should have been much larger. According to the EVZ, €4.4 billion ($5.1 billion) were paid to 1.66 million former forced laborers and their legal successors in around 100 countries between 2001 and 2007, when the final payments were made. Some 26 million people are believed to have been forced to work for the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945, around half of them in occupied Europe outside Germany's borders during World War II. Historical studies have found that if the full amount of slave ...