Did you know that the guillotine is most famously associated with revolutionary France, but it may have claimed just as many lives in Germany during the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler made the guillotine a state method of execution in the 1930s and ordered that 20 of the machines be placed in cities across Germany. According to Nazi records, the guillotine was eventually used to execute some 16,500 people between 1933 and 1945, many of them resistance fighters and political dissidents.

This ended by ten years of decline and then came Napoléon, for another fifteen years of wars and defeats…It took us more than eighty years to enjoy a bit of stability interrupted by WW1 a few decades later…