Otto von Bismarck was born in Schönhausen, Prussia, on April 1, 1815. His parents were Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck, a Junker estate owner, and Wilhelmine Luise Mencken. Having attended primary and secondary schools in Berlin, Otto studied law at the University of Göttingen. After converting to Lutheranism, he married Johanna von Puttkamer in 1847. In 1851, Otto von Bismarck was Prussia’s represntative to the German Confederation, and then he was appointed ambassador to Russia and France.

After the death of King Frederick Willian IV, the new King of Prussia, William I, appointed him Prime Minister. Bismarck was a single-minded person with uncomplicated political ideas: whatever strengthened Prussia strengthened Germany, and whatever weakened Prussia weakened Germany. Power, he beliewved, was the decisive factor in all political issues. He solved William I’s crisis over the military budget by simply decreeing that whenever the legislature and the king disagreed about increasing revenue, the government was entitled to levy new taxes and spend the money until agreement was reached.

Since he had been appointed Prime Minister of Prussia, Bismarck envisioned the unification of the German states and Prussia into a one indivisible empire. To achieve that, he engineered a war against Austria to obtain hegemony in central Europe and the leadership over the German states. Thus, having defeated Austria in the Austrian-Prussian War in 1866, Bismarck organized the Northern German Confederation, annexing Hanover, Nassau, Hesse-Kassel, and Frankfurt am Main. However, he still had to win over the support of the southern German states, which he would obtain after defeating Napoleon III, Emperor of France, at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Thus, during the siege of Paris, the Prussian King William I was proclaimed Emperor of the German Empire, a new nation that included Prussian and all the German states.

In a country deeply influenced by German Romanticism, Nationalist hopes soared when Frederick William IV died in 1861 and was succeeded by his younger brother William, a soldier by hard and severe training. To emphasize Prussia’s importance, William I insisted upon being crowned at the medieval city of Königsberg, founded by the Teutonic Knights, where Brandenburg had been made the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. Like his Hohenzollern ancestors, William’s first act was to launch a major expansion of the army and tighten royal control over it. When legislature challenged his authority to do so, a constitutional crisis developed. As a result, William I appointed his tough-minded ambassador to France, Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister; so for the next twenty eight years, this son of a Junker landowner and army officer was the effective ruler of Prussia, as Prime Minister, and of Germany as Chancellor.

With the sagacity and tenacity of Bismarck, William I achieved the unification of the Germany states and Prussia into one powerful nation: the German Empire. But for that, two wars had to be won: the Austrian-Prussian War, defeating the Austrian Army at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866; and the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Prussian/German Army defeated the French Army of Napoleon III at Sedan. After the siege of Paris, King William I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on January 18, 1871.

After the 1848 Revolution that forced King Louis Philippe I to abdicate, the Second Republic had been established and a new constitution created. As a result, a presidential election was called for December 1848, in which Louis Napoleon won by a wide margin. On December 2, 1851, he carried out a coup d’état, seizing dictatorial powers. Then, he called a plebiscite in which the French people approved the creation of the Second French Empire and his coronation as emperor with the name Napoleon III.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, Louis Philippe became a revolutionary himself, joining the Jacobins, the left wing group in the National Convention, which, along with the Cordeliers, had abolished the monarchy and founded the French First Republic in 1793. However, during the Reign of Terror, Louis Philippe fled the country to save his life as his father had been executed by guillotine. In 1809, he married Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily, with whom he would have ten children. In 1815, after the definite imprisonment of Napoleon in Saint Helena, Louis Philippe returned to France.

In 1824, Charles succeeded his brother and was determined to implement his right wing views. Accordingly, in 1825, he passed a law to compensate and indemnify the French noble families whose land had been confiscated during the revolutionary government. During his reign, the Catholic Church was given back the power and influence it had exerted before the Revolution. These and other measures, such as disbanding the Parliament and his attempt to abolish the 1814 Charter (Louis XVIII’s Constitution), made him very unpopular. As a result, in July 1830 a revolution broke out and forced him to abdicate. Thus, the ultra royalist king was replaced by the Duke of Orleans, who took the throne as Louis Philippe I.

After dissolving Napoleon’s Senate and abolishing the former Constitution, Louis XVIII created his own; the Charter of 1814, which established a legislature that consisted of the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers; taxation was to be passed by the Chambers as the press would enjoy a "controlled freedom". Thus, during the reign of Louis XVIII, France had a parliamentary government for the first time since the Revolution. Although both chambers were controlled by a right-wing royalist majority, Louis opposed the extreme views of the ultra royalists, who sought revenge. As a result, the King disbanded the parliament in 1816. Nevertheless, the extreme right wingers found their way to hinder Louis government and his attempt to pass reconciliatory measures to heal the wounds left behind by the violence of the Revolution.

The Marquis of Lafayette took part in the American Revolution since 1777, being wounded in the leg at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777. Having participated two years in the war against the British forces, Lafayette returned to Paris in February 1779, where he convinced the French King Louis XVI to send more aid to America. Working with Benjamin Franklin, Lafayette secured another 6,000 soldiers to be commanded by General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau. In May 1780, he returned to America and was put in command of two light brigades, and by February 1781, he commanded three regiments. From September to October, 1781, Lafayette fought in the Siege of Yorktown along side Washington’s forces that defeated British army of Charles Cornwallis.

When Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, returned to France in December 1781, he was welcomed as a hero as he was received at Versailles by the French king and was promoted to field marshal. However, when the French Revolution broke out, Lafayette joined the National Assembly in June 1789. On July 11, Lafayette presented a draft of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen". The next day, after the dismissal of Finance Minister Jacques Necker, Camille Desmoulins organized an armed mob. On July 13, the Assembly elected Lafayette their vice-president; the following day, July 14, 1789, the Bastille was stormed.

On July 15, 1789, Lafayette was appointed by the National Assembly commander-in-chief of the National Guard of France, an armed force established during the French Revolution to maintain order under the control of the Assembly. Ideologically, Lafayette was a moderate who inclined in favor of a parliamentary monarchy, like the English political system. As leader of the National Guard, Lafayette attempted to maintain order. In May 1790, he instituted, along with Jean Sylvain Bailly, who was mayor of Paris, a political club called the "Society of 1789". The club’s intention was to provide balance to the influence of the Jacobins, who were on the extreme left as they favored the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic.

In June 1791, when the king and his family tried to escape from France, Lafayette was called a traitor by the Jacobins as the National Guard was responsible for the royal family custody. This event and the massacre of the Champs de Mars, where National Guard fired opened fire on a Parisian crowd, marked the decline of Lafayette as a key influencing figure of the French Revolution. And in August 1792, after National Convention relieved him of his command, Layayette fled to Holland with his family, for he feared being guillotined by the Jacobins. He remained in exile in the Danish province of Holstein and the Batavian Republic until Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, November 9, 1799. Lafayette used the change of regime to slip into France with a passport in the name of "Motier". He managed to convince an angry Napoleon that he planned to live in rural obscurity. Not wanting to serve in Napoleon’s army, Lafayette resigned his commission. The Lafayettes retired to La Grange, which his wife Adrienne had inherited from her mother.

Otto Carius was born on May 27, 1922, in Zweibrücken, Germany. Although he had been rejected twice before by the German Army as not fit for service when he volunteered, Carius was finally accepted in the 104th Infantry Replacement Battalion in May 1940. After intensive tank training in the Panzer Corps he had volunteered for, he was transferred to the 21st Panzer Regiment. By the end of June 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Carius had his baptism of fire as a gunner in a Panzer 38 light tank, suffering wounds from spalling.