Otto von Bismarck: Did you mean...?

The Holy Roman Empire officially lasted from 962 to 1806. It was one of Europe’s largest medieval and early modern states, but its power base was unstable and continually shifting. The Holy Roman Empire was not a unitary state...

Portrait of Heros von Borcke in 1864, original copyright by E. O. Wiggins, c. 1914. Von Borcke (1835-1895) was a Prussian Confederate who served under J. E. B. Stuart in the American Civil War...

German field marshal Fedor von Bock (1880-1945) in 1939. Bock commanded important victories in the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Fall of France, and Operation Barbarossa during the Second World War (1939-45). (German...

The corpse of Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946) who was found guitly of war crimes and hanged 16 October 1946 after the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46).

A 1938 photograph of Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946), Nazi German foreign minister, who negotiated the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. (German Federal Archives)

A colourised photograph of the German general Hans von Seeckt (1866-1936). Seeckt was head of the German Army through the 1920s.

Modern statue of Katharina von Bora (Martin Luther's wife) on the compound of the Lutherhaus, Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.

A photograph of the German general Erich von Manstein (1887-1973), shown on the left, after the Siege of Sevastopol in 1941-2 during the Second World War (1939-45). The port in the Crimea was captured by Axis forces...

A 1629 portrait of the mercenary General Albrecht von Wallenstein, leader of the Imperial forces during the Thirty Years' War. (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich)

Cooper engraving presenting a reformer and theologian Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (l. 1486-1541). Created around 1522.