The Battle of Tours called the Battle of Poitiers and, by Arab sources, the Battle of the Highway of the Martyrs, was an important victory of the Frankish and Burgundian forces under Charles Martel over the raiding parties of the Umayyad Caliphate led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Governor-General of al-Andalus. It was fought in an area between the cities of Poitiers and Tours, in Aquitaine in west-central France, near the village of Moussais-la-Bataille, about 20 kilometres northeast of Poitiers; the location of the battle was close to the border between the Frankish realm and the then-independent Duchy of Aquitaine under Odo the Great. The Franks were victorious. Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi was killed, Charles subsequently extended his authority in the south. Details of the battle, including its exact location and the number of combatants, cannot be determined from the accounts that have survived. Notably, the Frankish troops won the battle without cavalry; the battle helped lay the foundations of the Carolingian Empire and Frankish domination of western Europe for the next century.

Most historians agree that "the establishment of Frankish power in western Europe shaped that continent's destiny and the Battle of Tours confirmed that power." The Battle of Tours followed two decades of Umayyad conquests in Europe which had begun with the invasion of the Visigothic Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in 711. These were followed by military expeditions into the Frankish territories of Gaul, former provinces of the Roman Empire. Umayyad military campaigns reached northward into Aquitaine and Burgundy, including a major engagement at Bordeaux and a raid on Autun. Charles's victory is believed to have stopped the northward advance of Umayyad forces from the Iberian Peninsula and to have preserved Christianity in Europe during a period when Muslim rule was overrunning the remains of the Byzantine and Persian Empires. Most historians assume that the two armies met where the rivers Clain and Vienne join between Tours and Poitiers; the number of troops in each army is not known.

The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, a Latin contemporary source which describes the battle in greater detail than any other Latin or Arabic source, states that "the people of Austrasia, greater in number of soldiers and formidably armed, killed the king, Abd ar-Rahman", which agrees with many Arab and Muslim historians. However all Western sources disagree, estimating the Franks as numbering 30,000, less than half the Muslim force; some modern historians, using estimates of what the land was able to support and what Martel could have raised from his realm and supported during the campaign, believe the total Muslim force, counting the outlying raiding parties, which rejoined the main body before Tours, outnumbered the Franks. Drawing on non-contemporary Muslim sources, Creasy describes the Umayyad forces as 80,000 strong or more. Writing in 1999, Paul K. Davis estimates the Umayyad forces at 80,000 and the Franks at about 30,000, while noting that modern historians have estimated the strength of the Umayyad army at Tours at between 20,000–80,000.

However, Edward J. Schoenfeld, rejecting the older figures of 60,000–400,000 Umayyads and 75,000 Franks, contends that "estimates that the Umayyads had over fifty thousand troops are logistically impossible." Historian Victor Davis Hanson believes both armies were the same size, between 20,000 and 30,000 men. Contemporary historical analysis may be more accurate than the medieval sources, as the modern figures are based on estimates of the logistical ability of the countryside to support these numbers of men and animals. Both Davis and Hanson point out that both armies had to live off the countryside, neither having a commissary system sufficient to provide supplies for a campaign. Other sources give the following estimates: "Gore places the Frankish army at 15,000–20,000, although other estimates range from 30,000 to 80,000. In spite of wildly varying estimates of the Muslim force, he places that army as around 20,000–25,000. Other estimates range up to 80,000, with 50,000 not an uncommon estimate."Losses during the battle are unknown, but chroniclers claimed that Charles Martel's force lost about 1,500 while the Umayyad force was said to have suffered massive casualties of up to 375,000 men.

However, these same casualty figures were recorded in the Liber Pontificalis for Duke Odo the Great's victory at the Battle of Toulouse. Paul the Deacon reported in his History of the Lombards that the Liber Pontificalis mentioned these casualty figures in relation to Odo's victory at Toulouse, but writers "influenced by the Continuations of Fredegar, attributed the Muslims casualties to Charles Martel, the battle in which they fell became unequivocally that of Poitiers." The Vita Pardulfi, written in the middle of the eighth century, reports that after the battle'Abd-al-Raḥmân's forces burned and looted their way through the Limousin on their way back to Al-Andalus, which implies that they were not destroyed to the extent imagined in the Continuations of Fredegar. The invasion of Hispania, Gaul, was led by the Umayyad dynasty, the first dynasty of Sunni caliphs of the Sunni Islamic empire after the reign of the Rashidun Caliphs ended; the Umayyad Caliphate, at the time of the Battle of Tours, was the world's foremost military power.

Great expansion of the Caliphate occurred under the reign of the Umayyads. Muslim armies pushed east across Per

Helmut Kallmeyer was a German chemist in the era of National Socialism. He served as a consultant in Adolf Hitler's Chancellery for gasification methods, he worked in the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime. He was involved in Nazi Germany's program to murder people with disabilities. Kallmeyer was the son of a senior government surveyor, he passed his Abitur in 1929, studied chemistry at various universities. In 1939, he completed his studies at the Technical University of Berlin and received his doctorate the following year, he was drafted into the Kriegsmarine, the navy of Nazi Germany, served until September 1941. Kallmeyer never was a member of the Nazi Party, nor was he an SS man, nor a policeman, but he did join the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi Party's early paramilitary wing, he claimed that, as a member of a German sailing club, he had been automatically transferred into the SA. At the end of 1940, Kallmeyer married Gertrud Fröse, working temporarily at Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre at this time, whom he had met four years earlier at his sailing club.

Among the wedding guests was Viktor Brack, from Hitler's Chancellery and Action T4, for whom the bride had worked as a secretary. In September 1941, Kallmeyer was discharged from the Kriegsmarine for special home front duty. Following his discharge, Kallmeyer was recruited by Brack for Action T4. Along with August Becker and Albert Widmann, Kallmeyer was one of the three chemists involved with the murderous program; these men, familiar with the uses of gas and poison, supplied professional services essential for the success of the killings. There exists little paperwork on Kallmeyer's involvement within T4, the Kallmeyers' postwar testimonies appear to be withholding evidence. A letter from Alfred Wetzel of the Reich Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories to Hinrich Lohse attests that Viktor Brack wanted disabled Jews in Riga to be gassed by "Brack's devices". For this purpose, Brack offered his chemist, Dr. Kallmeyer, other assistants; this plan was not carried out in the Baltic States.

After the war, Kallmeyer stated. Rather, he was in Lublin in early 1942 for a particular job, the vocation of which he could not remember. At this time, the T4 perpetrators had been reporting to the Lublin region to start construction of the extermination camps. Kallmeyer returned to Berlin after a week, where he was ordered to start an analysis of drinking water, he was admitted to a hospital on 28 February 1942 with typhus. Upon recovery, he was transferred to the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime; as with T4, Kallmeyer's name appears on KTI documents involving the delivery of gas and poisons to T4 euthanasia centres. Kallmeyer's letter from 2 May 1944 includes an order, on behalf of KTI, for "15 bottles of Kohlenoyd". In 1946, Kallmeyer was interrogated as a witness in connection with the Doctors' trial in Nuremberg, he denied having been aware of anything concerning the euthanasia murders. He downplayed his subsequent work at KTI. Kallmeyer and his wife admitted only to. Though the investigating authorities did not believe the claims, the couple could not be proven to have partaken in the mass murder.

After the war, Kallmeyer worked as a senior civil servant in the Statistical Office for Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel and for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Cuba and Ghana. The Kallmeyers met with Horst Schumann and his wife in Ghana in 1960. Schumann was wanted on account of his activities in the euthanasia centres of Sonnenstein and Grafeneck, his experiments in Auschwitz

Scott Joseph Lachance is an American former professional ice hockey defenseman who last played for the Lowell Devils of the American Hockey League. Lachance was born in Charlottesville and raised in Bristol, where he attended St. Paul Catholic High School; as a youth, he played in the 1985 and 1986 Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournaments with a minor ice hockey team from Middlesex County, Connecticut. Lachance was named to the All-Hockey East Rookie Team in the 1990–91 season. Lachance was selected 4th overall by the New York Islanders in the 1991 NHL Entry Draft, he played scoring 31 goals and 112 assists for 143 points. He played in 1997 National Hockey League All-Star Game, he has three children: Jake and Ryan. His wife, Jaqueline, is the daughter of former Boston University hockey coach Jack Parker. Lachance is a scout for the New Jersey Devils. Scott Lachance career statistics at The Internet Hockey Database