Adelaide
Adelaide is the capital city of the state of South Australia, the fifth-most populous city of Australia. In June 2017, Adelaide had an estimated resident population of 1,333,927. Adelaide is home to more than 75 percent of the South Australian population, making it the most centralised population of any state in Australia. Adelaide is north of the Fleurieu Peninsula, on the Adelaide Plains between the Gulf St Vincent and the low-lying Mount Lofty Ranges which surround the city. Adelaide stretches 20 km from the coast to the foothills, 94 to 104 km from Gawler at its northern extent to Sellicks Beach in the south. Named in honour of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort to King William IV, the city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital for a freely-settled British province in Australia. Colonel William Light, one of Adelaide's founding fathers, designed the city and chose its location close to the River Torrens, in the area inhabited by the Kaurna people. Light's design set out Adelaide in a grid layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, surrounded by parklands.
Early Adelaide was shaped by wealth. Until the Second World War, it was Australia's third-largest city and one of the few Australian cities without a convict history, it has been noted for early examples of religious freedom, a commitment to political progressivism and civil liberties. It has been known as the "City of Churches" since the mid-19th century, referring to its diversity of faiths rather than the piety of its denizens; the demonym "Adelaidean" is used in reference to its residents. As South Australia's seat of government and commercial centre, Adelaide is the site of many governmental and financial institutions. Most of these are concentrated in the city centre along the cultural boulevard of North Terrace, King William Street and in various districts of the metropolitan area. Today, Adelaide is noted for its many festivals and sporting events, its food and wine, its long beachfronts, its large defence and manufacturing sectors, it ranks in terms of quality of life, being listed in the world's top 10 most liveable cities, out of 140 cities worldwide by The Economist Intelligence Unit.
It was ranked the most liveable city in Australia by the Property Council of Australia in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Before its proclamation as a British settlement in 1836, the area around Adelaide was inhabited by the indigenous Kaurna Aboriginal nation. Kaurna culture and language were completely destroyed within a few decades of European settlement of South Australia, but extensive documentation by early missionaries and other researchers has enabled a modern revival of both. South Australia was proclaimed a British colony on 28 December 1836, near The Old Gum Tree in what is now the suburb of Glenelg North; the event is commemorated in South Australia as Proclamation Day. The site of the colony's capital was surveyed and laid out by Colonel William Light, the first Surveyor-General of South Australia, through the design made by the architect George Strickland Kingston. Adelaide was established as a planned colony of free immigrants, promising civil liberties and freedom from religious persecution, based upon the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.
Wakefield had read accounts of Australian settlement while in prison in London for attempting to abduct an heiress, realised that the eastern colonies suffered from a lack of available labour, due to the practice of giving land grants to all arrivals. Wakefield's idea was for the Government to survey and sell the land at a rate that would maintain land values high enough to be unaffordable for labourers and journeymen. Funds raised from the sale of land were to be used to bring out working-class emigrants, who would have to work hard for the monied settlers to afford their own land; as a result of this policy, Adelaide does not share the convict settlement history of other Australian cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. As it was believed that in a colony of free settlers there would be little crime, no provision was made for a gaol in Colonel Light's 1837 plan, but by mid-1837 the South Australian Register was warning of escaped convicts from New South Wales and tenders for a temporary gaol were sought.
Following a burglary, a murder, two attempted murders in Adelaide during March 1838, Governor Hindmarsh created the South Australian Police Force in April 1838 under 21-year-old Henry Inman. The first sheriff, Samuel Smart, was wounded during a robbery, on 2 May 1838 one of the offenders, Michael Magee, became the first person to be hanged in South Australia. William Baker Ashton was appointed governor of the temporary gaol in 1839, in 1840 George Strickland Kingston was commissioned to design Adelaide's new gaol. Construction of Adelaide Gaol commenced in 1841. Adelaide's early history was marked by questionable leadership; the first governor of South Australia, John Hindmarsh, clashed with others, in particular the Resident Commissioner, James Hurtle Fisher. The rural area surrounding Adelaide was surveyed by Light in preparation to sell a total of over 405 km2 of land. Adelaide's early economy started to get on its feet in 1838 with the arrival of livestock from Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania.
Wool production provided an early basis for the South Australian economy. By 1860, wheat farms had been established from Encounter Bay in the south to Clare in the north. George Gawler took over from Hindmarsh in late 1838 and, despite being under orders from the Select Committee on South Australia in Britain not to undertake any public works, promptly oversaw construction of a governo
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Australia
Australia the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area; the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north. The population of 25 million is urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, its largest city is Sydney; the country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, it is documented. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day; the population grew in subsequent decades, by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories. Being the oldest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils, Australia has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres. A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east and mountain ranges in the south-east. A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, its population density, 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, remains among the lowest in the world. Australia generates its income from various sources including mining-related exports, telecommunications and manufacturing. Indigenous Australian rock art is the oldest and richest in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites. Australia is a developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy.
It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income. It is a regional power, has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure. Australia has the world's ninth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 26% of the population. Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks in quality of life, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights, with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys. Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism; the name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis, a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts; the name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth". The first time that Australia appears to have been used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known by that name; the first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under". Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", "the Wide Brown Land".
The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country". Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun around 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia; these first inhabitants were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual civilisations on earth. At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies. Recent archaeological finds suggest. Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime; the Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited s
Walther-Peer Fellgiebel
Walther-Peer Fellgiebel was a German author and a key member of the Association of Knight's Cross Recipients. Fellgiebel served in World War II reaching the rank of a Major, he was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Walther-Peer Fellgiebel's father was the General Erich Fellgiebel. Fellgiebel joined the Association of Knight's Cross Recipients in 1954 and as of 1961 served on the board of directors, he became head of the order commission of the AKCR in 1970, a position he held until 1985. From this work evolved the book Die Träger des Ritterkreuzes des Eisernen Kreuzes, 1939–1945. For many years this book was considered a reference work on this topic. Fellgiebel himself indicated that the book was not official; the deteriorating situation of Nazi Germany during the final days of World War II left a number of nominations incomplete and pending in various stages of the approval process. In some of these instances the AKCR accepted and listed holders of the Knight's Cross with questionable evidence.
Author Veit Scherzer analyzed the German Federal Archives and found discrepancies in 193 instances of the original 7,322 listings by Fellgiebel. Fellgiebel's work was translated into English in 2003 as Elite of the Third Reich: the Recipients of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, 1939-45. Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 7 September 1943 as Oberleutnant as chief of the 2./leichte Heeres Artillerie-Abteilung 935 Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse Fellgiebel, Walther-Peer. Die Träger des Ritterkreuzes des Eisernen Kreuzes, 1939–1945: Die Inhaber der höchsten Auszeichnung des Zweiten Weltkrieges aller Wehrmachtteile. Friedberg, Germany: Podzun-Pallas. ISBN 978-3-7909-0284-6. Fellgiebel, Walther-Peer: Elite of the Third Reich: the Recipients of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, 1939-45, West Midlands, England: Helion. ISBN 9781874622468
Order of Vitéz
Order of Vitéz is a Hungarian order of merit, founded in 1920. It was awarded as a state honour from 1920 to 1944. During World War II, many members of the Hungarian government and military were members of the Order; the United States Department of State lists the Order of Vitéz as having been "under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany."The Order of Vitéz has several successors. The Hungarian word Vitéz is of medieval Slavic origin and means "valiant", "gallant soldier" or "knight"; the Vitézi Rend should not be confused with the 17th-century Vitézlő Rend, which refers to a rebellion of former peasants and craftsmen whose homes had been destroyed by the Ottoman Empire. These men took up arms and formed an estate within society that received charters and privileges over the centuries from the princes of Transylvania, but which were recognised by the Habsburg kings of the Kingdom of Hungary. Following the peace Treaty of Trianon, which banished the ruling House of Habsburg from Hungary, a constitutional assembly decided to return to the monarchical form of government and replace the incumbent Habsburg regent, Archduke Joseph August von Habsburg of Austria, with Vice-Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya.
It was his idea to help re-build the shattered country by giving land to soldiers who had proven themselves on the battlefield. This way, the poverty brought on by World War I could begin to be alleviated and soldiers could be rewarded; the Vitéz Order was created by Prime Ministerial Decree number 6650 of 1920 and was included as paragraph no. 77 in the Land Reform Act. Membership replaced the titles of nobility; the title of "vitéz" was to serve as an award. The "vitéz" title was official; the legislation gave those qualifying as members of the Order in need a grant of land and/or a house. According to Viktor Karady, "its members served as a Christian gentry". Admittance into the Order was on military merit by the number of medals won, it worked on a system depending on rank, where privates or junior NCOs had to prove lesser awards of bravery, while officers and generals had to prove more in World War I. Members were entitled to use the designation vitéz as a prefix to their names. Admission into the Order carried with it a land grant of 40 cadastral holds to an officer, eight cadastral holds to other ranks based on need.
The Order of Vitéz become hereditary, the grants were to be passed on by the recipient to his eldest son. Horthy was the first to be admitted into the Order and was its Captain General. In 1920, Archduke Joseph August of Austria became the first knight of the Order of Vitéz. In October 1944, the Government of National Unity was established as a Nazi puppet state. According to the Hungarian historian George Deák, the Order of Vitéz was a "'tainted' but ambiguous symbol" during the war years: antisemitism was a shared sentiment among the order membership, though the order itself was not explicitly antisemitic. For example, Hungarian Interior Minister László Endre, a noted anti-semite, member of various incarnations of the Hungarian National Socialist Party, Nazi collaborator during the war, eagerly helped Adolf Eichmann collect and deport more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews between May and July 1944, was a "proud members of the order" according to Deák. László Ferenczy, a Lieutenant colonel in the Hungarian Gendarme who worked under Endre to first establish the ghettos and the attempted deportation of the Jews of Hungary in 1944, gathered thousands of Jews at the Obuda brick factory and sent them on a death march towards Hegyeshalom near the Western border to build a line of defense, indicated in reports that he was aware of what was taking place at Auschwitz.
Like Endre, Ferenczy was a “proud member of the order” according to Deák. The majority of the real estate owned by Jews that were deported after the German occupation of Hungary went to organizations supportive of the collaborationist regime, including the Order of Vitéz and some of its members. However, Hungarian historian Róbert Kerepeszki stresses that there were ruptures in the organization of the Order of Vitéz on the question of Nazism during the war, many of them died fighting against Hungarian Nazis; the most famous of them was Vilmos Nagy de Nagybaczon, awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations for saving Jews. Vitéz Colonel Ferenc Koszorus deployed his troops to stop Jewish deportations, allowing the escape of as many as 250,000 Jews concentrated in Budapest. Miklós Horthy Jr. was an anti-fascist "vitéz" who conducted negotiations with the Allies, was deported to a concentration camp. Colonel-General Vitéz Gábor Faragho and Colonel-General Vitéz Béla Miklós of Dálnok joined the Soviet forces after the failed attempt of Horthy to make an armistice with the Allies.
Lieutenant colonel Vitéz Oszkár Variházy fought against the Nazis during the siege of Budapest. Lieutenant-General Vitéz Szilárd Bakay was deported to a Nazi concentration camp for his activity during Horthy's armistice attempt on 16 October. Vitéz Lajos Keresztes-Fischer and his brother Vitéz Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer were deported to concentra
Prime Minister of Hungary
The Prime Minister of Hungary is the head of government in Hungary. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Parliament, to their political party and to the electorate; the current holder of the office is Viktor Orbán, leader of the Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance, who has served since 29 May 2010. According to the Hungarian Constitution, the President of Hungary is required to nominate the leader of the political party who wins a majority of seats in the National Assembly of Hungary as Prime Minister. If there is no party with a majority, the President holds an audience with the leaders of all parties represented in the Assembly and nominates the person, most to command a majority in the Assembly, formally elected by a simple majority of the Assembly. In practice, the leader of the party winning a plurality of votes in the elections is named Prime Minister; the Prime Minister has a leading role in the executive branch in accordance with the Hungarian Constitution.
The Prime Minister has the exclusive right to dismiss them. Cabinet nominees appear before one or more parliamentary committees in consultative open hearings, they must survive a vote by Parliament and be formally approved by the President. The title of Hungary's head of government in Hungarian is miniszterelnök. Translated, this means "Minister-President". However, since "Prime minister" or "premier" is the more usual title in a parliamentary system for a head of government in English-speaking nations, the title is translated as "Prime Minister" by most English sources; the palatine was the highest dignitary in the Kingdom of Hungary after the king from the kingdom's rise up to 1848/1918. He was in fact the representative of the king the vice-regent. In the early centuries of the kingdom, he was appointed by the king elected by the Diet of the Kingdom of Hungary. After the Habsburgs solidified their hold of Hungary, the dignity became an appointed position once again, it became hereditary in a cadet branch of the Habsburg dynasty after King Francis appointed his brother Joseph.
During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 the revolutionaries wanted the creation of a Hungarian cabinet which would be independent from the Austrian Empire and the Buda Chancellery. One of the 12 points said: 2. A responsible government in Buda-Pest. Ferdinand V appointed Count Lajos Batthyány for the position of Prime Minister of Hungary on 17 March 1848; the government was called ministry, differently from the current acceptation. The ministries were called departments. Batthyány resigned on October 2, 1848 he was succeeded by Lajos Kossuth as President of the Committee of National Defence; this executive body has not been allocated the portfolios. In April 1849, when the Hungarians had won many successes, after sounding the army, Kossuth issued the celebrated Hungarian Declaration of Independence. In May Bertalan Szemere was appointed Prime Minister; the position was vacant after the defeat of the freedom fight. As of April 2019, 5 former Prime Ministers of Hungary are alive. Viktor Orbán, who served as Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002, is serving and thus is not included on this list.
Records of Prime Ministers of Hungary List of Prime Ministers of Hungary by tenure List of Prime Ministers of Hungary List of heads of state of Hungary List of rulers of Hungary List of palatines of Hungary Official government Web site of the Office of the Prime Minister
Gusztáv Jány
Colonel General Vitéz Gusztáv Jány was a Hungarian officer during World War II who commanded the Hungarian Second Army at the Battle of Stalingrad. After the war, he was executed by firing squad, he was posthumously exonerated in 1993. Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross
