I'm playing through the game Sniper Elite 2 at the moment, and the plot is premised around the race to scoop up all of the scientific talent in Germany after the war.

In one of the missions in the game, the American sniper that you play as decides to 'help' the Germans fight off the Soviets in order to slow the Soviet advance on Berlin (after it had already been encircled and everyone knew it was basically over).

I was wondering if anything like this ever happened? Presumably undercover or special ops or something if it did?

I don't mean friendly fire incidents - I'm presuming there must have been a few of those. I mean deliberate attempts to attack their future Cold War opponents.

(And a partially related question - did the US or the Soviets ever seek out to deliberately kill any German scientists rather than capture them for use in their own rocket programmes?).

I have often learned about the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989 and its causes but rarely ever hear how it has effected China and the Chinese people. Did China change because of the protest? Did the people of China have more or less freedom than before the protest?

At least in modern times, conservative generally means something closer to preserving the status quo, or being against radical social change.

Was it possible to use a 1 gram (arbitrary number) silver, copper or gold coin minted in Spain to pay for goods in, for example, the German or Egyptian regions, which presumably coined its own silver coins? Were there any fees applied for using foreign currency?

Just wondering if more guys from the West Coast went to the Pacific and East Coast Atlantic? I had a grandfather sent to France and an uncle sent to the Pacific. Curious how they got there both were from the East.

To clarify, how were non-blacks/non-whites treated during apartheid in South Africa and during the Black/White divide in the USA?

edit: Just to clarify I mean short term significance ie. how it effected the rest of the war?

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My parent were born in Nigeria and moved too the U.S. 20 years and I was born here. Just curios if my ancestors were slaves just like the Black Americans with slave blood?

As a Dane i often argue with my Norvegian girlfriend about where most vikings lived: In Denmark or in Norway? I always think of Denmark as a easier place to live and trade because its closer to the more populated areas of central Europe.

I learned in school that nationalism was pretty much non-existent before the French Revolution. I can't fathom why people would all of a sudden be like, "Oh sure, I'll be proud of my country and die happily for it".

In the West it seems that there has been a gradual degeneration of day-to-day clothing. Even as late as the 1960s, men attended baseball games in suits an ties, and women got "dressed up" to go shopping. How is it that old people today, who lived through this change didn't object to this massively visible cultural shift? Is the degeneration (from suits to jeans and teeshirts in 50 years) of clothing for the majority of daily wear cyclical in history?

In the prelude to World War 2 France and Great Britain had gone into a pact with Poland, vowing to protect its sovereignty. They immediately declared war on Germany when they invaded, but it seems often brushed aside the fact that the Soviet Union did the exact same thing at the exact same time. Weren't France and Great Britain obligated to respond to Soviet aggression in the same measure?

So as the title reads, why didn't they?

Most Sikhs migrated to eastern Punjab and native Sikhs of the sub-region stayed.

Ancient religions were full of "dying gods," gods and goddesses who died and then rose in a specific cycle. We have Adonis, Persephone, and Dionysus, and that's just in Greek mythology. The list is massive, but these all have the idea of a cycle in common. They'll die again, and come back again, forever. Are there any others who just came back once, like Jesus did in Christian mythology?

Besides the Rosetta Stone, I don't know how either of these languages were completely translated, further both languages...well with Egyptian there were at least three ancient stages of development so I imagine the language evolved significantly in that time period. Pronunciations for modern languages sometimes change based on region and time period within 20 or 100 years.

With Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Assyrian were all quite different, and I'm not sure which of them used Cuneiform, I don't understand how that was deciphered.

Most importantly, after seeing a post about how the Ancient Egyptian word for cat was Mau pronounced Meow I just find it hard to believe that we have any idea how these words were pronounced. Further, the Babylonian/Phoenician god Milqart, how do we know it's pronounced 'Milk-Cart' rather than 'Mel Cart'?

I've been watching a lot of The Borgias and The Tudors lately and each family seems to have their own seal that they use to 'prove' or show that the letter/document was indeed signed by them. But have there been any instances of this seal being faked/copied? When was the first seal used and how did the usage come about, as opposed to signatures etc.?