German Military History

On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, one of the turning points of World War II. Within six months, the invasion bogged down on the outskirts of Moscow, and the Eastern Front proved to be the decisive theater in the defeat of the Third Reich. Ever since, most historians have agreed that this was Hitler's gravest mistake. In Hitler's Great Gamble, James Ellman argues that while Barbarossa was a gamble and perverted by genocidal Nazi ideology, it was not doomed from the start.

In Hitler's Army, Omer Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union—where the vast majority of German troops fought—to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman.

Who were the Gestapo officers? Were they merely banal paper shufflers, or were they recognizably evil? Were they motivated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism? Did the average German know about the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables while they were happening? Exactly how was Nazi terror applied in the daily lives of ordinary Jews and Germans? Eric A. Johnson answers these questions as he explores the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work.

The 16 case studies in this volume examine the culture of armies, navies, and air forces from the Civil War to the Iraq War and how and why culture affected their performance in the ultimate arbitration of war.

Dünkirchen 1940 is the first major history on what went wrong for the Germans at Dunkirk. As supreme military commander, Hitler had seemingly achieved a miracle after the swift capitulation of Holland and Belgium, but with just seven kilometres before the panzers captured Dunkirk – the only port through which the trapped British Expeditionary force might escape – they came to a shuddering stop. Only a detailed interpretation of the German perspective – historically lacking to date – can provide answers as to why.

In the wake of World War I, the German army lay in ruins - defeated in the war, sundered by domestic upheaval, and punished by the Treaty of Versailles. A mere 20 years later, Germany possessed one of the finest military machines in the world, capable of launching a stunning blitzkrieg attack against Poland in 1939. Well-known military historian Robert M. Citino shows how Germany accomplished this astonishing reversal and developed the doctrine, tactics, and technologies that its military would use to devastating effect in World War II.

Lieutenant John Ryan couldn’t wait to see action in WWI. He joined up with the British colors out of Canada. As one of several American pilots in the Royal Flying Corps before the US joined the war, he earned his wings and became an ace through fierce air battles over the skies of Germany. After getting shot down twice behind enemy lines, Lieutenant Ryan recounts the trials, tragedies, and tribulations of 72 days on the run behind enemy lines.

Lange Zeit galt es als ausgemacht, dass das deutsche Kaiserreich wegen seiner Großmachtträume die Hauptverantwortung am Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs trug. In seinem bahnbrechenden neuen Werk kommt der renommierte Historiker und Bestsellerautor Christopher Clark (Preußen) zu einer anderen Einschätzung.

The summer that Patty Bergen turns twelve is a summer that will haunt her forever. When her small hometown in Arkansas becomes the site of a camp housing German prisoners during World War II, Patty learns what it means to open her heart. Even though she’s Jewish, she begins to see a prison escapee, Anton, not as a Nazi, but as a lonely, frightened young man. As their gentle friendship blossoms, Patty experiences a kind of love she never felt from her abusive father or her distant mother.

Die Geschichte liest sich wie ein Hollywood-Thriller, ist aber wahr: Am 7. April 2018 verschwindet der deutsch-amerikanische Milliardär Karl-Erivan Haub im Gletschergebiet am Matterhorn. Der bestens trainierte Extremsportler hinterlässt keine einzige Spur, keinen Hilferuf, kein Zeichen eines Überlebenskampfes. Im Oktober 2018 wird die Suche nach ihm offiziell eingestellt, seine Leiche wird nie gefunden. Ein Bruder Haubs lässt den Unternehmer für tot erklären, was seine Macht in einem Firmenimperium sichert, zu dem unter anderem OBI, KiK und Teile von Zalando gehören.

A plucky yet innocent wallflower writing a dictionary of bawdy slang arranges her own marriage to the ultimate instructor: the town rake. As sexy as it is witty and as charming as it is irreverent, The Very Definition of Love is Emily Henry for the regency era. 1816– Harriet Barrington may be...

This powerful Cold War novel tells the story of two cousins, one German and the other an American Army brat, as they navigate the political and social turmoil that threatens their friendship and ends in the abrupt rise of the Berlin Wall–which may separate them forever. Drew is an army brat, a...

Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the 20th century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old. Yet an encounter with a primitive German U-Boat sent her and her gilded passengers to their tragic deaths.

En el año 2015 se conmemora el 70º aniversario del final de la segunda guerra mundial, la guerra total de la que todos conocemos los grandes hitos: los turbios inicios del nazismo, la invasión de Polonia, la derrota de Francia, el bombardeo de Pearl Harbor, el Afrika Korps, el holocausto judío, la batalla de Stalingrado, el desembarco de Normandía, la batalla final en Berlín, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

In the early 1920s amidst the upheaval of Weimar Germany, a small group of peaceable idealists began to meet, practicing a quiet, communal life focused on self-improvement. For the most part, they had come to know each other while attending adult education classes in the city of Essen. But "the Bund", as they called their group, had lofty aspirations - under the direction of their leader Artur Jacobs, its members hoped to forge an ideal community that would serve as a model for society at large. What became of this group?

During the summer of 1940, Hitler's Germany appeared unstoppable. The Nazis were masters of mainland Europe, in alliance with Stalin's Russia, and only the English Channel prevented an immediate invasion. Britain stood alone. Operation Sealion examines just how realistic the German threat of invasion was. The author studies the plans, the available capability and resources, and the Germans' record in Norway and, later, Crete. The author weighs these against the state of Britain's defenses and the relative strengths of the land, air, and naval forces.

Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors.

The successes of the German Blitzkrieg in 1939-41 were as surprising as they were swift. Allied decision-makers wanted to discover the secret to German success quickly, even though only partial, incomplete information was available to them. The false conclusions drawn became myths about the Blitzkrieg that have lingered for decades.

Oleg Gordijewskis Weg in den sowjetischen Geheimdienst war ihm als Sohn zweier KGB-Agenten in die Wiege gelegt. Da er Deutsch konnte, brachte ihn eine seiner ersten Anstellungen nach Berlin, wo er den Bau der Mauer hautnah mitbekam – es sollte sich als eines von vielen Ereignissen erweisen, die seinen Glauben an den Kommunismus zerrütteten.

Raised in 1943 with 17-year-olds from the Hitler Youth movement, and following the twin disasters of Stalingrad and "Tunisgrad", the Hitlerjugend Panzer Division emerged as the most effective German division fighting in the West. The core of the division was a cadre of offices and NCOs provided by Hitler's bodyguard division, the elite Leibstandarte, with the aim of producing a division of "equal value" to fight alongside them in I SS Panzer Corps.