Germany World War Ii

On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.

Under orders of the Fuhrer, the German General Staff reluctantly drew up a lackluster plan of invasion for France. Yet it was the audacious scheme of three of Hitler’s top generals that brought down France’s military force, Rather than simply move troops to engage the enemy, for the first time they would unleash the tank and drive straight into the heart of their foe.

An insightful historical account, Democrat and Diplomat exposes the dark underbelly of 1930s Germany and explores the terrible burden of those who realized the horror that was to come. Dodd was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, arriving in Berlin with his wife and daughter just as Hitler assumed the chancellorship. An unlikely candidate for the job - and not President Roosevelt's first choice - Dodd quickly came to realize that the situation in Germany was far grimmer than was understood in America.

Veteran military historian Dr. Samuel Mitcham, in the capstone of a career covering of more than 40 books - most of them on the German Armed Forces in World War II - tells the extraordinary tale of how Hitler’s once-feared war machine came to a cataclysmic end, from the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 to the German surrender in May 1945.

On the windswept shores of an East German island, Bettina Heilstrom struggles to build a life from the ashes. World War II has ended, and her country is torn apart. Longing for a family, she marries Werner, an older bureaucrat who adores her. But after joining the fledgling secret police, he is drawn deep into its dark mission and becomes a dangerous man.

Ukraine, 1923. On a small farm, two boys are born within days of each other, both Ukrainian, one Jewish. Mykhail and Asher grow up inseparable, together finding friendship, adventure and escape from the harshness of Russian rule. But after Asher’s family flees to Warsaw, their worlds are torn to shreds by the Second World War. The war brings cruelty to both boys. Although Asher finds love in Warsaw, the city is far from the haven his family sought; meanwhile Mykhail becomes a victim of the bitter struggle for Ukraine. But worse follows, in the shape of the Treblinka death camp.

Inspired by the stories told by her father about his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for 50 years, Motherland is a novel that attempts to reckon with the paradox of the author's father - a product of her grandparents' fiercely protective love - and their status as passive Nazi-sympathizers known as Mitläufer.

On the 75th anniversary of the Coventry bombing, acclaimed historian Frederick Taylor brilliantly details this momentous act and analyzes its impact on World War II and the moral quandaries it still engenders about the nature of warfare.

All his life, journalist Walter Shapiro assumed that the outlandish stories about his great-uncle Freeman were exaggerated family lore; some cockamamie Jewish revenge fantasies dreamt up to entertain the kids and venerate their larger-than-life relative. Only when he started researching Freeman Bernstein's life did he realize that his family was actually holding back.

When Otto Dietrich was invited in 1933 to become Adolf Hitler's press chief, he accepted with the simple uncritical conviction that Adolf Hitler was a great man, dedicated to promoting peace and welfare for the German people. At the end of the war, imprisoned and disillusioned, Otto Dietrich sat down to write what he had seen and heard in 12 years of the closest association with Hitler, requesting that it be published after his death.

In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.

The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable … In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother.

Senator Thomas Dodd began his career in public service as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. His son, Senator Christopher Dodd, recently discovered his mother's collection of letters his father wrote during that time. Through his father, Chris Dodd learned not only the scope of the Holocaust but also the importance of the rule of law.

For over 50 years scholars and philosophers alike have attempted to make some sense of the Third Reich and its "Final Solution" campaign. Historian Robert Wistrich takes listeners on a guided tour through the death camps and meticulously details the events that led to this horrific tragedy and the lasting repercussions it had on the world community.

Had Hitler succeeded in conquering Europe, he would have crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. The Nazis had in their possession priceless artifacts that would give Hitler legitimacy in his subjects' eyes: the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire including the Spear of Destiny, alleged to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion. Looted from the royal treasury in Vienna, Austria, the Crown Jewels were hidden in a secret bunker deep beneath Nrnberg castle, known to few.

While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new research that included records saved by the Monuments Men themselves, Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books. When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe's libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. A year later, all parties but the Nazis had been outlawed, freedom of the press was but a memory, and Hitler's dominance seemed complete. Yet over the next few years, an unlikely clutch of conspirators emerged - soldiers, schoolteachers, politicians, diplomats, theologians, even a carpenter - who would try repeatedly to end the Fuhrer's genocidal reign. This dramatic and deeply researched book tells the full story of those noble, ingenious, and doomed efforts.

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be a rotating radar tower on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre. The truth must be revealed. The decision was taken to launch a daring raid on the Bruneval site to try and capture the technology for further examination.

"Blitzkrieg", or "lightning war", describes the Third Reich's invasion strategy during its 1940 conquest of France not only due to the speed of the Wehrmacht advance but also its devastating effect on its ill-prepared adversaries. Mired in the paralyzing muck of plodding staff college military doctrine and demoralized as a nation by their appalling losses during World War I, the French succumbed in a few weeks to German skill and vigor.

Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, 1945, was the scene of a trial without precedent in history, a trial that continues to haunt the modern world.