Germany World War Ii

On a cold May morning in 1940, Adrian Vincent arrived in France with his battalion. His war didn’t last long. Within five days the Siege of Calais was over, and nearly all his comrades were killed, wounded or, like him, taken prisoner. After a brutal journey across the breadth of Germany, Vincent and his fellow survivors began their life in Stalag VIIIB, set to work in terrible conditions down a Polish mine. For the next five years, they waged a war not against enemy soldiers but instead versus monotony, disease, cruelty, starvation, and hopelessness.

After Germany's humiliating World War II defeat, numerous German generals published memoirs claiming that their country's brilliant military leadership had been undermined by the Führer's erratic decision making. The author of three highly acclaimed books on the era, Stephen Fritz upends this characterization of Hitler as an ill-informed fantasist and demonstrates the ways in which his strategy was coherent and even competent.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. World War Two was one of the most devastating conflicts the world has ever seen. Between 1939 and 1945 almost every country in the world was affected by the war in some way. World War Two: History in an Hour neatly covers all the major facts...

As Sicily fell and the Allies prepared to press on, Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was actually arrested to prevent him from doing further damage. Il Duce still held considerable power in the eyes of many ground-level activists, and if left unchecked, the possibility of violence in the streets was genuine. He was jailed in Campo Imperatore on August 28, 1943, on one of the largest mountains in Central Italy, but when the new Italian government surrendered to the Allies, most of the Italian mainland was still controlled by the Germans.

By the time of her execution at thirty-six, Maria Mandl had achieved the highest rank possible for a woman in the Third Reich. As Head Overseer of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was personally responsible for the murders of thousands. In this riveting biography, Susan J. Eischeid explores how Maria Mandl, regarded locally as "a nice girl from a good family," came to embody the very worst of humanity.

The Devil's Dust MC has a list of new threats to the club's lifestyle. Dani, to prove her loyalty, is trying to embrace a part of herself that she never knew existed until now. A sinful beast lurking beneath her surface has been awakened and is ready to eliminate anyone that stands in its way. Looking at her stained hands, she rinses the blood from them. She resigns herself to innocence lost and welcomes her thirst for more blood.

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood through the late 1950s, when his book The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Wohl nie waren so viele berühmte Schriftsteller und Reporterinnen aus aller Welt unter einem Dach versammelt wie in Nürnberg 1946. Sie kamen, um zu berichten – von den Gräueln des Krieges und des Holocaust, die dort vor Gericht verhandelt wurden. Sie wohnten und schrieben auf Schloss Faber-Castell, diskutierten, tanzten, verzweifelten, tranken. Uwe Neumahr erzählt ihre Geschichte in seinem aufregenden und bewegenden Buch. Erich Kästner war in Nürnberg und Erika Mann, John Dos Passos und Martha Gellhorn. Augusto Roa Bastos kam aus Paraguay, Xiao Qian aus China.

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.

A princess of White Russian descent, Marie Vassiltchikov was 23 years old when she was trapped in Berlin by the outbreak of World War II. In these secret diaries, she chronicles the glamorous rise and shattering fall of the Nazi Party, as seen from the vantage point of her desk at the Foreign Ministry. She also describes how she and her friends became involved in a desperate conspiracy to murder Hitler.

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.

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.

The book outlines “the activities of Nazi agents in the United States, Mexico, and Central America” in the late 1930s. “During the past five years,” Spivak writes, “I have observed some of them, watching the original, crudely organized and directed propaganda machine develop, grow and leave an influence far wider than most people seem to realize.” First aimed at domestic propaganda, these activities extended to probing U.S. military secrets and attempting to damage U.S. relations to its neighbors to the south.

At the end of August 2012, BBC ran a report about the commemoration of a young man who had been killed more than 70 years earlier. Just 12 days before Oswald St John Pigg’s death, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already immortalized the men of the Royal Air Force with one of the West’s most famous war-time quotes. But the sentiment and gratitude Churchill expressed back in 1940 is very much alive today. The sacrifice made by “The Few”, the British and Allied fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain in 1940, remains close to the hearts of the British public.

When three little girls—Anna, Bernie, and Elica—make a pact to be blood sisters for life, they believe nothing can come between them. Anna is from an affluent Jewish family, while Bernie and Elica are from poor Austrian families who barely make ends meet. As they get older, their social differences become all too real. With infectious Jew-hate-laden rhetoric from Nazi Germany spreading into Austria, it is only a matter of time before their bond of friendship gets severely tested.

From the beginning, it was clear that Ralph Nutter was an exceptional navigator. Rapid promotion followed when he was assigned as Maj. Gen. Curtis the Eagle LeMay's personal navigator. Later, he was picked by Maj. Gen. Haywood Possum Hansell, the 20th Air Force Commander, to be his personal navigator. The author's vivid recollections of those halcyon years make for exciting, informative listening.

In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler's army was beaten, and expected that the war would be over by Christmas. But the disastrous Allied airborne landing in Holland, American setbacks on the German border and in the Hürtgen Forest, together with the Battle of the Bulge, drastically altered that timetable. Hastings tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, and paints a vivid portrait of the Red Army's onslaught on Hitler's empire.

The “remarkable…inspiring” (The Wall Street Journal) true story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg—a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat—drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir. World War II and the...

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.