Germany World War

More than a century later, historians still argue about this controversial and misunderstood World War I naval battle off the coast of Denmark. It was the 20th century's first engagement of dreadnoughts - and while it left Britain in control of the North Sea, both sides claimed victory and decades of disputes followed. This book not only retells the story of the battle from both a British and German perspective based on the latest research, but also helps clarify the context of Germany's inevitable naval clash and the aftermath after the smoke had cleared.

Set in 1949 Paris, Slim Moran runs the Pitchipoi Agency with her Nazi Hunter boyfriend, Daniel. Their specialty: to find those lost in the last war. After a couple of easy cases, business has ground to halt, and Daniel has just gone on another manhunt this time to find the Nazi Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Slim is bored until a British spymistress asks her to find a missing woman spy long presumed dead.

In this dramatic story of World War II, Jay A. Stout describes how the US built an air force of 2.3 million men after starting with 45,000 and defeated the world's best air force. In order to defeat Germany in World War II, the Allies needed to destroy the Third Reich's industry and invade its territory, but before they could effectively do either, they had to defeat the Luftwaffe, whose state-of-the-art aircraft and experienced pilots protected German industry and would batter any attempted invasion.

"Bloom where you're planted," is the advice Christine Bolz receives from her beloved Oma. But 17-year-old domestic Christine knows there is a whole world waiting beyond her small German village. It's a world she's begun to glimpse through music, books - and through Isaac Bauerman, the cultured son of the wealthy Jewish family she works for.

Yet the future she and Isaac dream of sharing faces greater challenges than their difference in stations. In the fall of 1938, Germany is changing rapidly under Hitler's regime....

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.

Secret agent Richard Hannay travels across war-torn Europe in search of a German plot and an Islamic messiah. He is joined by three others: John S. Blenkiron, an American who is determined to battle the Kaiser; Peter Pienaar, an old Boer Scout; and the colorful Sandy Arbuthnot, who is modeled on Lawrence of Arabia. Their success or failure could change the outcome of the First World War.

In the early years of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, one of the most notorious leaders of the Third Reich, worked to establish his own personal army to rival Himmler's SS and Reichswehr. The result: a private Prussian police force which grew into one of the most powerful armored units in Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht. This unit fought throughout the Second World War, meeting Anglo-American forces in vicious battles across the European theatres of Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy before finally being defeated by the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

This is a unique first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish refugee imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II. Its immediacy is what makes it such a valuable eyewitness account. While there are other memoirs written decades after internment, Walter Igersheimer wrote this book shortly after he was deported from Canada because the Liberal government in the 1940s did not want Jews to become Canadian citizens.

Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden - just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat - Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war - and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime - aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in.

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.

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.

The German invasion of Poland on 1 September, 1939, designated as Fall Weiss (Case White), was the event that sparked the outbreak of World War II in Europe. The campaign has widely been described as a textbook example of Blitzkrieg, but it was actually a fairly conventional campaign as the Wehrmacht was still learning how to use its new Panzers and dive-bombers. The Polish military is often misrepresented as hopelessly obsolete and outclassed by the Wehrmacht, yet in fact it was well-equipped with modern weapons and armor.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.

In 1941 Hitler's armies blocked the last roads leading into Leningrad. What followed was one of the most horrific sieges in history. When the German High Command encircled Leningrad it was a deliberate policy to eradicate the city's civilian population by starving them to death. As winter set in and food supplies dwindled, starvation and panic set in.

In the summer of 1942, as war rages across Europe, a series of anonymous leaflets appears around the University of Munich, speaking out against escalating Nazi atrocities. The leaflets are hidden in public places, or mailed to addresses selected at random from the phone book. Natalya Petrovich, a student, knows who is behind the leaflets - a secret group called the White Rose, led by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends. As a volunteer nurse on the Russian front, Natalya witnessed the horrors of war first-hand. She willingly enters the White Rose's circle....

Irene Nemirovsky was arrested soon after completing the second part of Suite Francaise. Ten days later, on August 17, 1942, she died of typhus in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her husband, Michel, perished in a gas chamber on November 6. Their daughters, Denise and Elizabeth, survived, hidden in safe houses and convents, carrying a suitcase packed with clothes, photographs, and their mother's manuscript written in tiny letters to save paper.

Distinguished Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner Jr. makes an important and influential addition to his lifelong study of Nazi Germany. Hitler's Thirty Days to Power paints vivid portraits of the main players in the drama of January 1933 and, using newly available documents, masterfully recreates the bewildering circumstances surrounding Hitler's unexpected appointment as chancellor of Germany. The result is a work that Booklist calls "first rate...a gripping, foreboding narrative."

Few, if any, 20th-century political leaders have enjoyed greater popularity among their own people than Hitler did in the decade or so following his rise to power in 1933. The personality of Hitler himself, however, can scarcely explain this immense popularity or his political effectiveness in the 1930s and '40s. His hold over the German people lay rather in the hopes and perceptions of the millions who adored him. Based largely on the reports of government officials, party agencies, and political opponents, Kershaw's study charts the creation, growth, and decline of the Hitler myth.

The first British major success of World War II was when the Royal Navy forced the preying pocket battleship, Graf Spee, to scuttle at sea. Hitler had ordered a blockade of the British Isles and for some months German U-boats and warships caused havoc among allied merchant shipping carrying vital supplies.

At once a murder mystery, a moving love story, and a riveting portrait of a unique time and place - Berlin, July 1945 - The Good German is a historical thriller of the first rank. The New York Times calls it "thoroughly captivating, a novel that brings to life the ambiguities at the heart of our country's moral legacy."