Germany World War

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.

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.

The wartime interest in Greenland was a direct result of its vital strategic position—if you wanted to predict the weather in Europe, you had to have men in place on the vast, frozen island. The most celebrated example of Greenland's crucial contribution to Allied meteorological services is the correct weather forecast in June 1944 leading to the decision to launch the invasion of Normandy. In addition, both before and after D-Day a stream of weather reports from Greenland was essential for the Allied ability to carry out the bombing offensive against Germany.

Like other totalitarian regimes, the leader of the Nazis kept an iron grip on power in part by making sure nobody else could attain too much of it, leading to purges of high-ranking officials in the Nazi party. Of these purges, the most notorious was the Night of the Long Knives, a purge in the summer of 1934 that came about when Hitler ordered the surprise executions of several dozen leaders of the SA.

In Hitler’s Germany, loyalty is demanded and dissent is deadly. But for young Waltraud, nothing is more devastating than the day the Nazis steal away her father to fight in a war he didn't believe in. Even as their reign of terror spreads, she’s convinced war will never touch her quiet village. But when bombs start falling and innocent people disappear, she’s confronted with a stark reality…she might be next.

Germany was a deeply divided nation when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. As the shadow of the swastika lengthened, its citizens quickly came to realize that the Nazis' brutal programme was not optional. Everyone was expected to play their part in "national revival", especially those chosen as sacrificial victims. Life in the Third Reich draws on the recollections of those who lived through the rise and fall of one of the most vicious and sadistic regimes the world has ever seen.

Dark skies and barbed wire fences were all Bluma Plaskovsky saw as she stepped down from the train onto the main platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After surviving the Wehrmacht’s decimation of her hometown, Bluma and what remained of her family were finally put on the long, harsh train ride through inhuman conditions that seemed to last an eternity.

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.

During World War II many escape-line organizations contributed to the Allied cause by funneling hundreds of servicemen out of occupied Europe. As the Germans tightened their noose, the risk of discovery only grew for the servicemen who needed safe passage across the Pyrenees. In early 1944 two important escape-line organizations operated in southwestern France, handing over many fugitives to French passeur Jean-Louis Bazerque. Along with several of his successful missions, his only failure as a passeur is recounted in gripping detail in So Close to Freedom.

In a return to sweeping social history of wartime, Patrick Bishop explores the lives and wartime experiences of thousands of men and women who served in all units of the air force. On 1st April 2018, the Royal Air Force will be 100 years old - a short life by military standards but an extraordinarily important and eventful one. From the start it was special, standing sometimes awkwardly but always proudly a little apart from the existing services.

German bombers are arriving daily, seeking to crush England. But in a rural Hampshire village, things have remained fairly quiet - until an elderly loner, Will Blackwell, is brutally murdered. The method of his killing bears the hallmarks of the traditional vanquishing of a witch, and indeed local legend claims that as a boy Blackwell encountered a ghostly black dog sent from the devil, who struck a bargain for Blackwell's soul.

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 this detailed study, Terri Blom Crocker provides the first comprehensive analysis of both scholarly and popular portrayals of the Christmas Truce from 1914 to present. This new examination shows how a variety of works have both explored and enshrined this outbreak of peace amid overwhelming violence. The vast majority of these accounts depict the soldiers as acting in defiance of their superiors. Crocker, however, analyzes official accounts as well as private letters that reveal widespread support among officers for the détentes.

In Top 10 Nazi Conspiracies Debunked, historian and researcher Cyril Marlen unpacks and exposes the most infamous Nazi-related myths that have persisted for decades. These aren’t just fringe internet rumors—they’re global narratives that continue to shape pop culture, political thinking, and historical misunderstanding. This powerful and thoroughly researched book offers a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the top ten conspiracy theories associated with Nazi Germany.

Whilst the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet, restricted for much of the period after 1919 by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, was relatively small in comparison to the Royal Navy, it did possess a number of highly potent battleships and other capital vessels that could - and did - pose a major threat to British interests in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. Amongst the most powerful were the two battleships - the Bismarck and the Tirpitz.

Stephen E. Ambrose’s D-Day is the definitive history of World War II’s most pivotal battle, a day that changed the course of history. D-Day is the epic story of men at the most demanding moment of their lives, when the horrors, complexities, and triumphs of life are laid bare. Distinguished...

Count Luna is the story of Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat who presides over a Viennese transport company. As World War II opens, Jessiersky, who detests the Nazis, is asked by his board of directors to acquiesce in the confiscation of a neighboring parcel of land in order to accommodate expanded war business. Jessiersky refuses to go along, but because of inattention or laziness his board carries out the land seizure behind his back.

The histories of the first three SS corps are well known - the actions of I, II, and III (Germanic) SS-Panzerkorps and their subordinate divisions, including the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Hitlerjugend, Hohenstaufen, Frundsberg, and Nordland divisions, have been thoroughly documented and publicized. Overlooked in this pantheon is another SS corps that never fought in the west or in Berlin but one that participated in many of the key battles fought on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war - the IV SS-Panzerkorps.

On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun on Virginia Beach, a massive fireball erupted from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. By the next day, three ships lay at the bottom of the channel, victims of Lieutenant-Commander Horst Degen and his crew on the German submarine U-701. In The Burning Shore, acclaimed military reporter Ed Offley presents a thrilling account of Degen's rampage along the American coast and of US Lieutenant Harry J. Kane's quest to bring him down.

The Battle of the Meuse-Argonne stands as the deadliest clash in American history: More than a million untested American soldiers went up against a better-trained and more experienced German army, costing more than 26,000 deaths and leaving nearly 100,000 wounded. Yet, in 47 days of intense combat, those Americans pushed back the enemy and forced the Germans to surrender, bringing the First World War to an end - a feat the British and the French had not achieved after more than three years of fighting.