Showing titles in Germany

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.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took absolute control of Germany, and his new regime was known as the Third Reich (Third Empire). The first Germanic empire had been the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806), and the second was the German Empire (1871-1918). Hitler was determined the new Reich be more impressive and longer-lasting than any that had gone before, and the Nazis soon began referring to the Tausendjähriges Reich (“Thousand-Year Reich”).

As the Nazi war machine caused death and destruction throughout Europe, one man in the Fatherland began his own reign of terror. This is the true story of the pursuit and capture of a serial killer in the heart of the Third Reich. For all appearances, Paul Ogorzow was a model German. An employed family man, party member, and sergeant in the infamous Brownshirts, he had worked his way up in the Berlin railroad from a manual laborer laying track to assistant signalman. But he also had a secret need to harass and frighten women.

A knife, a diary, a recipe book, a stringed instrument and a cotton pouch. Each belonged to an individual who was in their twenties during the Second World War: a fresh-faced prairie boy, a melancholic youth, a capable cook, a musician wounded at the front and a survivor.

In this classic work of twentieth-century history, William Sheridan Allen demonstrates how dictatorship subtly surmounted democracy in Germany and how the Nazi seizure of power encroached from below. Relying upon legal records and interviews with primary sources, Allen dissects Northeim, Germany with microscopic precision to depict the transformation of a sleepy town to a Nazi stronghold. This cogent analysis argues that Hitler rose to power primarily through democratic tactics that incited localized support rather than through violent means.

For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental Europe. Thirty years ago, a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people now understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that uniquely for any European country, no coherent, over-arching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany, both geography and history have always been unstable.

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials. But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January 1942: the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodgepodge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world.

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."

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power.

Now capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin rose from insignificant origins on swampy soil, becoming a city of immigrants over the ages. Through a series of ten vignettes, Mary Fulbrook discusses the periods and regimes that shaped its character—whether Prussian militarism; courtly culture and enlightenment; rapid industrialization and expansion; ambitious imperialism; experiments with democracy; or repressive dictatorships of both right and left, dramatically evidenced in the violence of World War and genocide, and then in the Wall dividing Cold War Berlin.

Der Kampf um Freiheit in Ostdeutschland – Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuks kompromisslose Analyse. 1989/90 erlitt Ostdeutschland einen "Freiheitsschock", das ist die Grundthese dieses Hörbuches. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk erzählt die Geschichte Ostdeutschlands seit 1990 als Kampf um die Freiheit – ein Kampf, dessen Ausgang richtungsweisend ist für die Zukunft ganz Deutschlands. Er will aufrütteln: zu mehr aktiver Eigenverantwortung, zu einer Abkehr von der eigenen Opferrolle und zu einem Blick auf die Geschichte, bei dem die DDR nicht immer schöner wird, je länger sie her ist.

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.

One man had a single goal…to eliminate Hitler from the face of the Earth. Living as a carpenter who had spent time working in a watch factory, Georg Elser was just an ordinary member of society living in Munich. That is, however, until he took it upon himself to attempt to assassinate the Fhrer, Adolph Hitler. Being a common man who opposed the Nazi regime, Elser took the skills from his craft and worked to assemble his own bomb detonator.

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.

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.

David Stahel's groundbreaking new account of Operation Typhoon captures the perspectives of both the German high command and individual soldiers, revealing that despite success on the battlefield the wider German war effort was in far greater trouble than is often acknowledged.

Preußen stand stets in einem Spannungsfeld: seit seinem Aufstieg vom kleinen, an Bodenschätzen armen Territorium um Berlin bis zu seiner Blüte als der dominierenden Macht in Europa. Es verkörpert nicht nur Aufklärung und Toleranz, sondern steht auch für Militarismus, Maßlosigkeit, Selbstüberschätzung. Meisterhaft erzählt Christopher Clark die Geschichte Preußens von den Anfängen bis zur Auflösung des Staates im Jahr 1947. Dabei gelingt es ihm nicht nur, die äußerst ambivalente Geschichte dieser europäischen Großmacht lebendig zu schildern, sondern auch, sie von etlichen Mythen zu befreien.

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.

On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above.