Germans Germany

German for Your First 30 Days is a practical, fully standalone audio course for English-speaking adults preparing to move to Germany or settling into their first weeks. In just over two hours, it builds essential A1–A2 German for situations that matter immediately—from stations, tickets, and...

By July of 1944, the Third Reich's days were numbered. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a general staff insider with open eyes (and access to the Fuhrer), was convinced that assassinating Hitler was the only way to prevent the destruction of the Fatherland and the deaths of millions. On July 20, he hid a bomb-stuffed briefcase at a high-level meeting. The explosion tore through the room, but a table leg spared Hitler from the blast. The result was a witch hunt, a wave of executions, and a further pointless year of war. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh deliver an exhilarating and definitive portrait of the anti-Nazi movement (called "Secret Germany") that almost killed Hitler. Secret Germany is the story of "World War II's boldest plot-that-failed" (Time), a coup that was a moral and spiritual necessity.

In burnished, driving prose, John Keegan chronicles the 1944 invasion of Normandy, from D-day to the liberation of Paris. At the same time, he furthers his exploration of the "role which warfare and its institutions play in social life" by showing how each of the six armies, while resembling one...

This is the riveting and extraordinary story of Kapitan Herbert Cleff, presented here for the first time by Brian Brinkworth. Cleff, an officer on the staff of General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, attached to the 21st Panzer division operating in the Western desert, was captured near El Dab'a in Libya on the sixth of November, 1942. He was interrogated both in the Western Desert and in the United Kingdom, following assessments that led his British captors to believe that he might prove useful to the Allied war effort. During this interrogation period, Cleff kept releasing tantalizing snippets.

Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring 39 individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France - all without destroying itself in the process?

The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of World War II from Germany back to Paris. This program includes a...

From a master historian and the critically acclaimed author of Lenin, comes a dramatic and gripping account of the political and cultural upheavals that lead to the death of democracy in Weimar era Germany—a story ripped out of today’s headlines. In this masterful work of history, Victor...

An award-winning historian charts Hitler's radical transformation after World War I from a directionless loner into a powerful National Socialist leader In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler...

Practical, fun and effective. Welcome to Learn with Paul Noble – a unique, tried and tested language learning method that has been used by millions. You'll be speaking German fluently and confidently in no time at all. Take a simple, relaxed approach to learning a language that has been proven...

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

Narrated by Derek Perkins From a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (The New Yorker) comes the most authoritative, readable single-volume military history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land. Nine hundred years ago, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the Pope...

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. With his customary authority and audacity, William F. Buckley, Jr., has taken a pivotal moment in history and shaped it into a novel of riveting insight...

As early as 1941, Allied victory in World War II seemed all but assured. How and why, then, did the Germans prolong the barbaric conflict for three and a half more years? In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials - personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence - to answer this question. He offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people to vivid life.

In the cold morning of June 6, 1944, thousands of German soldiers were in position from Port en Bessin eastward past Colleville on the Normandy coast, aware that a massive invasion force was heading straight for them, although according to Allied Intelligence, they shouldn't have been there. The presence of 352 Division meant that the number of defenders was literally double the number expected - and on the best fortified of all the invasion beaches. What makes this account of the bloody struggle unique is that it is told from the German standpoint, using firsthand testimony....

This instant New York Times bestselling “dynamic detective story” (The New York Times) reveals the hidden history Rudolf Diesel, one of the world’s greatest inventors, and his mysterious disappearance on the eve of World War I. September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between...

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined. 

“Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.”—New York Times Book Review Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a...

In a work of extraordinary narrative power, filled with brilliant personalities and vivid scenes of dramatic action, Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Dreadnought, elevates to its proper historical importance the role of sea...

A supremely disturbing thriller set in the ruins of the Third Reich by an internationally acclaimed master of historical suspense. Bernie Gunther had his first brush with evil as a policeman in 1930s Berlin and came to know it intimately as a private eye under the Nazis, when each case drew him...

Germany is one of the richest and most influential countries in the world, which is amazing when you consider that the nation is only about the size of the US states of Oregon and Washington combined. It’s even more astounding when you consider that at the end of World War II, every major German city (and many minor ones) had been flattened by the Allied bombing campaign. Still more amazing is that the country has gone from international pariah and home of the Holocaust to one of the most well-regarded and humanitarian nations on Earth.