Germany World War

The predominant image of this first world war is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter. A generation of European manhood was massacred, and a wound was inflicted on European civilization that required the remainder of the twentieth century to heal.

Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich.

Coffee with Hitler tells the astounding story of how a handful of amateur British intelligence agents wined, dined, and befriended the leading National Socialists between the wars. With support from royalty, aristocracy, politicians, and businessmen, they hoped to use the recently founded Anglo-German Fellowship as a vehicle to civilize and enlighten the Nazis. Straddling the porous border between hard and soft diplomacy, their activities fueled tensions between the amateur and the professional diplomats in both London and Berlin.

Berlin, 1944: Amira and Gisele have been best friends since they were children, and now Gisele is the only person who knows Amira’s secret. A secret that puts her and everyone she loves in unimaginable danger amid the daily horror and violence of Nazi Germany. With the threat of exposure drawing closer, Gisele’s suggestion that Amira marries her friend Fred, a famous pianist, might just be the lifeline she needs to keep them both safe. Because Fred has secrets too.

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.

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography: “I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions.” He was referring to Germany in 1923, a “year of lunacy,” defined by hyperinflation, violence, a political system on the verge of collapse, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and separatist movements threatening to rip apart the German nation. Bestselling author Volker Ullrich presents a riveting chronicle of one of the most difficult years any modern democracy has ever faced.

It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient: heavy water, which is produced in Norway's Vemork, the lone plant in all the world that makes this rare substance. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers push production into overdrive. For the Allies, the plant must be destroyed.

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.

Inspired by the life of forgotten hero Haim Michael Klar, the number-one Amazon Charts best seller I Am Juden is the triumphant, epic tale of one man's incredible courage and resistance during the 20th century's darkest days. Jozef Siegler leads a perilous double life as an SS officer in the Krakow Ghetto and ultimately Auschwitz. His story is a tightrope walk through the Holocaust unlike any other. Nazi by day and Jewish resistance agent by night, any false move would result in instant death and exposure of his friends in the underground.

Four days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail - a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger.

The fighting between the German and Russian armies in the Rzhev Salient during World War II was so grisly, so murderous, and saw such vast losses that the troops called the campaign 'The Meat Grinder'. Though millions of men would fight and die there, the Rzhev Salient does not have the name recognition of Leningrad or Moscow. It has been largely ignored by Western historians – until now.

This book describes the odd coalition between Germany and Finland in World War II, and their joint military operations from 1941 to 1945. This is a topic often missing in English, though in stark contrast to the numerous books on the shorter and less bloody Winter War. That conflict represented a gallant fight of a democratic “David” against a totalitarian “Goliath” that caught the imagination of the world. The story of Finland fighting alongside a “Goliath” of its own has not brought pride to that nation and was a period many Finns would rather forget.

Vasiliy Chuikov offers a detailed history of the Battle of Stalingrad. He was there. Chuikov's account of the battle was first published in 1962. That book was translated into English and published as The Battle for Stalingrad in 1965. This book, Stalingrad: Battle of the Century, is a translation of Chuikov's 1975 edition, a very different work. I have now re-edited my translation and eliminated some mistakes. No translation is ever perfect. There is no doubt that Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II. It was, perhaps, a turning point in human history. Adolf Hitler's psychopathic ...

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between twelve and fourteen million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless.

The French Army crumbled swiftly under the powerful blows delivered to it in 1940 by Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht. Launching a massive feint into Belgium to lure French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) away from the actual point of attack, the weakly protected Ardennes Forest, the Germans struck past the Maginot Line. In a lightning campaign, panzers punched through to the coast, dividing Allied forces with a steel cordon across France and forcing the evacuation of the BEF from the port of Dunkirk.

With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification—and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the continent of Africa was a hotbed of international trade, colonialism, and political gamesmanship. So when World War I broke out, the European powers were forced to contend with each other not just in the bloody trenches - but in the treacherous jungle. And it was in that unforgiving land that General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck would make history.

Audie Murphy was a desperately poor eighteen-year-old orphan when he joined the Army, nineteen when he first saw a buddy die from an enemy bullet and an enemy die from one of his own. By VE day, he had killed at least 240 Germans, had single-handedly destroyed a German tank in one battle and held off six tanks in another, and had become the most decorated soldier in American history, winning every medal his country offered, including the Congressional Medal of Honor.

While the Battle of Kursk has long captivated World War II aficionados, it has been unjustly overlooked by historians. Drawing on the masses of new information made available by the opening of the Russian military archives, Dennis E. Showalter at last corrects that error. This battle was the critical turning point on World War II's Eastern Front. In the aftermath of the Red Army's brutal repulse of the Germans at Stalingrad, the stakes could not have been higher.

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion.