Germany World War

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.

This is a novel about a young German woman in the early 1940's who leaves Germany to fight with the French resistance against the Naxi occupation of Vichy France.

If history really belongs to the victor, what happens when there's more than one side declaring victory? That's the conundrum Norman Davies unravels in his groundbreaking book No Simple Victory. Far from being a revisionist history, No Simple Victory instead offers a clear-eyed reappraisal, untangling and setting right the disparate claims made by America, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union in order to get at the startling truth.

Under orders of the Fuhrer, the German General Staff reluctantly drew up a lackluster plan of invasion for France. Yet it was the audacious scheme of three of Hitler’s top generals that brought down France’s military force, Rather than simply move troops to engage the enemy, for the first time they would unleash the tank and drive straight into the heart of their foe.

"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 early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked - and the United States remained at peace. Hitler’s American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11.

Trapped and surrounded by the Germans, the besieged Americans seemed doomed. But a daring action by General Patton would break through the German lines and end the siege of Bastogne, bringing supplies and reinforcements that would allow the Americans to prove their mettle at the largest battle fought on the Western Front in Europe.

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.

The very young men who flew the B24s over Germany in World War II against terrible odds were an exemplary band of brothers. In The Wild Blue, Stephen Ambrose recounts their extraordinary brand of heroism, skill, daring, and comradeship. Stephen Ambrose describes how the Army Air Forces recruited, trained, and chose those few who would undertake the most demanding and dangerous jobs in the war.

On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women - many of them teenagers - were sent to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reich Marks (about $200) apiece for Nazis to take them as slave labor. Of those 999 innocent deportees, only a few survived.

During World War II, in the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research; Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses—dubbed the Alsos Mission—and sent them careening into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany's feared Uranium Club.

As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head.

The Crimea was one of the crucibles of the war on the Eastern Front, where first a Soviet and then a German army were surrounded, fought desperate battles, and were eventually destroyed. The fighting in the region was unusual for the Eastern Front in many ways, in that naval supply, amphibious landings, and naval evacuation played major roles, while both sides were also conducting ethnic cleansing as part of their strategy - the Germans eliminating the Jews and the Soviets purging the region of Tartars.

Nazi Germany expected its airborne attack on Crete in 1941 to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. Little did they know that the British, using Ultra intercepts, had already laid a careful trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war, but a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle around.

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.

Have you ever wondered how a man like Adolf Hitler could have come into power? How he legally became a dictator by using a democratic process? Or what events led up to his reign of terror? The answers lie in the Weimar Republic. Amid the devastation of World War I, Germany’s monarchy provided no answers. A democratic government seemed the only way to appease Allied nations and solve the many disasters that were already at the country’s doorstep.

This classic war memoir, first published in 1920, is based on the author's extensive diaries describing hard combat experienced on the Western Front during World War I. It has been greatly admired by people as diverse as Bertolt Brecht and Andre Gide, and from every part of the political spectrum. Hypnotic, thrilling, and magnificent, The Storm of Steel is perhaps the most fascinating description of modern warfare ever written.

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These were discoveries that would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general - almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war.

A small band of courageous university students dare to stand up against Hitler who has seized power in Germany and plunged them into a world war. Calling themselves, "The White Rose," Hans and Sophie Scholl publish thousands of leaflets condemning the dictatorship of Hitler and urging the German people to resist. Without using violence, The White Rose opposes the Nazis with the power of the printed word, risking their lives for the precious gift of freedom.

The sinking of the German battleship Bismarck - a masterpiece of engineering, well-armored with a main artillery of eight 15-inch guns - was one of the most dramatic events of World War II. She left the port of Gotenhafen for her first operation on the night of 18 May 1941, yet was almost immediately discovered by Norwegian resistance and Allied air reconnaissance. British battlecruiser Hood was quickly dispatched from Scapa Flow to intercept the Bismarck, together with new battleship Prince of Wales.