German History English

The German shorthaired pointer, or GSP, is an exceptionally versatile hunting dog that was bred in Germany in the 19th century. Like all pointer breeds, GSPs are very capable of spotting and quietly drawing attention to their quarry. Included with breeds like bloodhounds and English pointers, however, GSPs are also excellent trackers that are both fast and agile when pursuing game.

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.

Who were the Gestapo officers? Were they merely banal paper shufflers, or were they recognizably evil? Were they motivated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism? Did the average German know about the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables while they were happening? Exactly how was Nazi terror applied in the daily lives of ordinary Jews and Germans? Eric A. Johnson answers these questions as he explores the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work.

After 1933, as the terror regime took hold, most of the two-thirds of Germans who had never voted for the Nazis tried to keep their heads down and protect their families - they moved to the country, or pretended to support the regime to avoid being denounced by neighbours, and tried to work out what was really happening in the Reich, surrounded as they were by Nazi propaganda and fake news.

In 1832, 17-year-old Otto von Bismarck had just entered university and was already rejecting the republican indoctrination of his grade school years. Unlike so many of his day who had championed representative government, Bismarck longed for the glory of a nation he believed would only be found under a single, strong leader. Though his early university days showed him he would be isolated by this thinking, he strongly believed not only in the ideal of a national German state, but in its possibility.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, 15-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

In 1923, the Weimar Republic faced a series of crises, including foreign occupation of its industrial heartland, rampant inflation, radical violence, and finally Hitler’s infamous “beer hall putsch.” Fanning the flames of anti-government and anti-Semitic sentiment, the Nazis tried to violently seize power in Munich, only failing after they were abandoned by like-minded conservatives. In 1923, historian Mark William Jones draws on new research to offer a revealing portrait of German politics and society in this turbulent year.

In 1916, a nondescript freighter left Germany carrying 465 submarine mines, 16 torpedoes, eight cannons, 1,400 shells, a seaplane, and 346 men who believed they were embarking on a suicide mission. That ship became known to Allied forces as the Wolf, and by the time it returned to Germany more than a year later, it was home to more than 800 men, women, and children from 25 different nations, including its own crew.

In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”

This book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of time. Acclaimed historian Christopher Clark draws on four key figures from German history—Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler—to look at history through a temporal lens and ask how historical actors and their regimes embody unique conceptions of time.

In the late summer of 1944, SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm ‘Willi’ Bittrich found himself in the Netherlands surveying his II SS Panzer Corps, which was in a poor state having narrowly escaped the defeat in Normandy. He was completely unaware that his command lay directly in the path of a major Allied thrust: the 17 September 1944 launch of the largest airborne and glider operation in the history of warfare.

Heinz Knoke was one of the outstanding German fighter pilots of the Second World War. This vivid firsthand record of his experiences has become a classic among aviation memoirs and is a fascinating counterbalance to the numerous accounts written by Allied pilots.

In November 1939, a German anti-fascist named Georg Elser came as close to assassinating Adolf Hitler as anyone ever had. In this gripping novel of alternate history, he doesn’t just come close - he succeeds. But he could never have imagined the terrible consequences that would follow from this act of heroism. Hermann Göring, masterful political strategist, assumes the Chancellery and quickly signs a non-aggression treaty with the isolationist president Joseph Kennedy that will keep America out of the war that is about to engulf Europe.

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.

Learn about the process of German Reunification with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. Reunification in Germany was a slow process. The country was divided between the communist East and the capitalist West from the end of World War Two in 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. To understand how momentous a step reunification in Germany was, it is necessary to go back to the start of the division in 1945.

Lieutenant John Ryan couldn’t wait to see action in WWI. He joined up with the British colors out of Canada. As one of several American pilots in the Royal Flying Corps before the US joined the war, he earned his wings and became an ace through fierce air battles over the skies of Germany. After getting shot down twice behind enemy lines, Lieutenant Ryan recounts the trials, tragedies, and tribulations of 72 days on the run behind enemy lines.

In the wake of World War I, the German army lay in ruins - defeated in the war, sundered by domestic upheaval, and punished by the Treaty of Versailles. A mere 20 years later, Germany possessed one of the finest military machines in the world, capable of launching a stunning blitzkrieg attack against Poland in 1939. Well-known military historian Robert M. Citino shows how Germany accomplished this astonishing reversal and developed the doctrine, tactics, and technologies that its military would use to devastating effect in World War II.

The Unification of Germany: The History and Legacy of the German Empire’s Establishment looks at the life and work of Germany’s most famous politician and how Germany was unified. You will learn about German unification like never before.

From pint-sized puppy to confident canine: how to raise a healthy, happy, and well-behaved German Shepherd.

Until recent years, very little was known of the tens of thousands of foreign nationals from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain who served voluntarily in the military formations of the German army and the German Waffen-SS. In Kaisergruber's book, the listener discovers important issues of collaboration, the apparent contributions of the volunteers to the German war effort, their varied experiences, their motives, the attitude of the German High Command and bureaucracy, and the reaction to these in the occupied countries.