Germany War Ii

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.

As the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand-Year Reich. As architects of the most punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, the French government made natural targets for Teutonic retribution, so the Maginot Line, a series of interconnected strongpoints and fortifications running along much of France's eastern border, helped allay French fears of invasion.

Cloak and dagger espionage, assassination, dangerous adventure, and strange deceptions such as the Operation Mincemeat plan wherein the corpse of a Welsh pauper fitted with a uniform and false papers deceived the Nazi hierarchy about the location of the Western Allies' first landing in Europe, all constitute as real a part of World War II's kaleidoscopically varied history as battles and clear-cut policies.

The Weimar Republic has become a byword for a failed, tragic, political experiment. The official period of its existence, 1919-1933, marked the inter-war years in Germany and their related uncertainty, chaos, and the state’s ultimate collapse. Historians have found the roots of Nazism embedded in the Weimar years and that, in the final analysis, Weimar politicians voluntarily handed over power to the man who wrought destruction on an epic scale, Adolf Hitler.

In the predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, three million men waited along a front stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as Vichy France or the Vichy Regime after its spa-town capital, stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third Reich invasion.

Of course,Paris was not destroyed before the Allies liberated it, but it would take more than four years for them to wrest control of France from Nazi Germany after they took the country by storm in about a month in 1940. That said, it's widely overlooked today given how history played out that as the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand-Year Reich.

By the end of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies had managed to successfully land 170,000 men, with over 75,000 on the British and Canadian beaches, 57,000 on the American beaches, and over 24,000 airborne troops. Thanks to Allied deception, the German army had failed to react to prevent the Allies from making the most of their landings. Just one division, the Hitlerjugend, would arrive the following day. Despite a fearsome and bloody day, the majority of the Allied forces had achieved their objectives.

"Blitzkrieg", or "lightning war", describes the Third Reich's invasion strategy during its 1940 conquest of France not only due to the speed of the Wehrmacht advance but also its devastating effect on its ill-prepared adversaries. Mired in the paralyzing muck of plodding staff college military doctrine and demoralized as a nation by their appalling losses during World War I, the French succumbed in a few weeks to German skill and vigor.

Danger prowled under both the cold gray waters of the North Sea and the shimmering blue waves of the tropical Atlantic during World War II as Adolf Hitler's Third Reich attempted to strangle Allied shipping lanes with U-boat attacks. German and British submarines combed the vast oceanic battlefield for prey, while scientists developed new technologies and countermeasures.

At the close of World War I, Hitler was an impoverished young artist who scrapped by through selling souvenir paintings, but within a few years, his powerful oratory brought him to the forefront of the Nazi party in Munich and helped make the party much more popular. A smattering of followers in the hundreds quickly became a party of thousands. At the head of it all was a man whose fiery orations denounced Jews, communists, and other "traitors" for bringing upon the German nation the Treaty of Versailles, which had led to hyperinflation and a wrecked economy.

After the last shots of World War II were fired and the process of rebuilding Germany and Europe began, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union each tried to obtain the services of the Third Reich's leading scientists, especially those involved in rocketry, missile technology, and aerospace research. Naturally, this was a delicate affair due to the fact many of the German scientists were not only active Nazis but had helped the Nazi war machine terrorize the world.

How is it that one Austrian man, diminutive in stature, an unsuccessful Viennese street artist, a mediocre soldier, came to lead a nation into another devastating World War? All of this cannot be achieved by one man alone; other influences and circumstances contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler. There were many supporting players and acts in this story, long before Hitler was even born.

I 1973 gennemførte Frode Kristoffersen, Danmark Radios korrespondent i Vesttyskland, en række interviews med personer, der havde været tæt på Hitler i krigens sidste dage. Det er folk som storadmiral Karl Dönitz, Hitlers efterfølger og Det Tredje Riges sidste statsoverhoved, Albert Speer, arkitekten der blev rustningsminister, Erich Kempka, der var Hitlers chauffør og skaffede benzinen til hans og Eva Brauns ligbål og piloten Wolfgang Klemusch, der 1. maj lettede i en vandflyver på en mystisk mission til det indesluttede Berlin.

Memorias de una madre en el Holocausto. 1939. Tras su despiadada incursión en territorio polaco, el Ejército alemán no tardó en diseminarse hasta Bedzin, una pequeña población ubicada cerca de la frontera con Checoslovaquia. Con el tiempo los nazis decidieron confinar a los judíos en un gueto en la parte más pobre de la ciudad, para esclavizarlos como mano de obra y despúes enviarlos a campos de concentración como Auschwitz. Muerte y desolación fueron el desenlace de muchas familias, pero hubo una que logró la extraordinaria hazaña de sobrevivir gracias a una mujer.

Whatever happened to the Nazis after World War II? While the Nuremberg trials saw key party members prosecuted, it was impossible to imprison every German who had supported the Third Reich. This is the story of what happened to the Nazis who escaped justice.

February, 1945. Eight months have passed since the D-Day landings, when the Allies gained their foothold in North-West Europe. Since then the British Army has fought near continuously against the German military. Now, they stand ready for their greatest test: the battle for the German homeland. Drawing on the archive of the Imperial War Museums, this often-overlooked period of the war is brought vividly to life in the words of British soldiers who were there, from war-weary men who have survived many months of combat to new recruits facing Hitler's fanatic Panzer divisions for the first time.

Victor Capesius custodiaba la reserva nazi de gas Zyklon B y proporcionaba fármacos que eran empleados por médicos para llevar a cabo experimentos espantosos y mortales en mujeres embarazadas y niños. Hurgaba en los cadáveres de los judíos en busca de empastes de oro, y llevado por la codicia, arrastraba pesadas maletas llenas de ese metal extraído a miles de víctimas. El farmacéutico de Auschwitz cuenta su historia. Tras una exhaustiva investigación, Patricia Posner recrea la historia de Victor Capesius.

A chronicle of the experiences of Sigmund Weiss as a teenager trying to survive during the turbulence of Hitler’s mad aggression towards Poland and the Jews. A story about an escape that was near impossible and totally unlikely without luck, courage, and miracles all happening together.

On September 6, 1943, 338 B-17 "Flying Fortresses" of the American Eighth Air Force took off from England, bound for Stuttgart, Germany, to bomb Nazi weapons factories. Dense clouds obscured the targets, and one commander's critical decision to circle three times over the city---and its deadly flak---would prove disastrous. Forty-five planes went down that day, and hundreds of men were lost or missing.