Germany World War Ii

During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. But the terrible truth is that much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership, leading to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Focusing on the crucial period from 1942 to 1945, Fire and Fury tells the story of the American and British bombing campaign through the eyes of those involved.

When he was 17 years old, Audie Murphy falsified his birth records so that he could enlist in the army and help defeat the Nazis. When he was 19, he single-handedly turned back the German army at the Battle of Colmar Pocket by climbing on top of a tank with a machine gun, a moment immortalized in the classic film To Hell and Back, starring Audie himself.

Known as Fritz to his German spy-handlers and Zig-Zag to the British secret service, Eddie Chapman was a man of many faces. While his early life was rife with petty crime, gang activity and a dishonorable discharge from the British military, Chapman’s unique skills were eventually sought out by Nazi Germany, and after convincing them he could use his criminal contacts to sabotage the English forces, he was quickly recruited.

Best-selling historian Andrew Nagorski takes a fresh look at the decisive year 1941, when Hitler’s miscalculations and policy of terror propelled Churchill, FDR, and Stalin into a powerful new alliance that defeated Nazi Germany.

Weikart reveals the startling and fascinating truth about the most hated man of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler was a pantheist who believed nature was God. In Hitler's Religion, Weikart explains how the laws of nature became Hitler's only moral guide - how he became convinced he would serve God by annihilating supposedly "inferior" human beings and promoting the welfare and reproduction of the allegedly superior Aryansin accordance with racist forms of Darwinism prevalent at the time.

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary.

The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving".

Whilst the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet, restricted for much of the period after 1919 by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, was relatively small in comparison to the Royal Navy, it did possess a number of highly potent battleships and other capital vessels that could - and did - pose a major threat to British interests in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. Amongst the most powerful were the two battleships - the Bismarck and the Tirpitz.

Written as part of a US Army program instigated after World War II by Colonel S. L. A. Marshall of the Army Historical Division, who was convinced that no record of the war could be complete without the input of the German commanding officers and their main staff officers, these reports offer an invaluable record of German operations for historians and general audiences.

In a provincial town on Lake Constance, Johann basks in the affection of the colorful staff and regulars at the Station Restaurant. Though his parents struggle to make ends meet, around him the world is rich in mystery: the attraction of girls; the power of words and his gift for music; his rivalry with his best friend, Adolf, son of the local Brownshirt leader; a circus that comes to town bringing Anita, whose love he and Adolf compete to win.

Han pasado más de setenta y cinco años desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y no hay semana que no aparezca alguna noticia sobre reclamaciones de las víctimas del expolio nazi o sus descendientes, a estados o museos de todo el planeta, para recobrar las obras de arte robadas durante la contienda. ¿Cómo llevó a cabo el Tercer Reich este saqueo de obras de arte, el más grande de la historia? ¿Cuáles fueron sus vínculos con el Holocausto?

During the two major wars of the 20th century, America and Germany did indeed clash against each other, and in both cases, American entry into the war was a decisive factor in the defeat of the Germans. In World War I, it was the discovery of a German plan to attack the US through Mexico that overturned public opinion against neutrality, and in World War II, it wasn't until Pearl Harbor. For the Kaiser in the First World War and the Führer in the Second World War, utilizing Mexico as a strategic base to importune and hold back the US was a priority in the Americas.

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.

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.

After the failure of the Weimar Republic, the Nazis believed their mission was to "masculinize" life in Germany. Hermann Goering told women, "Take a pot, a dustpan and a broom, and marry a man", but many still became active participants in murder and mayhem. From the Reich Bride Schools through the Bund Deutscher Mädel and the bizarre Lebensborn Aryan breeding programme to the brothels of the Sicherheitsdienst, this book covers the lives of women in the Third Reich, concentrating on those who sought personal power and influence amid the chaos.

"My good friends," the mustached, bony man with thick eyebrows and large, strong teeth somewhat reminiscent of those of a horse, shouted to the crowds from the second-floor window of his house at 10 Downing Street, "this is the second time in our history, that there has come back to Downing Street from Germany peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time." (McDonough, 1998, 70).

A knife, a diary, a recipe book, a stringed instrument and a cotton pouch. Each belonged to an individual who was in their twenties during the Second World War: a fresh-faced prairie boy, a melancholic youth, a capable cook, a musician wounded at the front and a survivor.

When Company A of the US 116th Regiment landed on Omaha Beach in D-Day's first wave on June 6, 1944, it lost 96 percent of its effective strength. Sixteen teams of US engineers arriving in the second wave were unable to blow the beach obstacles, as first wave survivors were still sheltering behind them. This was the beginning of the historic day that Landing on the Edge of Eternity narrates hour by hour.

When Hitler came to power in the 1930s, Germany had led the world in science, mathematics, and technology for nearly four decades. But while the fact that Hitler swiftly pressed Germany's scientific prowess into the service of a brutal, racist, xenophobic ideology is well known, few realize that German scientists had knowingly broken international agreements and basic codes of morality to fashion deadly weapons even before World War I.

When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before or since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings.