Germany World War

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.

Set against the backdrop of the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, this compelling audiobook provides the first comprehensive history of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, notorious for the abduction of Israeli Olympians by Palestinian terrorists and the hostages' tragic deaths after a botched rescue mission by the German police. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources from the time, eminent historian David Clay Large explores the 1972 festival in all its ramifications.

After the successful amphibious invasion on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies began racing east toward Germany and liberating France along the way. The Allies had landed along a 50 mile stretch of French coast, and despite suffering 8,000 casualties on D-Day, over 100,000 still began the march across the western portion of the continent. By the end of August 1944, the German army in France was shattered, with 200,000 killed or wounded and a further 200,000 captured.

The Third Reich's Luftwaffe began World War II with significant advantages over other European air forces, playing a critical role in the German war machine's swift, powerful advance. By war's end, however, the Luftwaffe had been decimated by combat losses and crippled by poor decisions at the highest levels of military decision-making, and it proved unable to challenge Allied air superiority despite a last-minute upsurge in German aircraft production.

Terrified after her father's arrest by the Nazis, Ruth flees to Belgium. This is the unbelievable autobiographical story of Ruth Uzrad, a Jewish teenager whose life was turned upside down by the Nazi regime. After her father was arrested one night from their Berlin apartment by the Gestapo, Ruth's mother sends 13-year-old Ruth and her two younger sisters out on their escape route across Europe by train to the safety of Belgium. But then the Nazis also reach Belgium, driving Ruth into the French Jewish underground....

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.

In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live, the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys start to suspect all is not as it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows, they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for.

Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm II, who occupied the throne of the German Empire for more than 30 years from June 1888 to November 1918, remains as much an enigma in death as he was in life. Over 70 years after his death in 1941, the mention of his name still sparks unsettled debates among historians. Was he the duty-bound, hands-on leader and passionate pro-British reformer who ruled in challenging times, seemingly mild in comparison to Hitler?

The American contribution to World War I is one of the great stories of the 20th century, and yet it has all but vanished from view. Historians have dismissed the American war effort as largely economic and symbolic. But as Geoffrey Wawro shows in Sons of Freedom, the French and British were on the verge of collapse in 1918 and would have lost the war without the Doughboys. A major revision of the history of World War I, Sons of Freedom resurrects the brave heroes who saved the Allies, defeated Germany, and established the US as the greatest of the great powers.

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.

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.

At the end of August 2012, BBC ran a report about the commemoration of a young man who had been killed more than 70 years earlier. Just 12 days before Oswald St John Pigg’s death, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already immortalized the men of the Royal Air Force with one of the West’s most famous war-time quotes. But the sentiment and gratitude Churchill expressed back in 1940 is very much alive today. The sacrifice made by “The Few”, the British and Allied fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain in 1940, remains close to the hearts of the British public.

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.

The Fourth Horseman tells the startling story of that mission, led by a brilliant but conflicted surgeon who became one of Germany's most daring spies and saboteurs during World War I - and who not only pioneered bio-warfare in his native land but also lead a last-ditch German effort to goad Mexico into invading the United States. It is a story of mysterious missions, divided loyalties, and a new and terrible kind of warfare.

At the end of September 1941, more than a million German soldiers lined up along the frontline just 180 miles west of Moscow. They were well trained, confident, and had good reasons to hope that the war in the East would be over with one last offensive. Facing them was an equally large Soviet force, but whose soldiers were neither as well trained nor as confident. When the Germans struck, disaster soon befell the Soviet defenders.

The Imperial German Army: The History and Legacy of Germany’s Armed Forces During World War I chronicles the German military in the years after the German Empire’s formation and World War I. You will learn about Germany’s army in World War I like never before.

World War II was the culmination of a quarter century of tank development, and it would also be the first major test of tanks in mobile warfare. However, many of the tanks were constructed with the static warfare of the Western Front in mind and were thus slow and had short operational ranges. Others were too light to face opposing tanks or the new generation of anti-tank weapons that hadn’t existed in World War I. The unsuitability of these tank models for this new kind of warfare was quickly recognized, and the belligerent powers scrambled to create better designs.

The tank was first developed by the British and French during World War I as a means to break the deadlock on the Western Front. More so than any previous war, the balance of power lay with the defense, as machine guns, trenches, bunkers, barbed wire, and rapid-firing rifles all made frontal assaults on established positions prohibitively costly. In the closing months of the war, the tank partially evened up that balance, even as the war’s commanders initially proved unsure of how to use them.

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.