Germany World War

When World War II erupted, Philipp von Boeselager, son of an aristocratic Catholic family, fought enthusiastically for his country as a cavalry lieutenant. But in the summer of 1942, when he witnessed the regime's criminal brutality toward Jews and Gypsies, his patriotism quickly turned to disgust, and he joined a group of officers intent on killing Hitler. After one aborted attempt, it was decided that a bomb would be used to assassinate HItler.

Georg Elser was just an ordinary working-class citizen living in Munich, Germany. He was employed as a carpenter and had spent some time working in a watch factory. That all changed when he took it upon himself, without telling his family or friends, to single-handedly attempt to assassinate the most powerful man in all of Germany: the Führer, Adolph Hitler.

This is the secret and suspenseful account of how OSS spymaster Allen Dulles led a network of Germans conspiring to assassinate Hitler and negotiate surrender to bring about the end of World War II before the Soviet's advance. Agent 110 is Allen Dulles, a newly minted spy from an eminent family. Dulles met with and facilitated the plots of Germans who were trying to destroy the country's leadership.

In September 1943, Adolf Hitler, furious at the ouster of Mussolini, sent German troops into Rome and ordered SS General Karl Wolff, who had been Heinrich Himmler's chief aide, to occupy the Vatican and kidnap (and perhaps kill) Pope Pius XII. At the same time, plans were being made to deport Rome's Jews to Auschwitz. Wolff began playing a dangerous game: stalling Hitler's plot against the pope, whom he hoped would save him from the noose in case Germany lost the war.

In 1998, Helga Schneider, in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90-year-old mother lived. The last time she had seen her mother was 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on the SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected.

In 1940 a group of artists, sculptors, film makers, theatre designers and set painters came together to form the Camouflage Unit. Led by Major Geoffrey Barkas and including among their number the internationally renowned stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, the unit's projects became a crucial battlefield weapon.

For 32 days, they were chased across the mountains as they headed for the coast and a rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch waiting to spirit the general to Cairo. Rick Stroud, whose Phantom Army of Alamein won plaudits for its meticulous research and its lightness of touch in the telling, brings these same gifts to bear in this new project.

During World War II, Heinz Drossel saved Soviet prisoners of war and several Jews, including Marianne Hirschfeld. Again and again, he wasn't afraid to risk his own life when others' safety was at risk. Nearly all of Hirschfeld's family members were murdered by Nazis; she survived in hiding - and met Heinz again by coincidence after the war was over. They married in 1946. At that time, starting over was difficult. In the judicial service, Drossel witnessed Nazis continuing with their careers....

Sitting Ducks pieces together the story of an impossible and lesser-known WWII mission. In December 1944, during the bloody Battle of the Bulge, teams of German commandos disguised as American soldiers slipped behind the US front lines. Riding in captured US jeeps, they committed sabotage, sowed confusion, and caused paranoia among American troops. Word quickly spread that the undercover commandos were out to kill US General Eisenhower.

On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker as the Red Army closed in on Berlin. Within four days the Soviets had recovered his body. But the truth about what the Russian secret services found was hidden from history, when, three months later, Stalin officially declared to Truman and Churchill that Hitler was still alive and had escaped abroad. Reckless rumors about what really happened to Hitler began to spread like wildfire and, even today, they have not been put to rest. Until now.

Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son - the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel - is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father's early life.

Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, 1945, was the scene of a trial without precedent in history, a trial that continues to haunt the modern world.

In the charnel house that was Europe in the Second World War, there were few instances of shining moral courage, let alone secular sainthood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and Nazi resister, was the exception. This emblematic figure risked his life, and finally lost it, through his participation in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler and topple his regime.

Major General Sid Shachnow was ten-years-old when he escaped the notorious Kovno concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Later, he traveled to post-war Germany, and he earned a living as a courier for his mother's black market business. His family eventually came to America where he struggled to get an education, held down three jobs, and courted the girl of his dreams, whom he would marry and raise four daughters with.

One of hundreds of simple homicides each year, indistinguishable from any other in 1938, was the death of a spinster nurse killed in her apartment. A suspect is caught and convicted. Private Investigator Fintan Dunne is lured into the case and coerced by conscience into unraveling the setup that has put an innocent man on death row. Following the trail leads him into a murder conspiracy of a scope that defies imagination.

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.

In 1920s Munich, the body of Anna Gross, a young society wife, has been found in the English Gardens, still clothed in finery. Soon a second body is discovered, also a woman of high society. When a third body is found, homicide detective Axel Berg realizes he's dealing with unprecedented evil. Is the murderer politically motivated? Is he a lone madman? Or worse, is the killer possessed by both political and personal demons?

The Mafia at War reconstructs the relationships between the Mafia and Allied intelligence organizations.

Discover how Jewish gangsters clashed with Nazis on the streets of New York; how Mafiosi nearly issued contracts to kill top Nazis, including Hitler; how Mafia-backed bandits conducted a guerrilla war for Sicilian independence; and how Eisenhower was happy to arm the Mafia during the Allied invasion of Sicily.

In 1942, eight Nazi saboteurs were caught on American beaches after one turned the others in. The execution of the saboteurs was challenged in court but eventually upheld in the Supreme Court's ruling in Ex parte Quirin, a decision that has frequently been cited by the George W. Bush administration in support of its declared power to hold "enemy combatants" and try them by military commission.

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.