Germany World War

Marthe Cohn was a young Jewish woman living just across the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe's sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz and the rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army and became a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army.

Dark skies and barbed wire fences were all Bluma Plaskovsky saw as she stepped down from the train onto the main platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After surviving the Wehrmacht’s decimation of her hometown, Bluma and what remained of her family were finally put on the long, harsh train ride through inhuman conditions that seemed to last an eternity.

This is a unique first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish refugee imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II. Its immediacy is what makes it such a valuable eyewitness account. While there are other memoirs written decades after internment, Walter Igersheimer wrote this book shortly after he was deported from Canada because the Liberal government in the 1940s did not want Jews to become Canadian citizens.

In 1941, with the dark star of Nazi conquest in the ascendant over Europe, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler continued seeking fresh ways to expand the Third Reich's domains. Two strategic issues occupied Hitler's immediate attention: dealing with Britain and the Soviet Union. Hitler and Goering disagreed fundamentally on the next steps to be taken, and Hitler's ideas naturally won out over the Reichsmarshal's objections.

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography: “I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions.” He was referring to Germany in 1923, a “year of lunacy,” defined by hyperinflation, violence, a political system on the verge of collapse, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and separatist movements threatening to rip apart the German nation. Bestselling author Volker Ullrich presents a riveting chronicle of one of the most difficult years any modern democracy has ever faced.

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?

The first British major success of World War II was when the Royal Navy forced the preying pocket battleship, Graf Spee, to scuttle at sea. Hitler had ordered a blockade of the British Isles and for some months German U-boats and warships caused havoc among allied merchant shipping carrying vital supplies.

When the Italian dictator Mussolini saw that Hitler was conquering Europe, he decided that he too would have a share of the plunder. He declared war on the Allies, vowed to control the Mediterranean, and with his 300,000 troops stationed in Libya, take Egypt and the Suez Canal. But he knew that this could not be accomplished while the strategic island of Malta remained in Allied hands. For the next two years Malta and its people suffered for almost continuous bombardment, but never gave in.

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.

Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann - names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse, and Gerda. These are the women behind the infamous men - complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families, and quarreled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself.

From 1933 to 1945, the Gestapo was Nazi Germany's chief instrument of counter-espionage, political suppression, and terror. Jacques Delarue, a saboteur arrested by the Nazis in occupied France, chronicles how the land of Beethoven elevated sadism to a fine art. The Gestapo: A History of Horror draws upon Delarue's interviews with ex-Gestapo agents to deliver a multi-layered history of the force whose work included killing student resisters, establishing Aryan eugenic unions, and implementing the Final Solution.

In the early years of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, one of the most notorious leaders of the Third Reich, worked to establish his own personal army to rival Himmler's SS and Reichswehr. The result: a private Prussian police force which grew into one of the most powerful armored units in Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht. This unit fought throughout the Second World War, meeting Anglo-American forces in vicious battles across the European theatres of Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy before finally being defeated by the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

Heinz Linge worked with Adolf Hitler for a 10 year period from 1935 until the Fuhrer's death in the Berlin bunker in May 1945. He was one of the last to leave the bunker and was responsible for guarding the door while Hitler killed himself. During his years of service, Linge was responsible for all aspects of Hitler's household and was constantly by his side. He claims that only Eva Braun stood closer to Hitler over these years. Through a host of anecdotes and observations, Linge recounts the daily routine in Hitler's household; his eating habits, his foibles, his preferences, his sense of humour, and his private life with Eva Braun.

For over 50 years scholars and philosophers alike have attempted to make some sense of the Third Reich and its "Final Solution" campaign. Historian Robert Wistrich takes listeners on a guided tour through the death camps and meticulously details the events that led to this horrific tragedy and the lasting repercussions it had on the world community.

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These were discoveries that would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general - almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war.

Tank Rider is the riveting memoir of Evgeni Bessonov telling of his years of service at the vanguard of the Red Army and daily encounters with the German foe. He brings large-scale battles to life, recounts the sniping and skirmishing that tried and tested soldiers on both sides, and narrates the overwhelming tragedy and horror of apocalyptic warfare on the Eastern Front. So much of the Soviet experience of World War II remains untold, but this memoir provides an important glimpse into some of the most decisive moments of this overlooked history.

Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives to the unprecedented experience of the war itself.

One night at a dinner party in Florence, historian Daniel Lee was told about a remarkable discovery. An upholsterer in Amsterdam had found a bundle of swastika-covered documents inside the cushion of an armchair he was repairing. They belonged to Dr. Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart, who joined the S.S. and worked at the Reich's Ministry of Economics and Labor in Nazi-occupied Prague during the war.

In 1941 Hitler's armies blocked the last roads leading into Leningrad. What followed was one of the most horrific sieges in history. When the German High Command encircled Leningrad it was a deliberate policy to eradicate the city's civilian population by starving them to death. As winter set in and food supplies dwindled, starvation and panic set in.