German History English

From the depths of German and American archives comes a story one soldier never wanted told. The first volunteer killed defending Robert E. Lee’s position in battle was really a German assassin. After fleeing to the United States to escape prosecution for murder, the assassin enlisted in a German company of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Mexican-American War and died defending Lee’s battery at the Siege of Veracruz in 1847.

Hanns Alexander was the son of a wealthy German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s. Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became Kommandant of Auschwitz and oversaw the deaths of over a million people. In the aftermath of World War II, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen.

Robert Stratten Holmes (1850-1933) was a man of many and varied parts, cricket historian, author and prodigious collector of cricketing books, he was a churchman, friend and confidante of generations of English cricketers. ‘R.S. Holmes’ the fourth monograph of the James D. Coldham Series is a long biographical sketch of Reverend Holmes, the Methodist minister who became Yorkshire Cricket’s first historian, and friend the great men of Lord’s and downtrodden of his parishes. In editing my father’s corpus of work I sometimes get the distinct feeling that he was methodically ‘...

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its overseas colonies. This sudden transition to a post-colonial nation left the men and women invested in German imperialism to rebuild their status on the international stage. Remnants of an earlier era, these Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate, and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as "experts" and "fellow civilizers" in discourses on nationalism and imperialism.

Buttercup the gnome can´t believe her luck when she meets another gnome, Tommy the Toymaker, in the smog-ridden, factory city of Smokehatten in Fineland. That´s because the goblins from Brushia have long run over the country and forced most of the gnomes to work long hours in their filthy factories. After marrying, they finally get their chance to escape Fineland for good when they secretly meet the strange Elf-King of Toparia - but only if they and Tommy´s uncle build a submarine to steal the River Fine Gold and finish building his fairytale castle in Tophatten. This charmingly-told ...

The family saga of Johann Gehring, who at sixteen years old, travels to America. He begins his new life in the prairies of Nebraska. There he learns to dig a well and exist amid nature’s foes: tornados, prairie fires, and freezing winters. Johann changes his name to John and finds love with Helena. Together they build a home and raise five independent children including the head-strong, Berta. Helena teaches her children to be as strong as the prairie cottonwood. She warns that someday they will need to bend in the wind and support each other. Berta vow to be as formidable as the ...

Forced to confront the sorrows of her past, Daniela invites Simon to accompany her to the historical city of Nuremberg and its enchanting Christmas Market. But Simon is also burdened by memories of a hidden tragedy, and, drawn in by his bachelor lifestyle, he has a cynical view of the festive period. Together, they explore Nuremberg’s bewitching cobbled streets and discover that the city’s poignant and cruel secrets mirror their own. As Simon is gradually charmed by the quaint wooden market stalls and glorious old buildings, he realises that Nuremberg’s ghosts can help to redeem the ...

When gangsters kidnapped Ginger’s great-aunt from the Pink Palace Hotel in 1939, few clues ever surfaced. Those that did pointed to the alligator-infested waters of the Florida Everglades. All anyone knows for sure is that neither her aunt, the gangster who kidnapped her, nor the ransom money were ever seen again. Antonio has his own reasons for wanting to solve the mystery of why his great-uncle disappeared—and where he hid the ransom. While Antonio and Ginger work at trusting each other enough to deal with the truth, all they seem to unearth are secrets that are better left buried. ...

During the summer of 1940, Hitler's Germany appeared unstoppable. The Nazis were masters of mainland Europe, in alliance with Stalin's Russia, and only the English Channel prevented an immediate invasion. Britain stood alone. Operation Sealion examines just how realistic the German threat of invasion was. The author studies the plans, the available capability and resources, and the Germans' record in Norway and, later, Crete. The author weighs these against the state of Britain's defenses and the relative strengths of the land, air, and naval forces.

Bismarck's War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century.

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the new German luxury ocean liner SS Vaterland was interned in New York Harbor, where it remained docked for nearly three years - until the United States officially entered the fight to turn the tide of the war. Seized by authorities for the US Navy once war was declared in April 1917, the liner was renamed the USS Leviathan by President Woodrow Wilson and converted into an armed troop carrier.

A thrilling Cold War narrative of superpower showdowns, media suppression, and two escape tunnels beneath the Berlin Wall.

In 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain's government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital.

Hans Schiller was a seventeen-year-old student in Bromberg, Prussia, when World War I broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in the German army and was assigned to an artillery unit on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1917, Schiller saw action in what is now Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and Russia's withdrawal from the war, Schiller was transferred to the Western Front. He arrived in time for Germany's last great offensive in the west.

German South West Africa: The History and Legacy of Germany’s Biggest African Colony chronicles the politics and conflicts that marked Germany’s efforts to colonize German South West Africa. You will learn about German South West Africa like never before.

Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War, marveling at the size of the battles, the leadership of the generals, and the courage of the soldiers. The Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history, and had the two sides realized it would take four years and inflict over a million casualties, it might not have been fought. Since it did, however, historians and history buffs alike have been studying and analyzing the military and political history of the conflict ever since.

When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a trunk full of his late aunt's personal belongings, he was unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals, and photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy during World War II.

The first genocide of the 20th century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904-1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman - lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion - and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze", an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis.

Learn German with ease. Whatever plans you may have for your future, with knowledge of the German language, you can create infinite possibilities. Learning German means acquiring skills to improve your professional and personal life. If you want to learn German from scratch or just improve your German for travel, work, or enjoyment, this audio guide as you covered.

As war began in Europe in 1939, a naturalized German American was recruited by the Nazis to set up a radio transmitter and collect messages from spies active in the city to send back to Nazi spymasters in Hamburg. This German American, William G. Sebold, approached the FBI and became the first double agent in the Bureau's history, the center of a 16-month investigation that led to the arrest of a colorful cast of 33 enemy agents.