German Military History

The German Revolution of November 1918 is nowadays largely forgotten outside Germany. It is generally regarded as a failure even by those who have heard of it, a missed opportunity that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and the catastrophe to come. Robert Gerwarth argues here that to view the German Revolution in this way is a serious misjudgment. Not only did it bring down the authoritarian monarchy of the Hohenzollern, it also brought into being the first ever German democracy in an amazingly bloodless way.

For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and occupation.

While the Germans knew an invasion was inevitable, no one knew where or when it would fall. Those manning Hitler's mighty Atlantic Wall may have felt secure in their bunkers, but they had no conception of the fury and fire that was about to break. After the initial assaults of June established an Allied bridgehead, a state of stalemate prevailed. The Germans fought with great courage - hindered by lack of supplies and overwhelming Allied control of the air. This book describes the catastrophe that followed, in a unique look at the war from the losing side.

Drawing on more than a half-century of research and teaching, Dennis Showalter presents a fresh perspective on the German Army during World War I. Showalter surveys an army at the heart of a national identity, driven by - yet also defeated by - warfare in the modern age, that struggled to capitalize on its victories, and ultimately forgot the lessons of its defeat.

Few perspectives epitomize the sheer drama and sacrifice of combat more perfectly than those of the fighter pilots of World War II. As romanticized as any soldier in history, the World War II fighter pilot was viewed as larger than life: a dashing soul waging war amongst the clouds. In the 65-plus years since the Allied victory, stories of these pilots' heroics have never been in short supply. But what about their adversaries - the highly skilled German aviators who pushed the Allies to the very brink of defeat?

Secrets of Encirclement Warfare: A Gripping Exploration of the Intersection of Land and Air Power Imagine being surrounded by enemy forces, with limited supplies and no clear escape route. This is the harsh reality of encirclement warfare, a tactic that has been used to devastating effect throughout history. From the frozen tundras of World War II to the jungles of Vietnam, encirclement has proven to be a game-changer on the battlefield. In this fascinating and deeply researched book, we delve into the world of encirclement warfare, exploring the successes and failures of this complex and ...

This is the little-known story of Heavy Panzer (Tiger) Battalion 507 told through the recollections of the men who fought with the unit.

Raised in 1943 with 17-year-olds from the Hitler Youth movement, and following the twin disasters of Stalingrad and "Tunisgrad", the Hitlerjugend Panzer Division emerged as the most effective German division fighting in the West. The core of the division was a cadre of offices and NCOs provided by Hitler's bodyguard division, the elite Leibstandarte, with the aim of producing a division of "equal value" to fight alongside them in I SS Panzer Corps.

On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above.

In The German Aces Speak II, Heaton and Lewis paint a picture of the war through the eyes of four more of Germany's most significant pilots, put together from numerous interviews personally conducted by Heaton from the 1980s through the 2000s. The four ex-Luftwaffe fighter aces bring the past to life as they tell their stories about the war, their battles, their off-duty lives, their lives after the war, and perhaps most importantly, how they felt about serving under the Nazi leadership of Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler.

In Prevail Until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises.

By 1943, the war was lost, and most German officers knew it. What kept the German army going in an increasingly hopeless situation? Where some historians have found explanations in the power of Hitler or the role of ideology, Robert M. Citino, the world's leading scholar on the subject, posits a more straightforward solution: Bewegungskrieg, the way of war cultivated by the Germans over the course of history. In this book, Citino charts the path by which Bewegungskrieg, or a "war of movement," inexorably led to Nazi Germany's defeat.

In the cold morning of June 6, 1944, thousands of German soldiers were in position from Port en Bessin eastward past Colleville on the Normandy coast, aware that a massive invasion force was heading straight for them, although according to Allied Intelligence, they shouldn't have been there. The presence of 352 Division meant that the number of defenders was literally double the number expected - and on the best fortified of all the invasion beaches. What makes this account of the bloody struggle unique is that it is told from the German standpoint, using firsthand testimony....

Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich.

In this dramatic account of the 1944-45 winter of war in Bastogne, historian Peter Schrijvers offers the first full story of the German assault on the strategically located town. From the December stampede of American and Panzer divisions racing to reach Bastogne first, through the bloody eight-day siege from land and air, and through three more weeks of unrelenting fighting even after the siege was broken, events at Bastogne hastened the long-awaited end of WWII.

A tale of terrorism, espionage, and an epic struggle for justice in an America on the verge, sparked by a massive and mysterious explosion in New York Harbor in 1916.

That year, while the Allied and Central forces waged war in Europe, a group of German saboteurs blew up Black Tom Island, a spit of land in New York Harbor within earshot of downtown Manhattan. The subsequent hail of missiles and gunpowder devastated much of lower New York City.

An authoritative study of World War I's often-overlooked Romanian front. In contrast to the trench-war deadlock on the Western Front, combat in Romania and Transylvania in 1916 foreshadowed the lightning warfare of World War II. When Romania joined the Allies and invaded Transylvania without warning, the Germans responded by unleashing a campaign of bold, rapid infantry movements, with cavalry providing cover or pursuing the crushed foe.

This is the riveting and extraordinary story of Kapitan Herbert Cleff, presented here for the first time by Brian Brinkworth. Cleff, an officer on the staff of General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, attached to the 21st Panzer division operating in the Western desert, was captured near El Dab'a in Libya on the sixth of November, 1942. He was interrogated both in the Western Desert and in the United Kingdom, following assessments that led his British captors to believe that he might prove useful to the Allied war effort. During this interrogation period, Cleff kept releasing tantalizing snippets.

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 the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions.