Germany War Ii

When discussing the German war crimes of the Second World War, modern histories have focused on the Holocaust. While the Final Solution was a unique and unparalleled horror, German atrocities did not end there. The Nazis terrorized their own citizens, tortured and murdered POWs, and carried out countless executions throughout occupied Europe. Lord Russell of Liverpool was part of the legal team that brought Nazi war criminals to justice, and from this first-hand position, he published the best-selling The Scourge of the Swastika in 1954. Liverpool shows that the actions of the Third Reich, were illegal, not merely immoral.

Built in 1927, the German ocean liner Cap Arcona was the greatest ship since the Titanic. When the Nazis seized control, she was stripped down for use as a floating barracks and troop transport. Hitler's minister, Joseph Goebbels, later cast her as a "star" in the epic propaganda film about the sinking of the legendary Titanic. In the Third Reich's final desperate days, when SS Cap Arcona was mistakenly bombed by the British Air Force, concentration camp prisoners packed the ship.

At the height of World War II, with the Third Reich's final solution in full operation, a small group of Jews who had barely escaped the Nazis did the unthinkable: They went back. Spies now, these men took on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. They Dared Return is their story - a tale of adventure, espionage, love, and revenge.

On July 5, 1943, the greatest land battle in history began when Nazi and Red Army forces clashed near the town of Kursk, on the western border of the Soviet Union. Code named Operation Citadel, the German offensive would cut through the bulge in the eastern front that had been created following Germany's retreat at the battle of Stalingrad. But the Soviets, well informed about Germany's plans through their network of spies, had months to prepare.

One man had a single goal…to eliminate Hitler from the face of the Earth. Living as a carpenter who had spent time working in a watch factory, Georg Elser was just an ordinary member of society living in Munich. That is, however, until he took it upon himself to attempt to assassinate the Fhrer, Adolph Hitler. Being a common man who opposed the Nazi regime, Elser took the skills from his craft and worked to assemble his own bomb detonator.

In the early years of World War II, Germany shocked the world with a devastating blitzkrieg, rapidly conquered most of Europe, and pushed into North Africa. As the Allies scrambled to counter the Axis armies, the British Eighth Army confronted the experienced Afrika Corps, led by German field marshal Erwin Rommel, in three battles at El Alamein. In the first battle, the Eighth Army narrowly halted the advance of the Germans during the summer of 1942. However, the stalemate left Nazi troops within striking distance of the Suez Canal, which would provide a critical tactical advantage to the controlling force. War historian Glyn Harper dives into the story, vividly narrating the events, strategies, and personalities surrounding the battles and paying particular attention to the Second Battle of El Alamein, a crucial turning point in the war that would be described by Winston Churchill as "the end of the beginning."

Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors.

As an MI6 spy—known as secret agent A12—in Berlin in 1919, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for World War II, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, as well as to various prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, Dr. Bell’s intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed in Cracking the Nazi Code.

In May 1940, Nazi Germany was master of continental Europe. The only European power still standing was Great Britain - and the all-conquering German armed forces stood poised to cross the Channel. Following the destruction of the RAF fighter forces, the sweeping of the Channel of mines, and the wearing down of the Royal Naval defenders, two German army groups were set to storm the beaches of southern England.

At the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left its people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. In The Hitler Years - Disaster 1940-1945, Professor Frank McDonough charts the dramatic change of fortune for the Third Reich and challenges long-held accounts of the Holocaust and Germany's ultimate defeat.

In Hitler's Army, Omer Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union—where the vast majority of German troops fought—to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman.

In 1945, the New Yorker commissioned star reporter Rebecca West to cover the London trial of William Joyce, who stood accused by the British government of aiding the Third Reich. Joyce was alleged to have hosted a radio program, Germany Calling, devoted to Nazi propaganda and calls for a British surrender. The legal case against Joyce (known as "Lord Haw-Haw" for his supposedly posh accent) proved to be tenuous and full of uncertainties.

When three little girls—Anna, Bernie, and Elica—make a pact to be blood sisters for life, they believe nothing can come between them. Anna is from an affluent Jewish family, while Bernie and Elica are from poor Austrian families who barely make ends meet. As they get older, their social differences become all too real. With infectious Jew-hate-laden rhetoric from Nazi Germany spreading into Austria, it is only a matter of time before their bond of friendship gets severely tested.

Nazi Germany expected its airborne attack on Crete in 1941 to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. Little did they know that the British, using Ultra intercepts, had already laid a careful trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war, but a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle around.

The sinking of the German battleship Bismarck - a masterpiece of engineering, well-armored with a main artillery of eight 15-inch guns - was one of the most dramatic events of World War II. She left the port of Gotenhafen for her first operation on the night of 18 May 1941, yet was almost immediately discovered by Norwegian resistance and Allied air reconnaissance. British battlecruiser Hood was quickly dispatched from Scapa Flow to intercept the Bismarck, together with new battleship Prince of Wales.

After the failure of the Weimar Republic, the Nazis believed their mission was to "masculinize" life in Germany. Hermann Goering told women, "Take a pot, a dustpan and a broom, and marry a man", but many still became active participants in murder and mayhem. From the Reich Bride Schools through the Bund Deutscher Mädel and the bizarre Lebensborn Aryan breeding programme to the brothels of the Sicherheitsdienst, this book covers the lives of women in the Third Reich, concentrating on those who sought personal power and influence amid the chaos.

When he was 17 years old, Audie Murphy falsified his birth records so that he could enlist in the army and help defeat the Nazis. When he was 19, he single-handedly turned back the German army at the Battle of Colmar Pocket by climbing on top of a tank with a machine gun, a moment immortalized in the classic film To Hell and Back, starring Audie himself.

The Nazis kept extensive files on practically everybody in the Third Reich. Now author Paul Roland turns the tables with this brilliant new exposé—a fascinating psychological profile of the leading Nazis and their lesser-known associates.

In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence.

On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald's harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things - such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF - too terrible to bear.