Germany War Ii

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.

The Crimea was one of the crucibles of the war on the Eastern Front, where first a Soviet and then a German army were surrounded, fought desperate battles, and were eventually destroyed. The fighting in the region was unusual for the Eastern Front in many ways, in that naval supply, amphibious landings, and naval evacuation played major roles, while both sides were also conducting ethnic cleansing as part of their strategy - the Germans eliminating the Jews and the Soviets purging the region of Tartars.

This is the concluding volume of the history of the IV SS-Panzerkorps, a relatively unknown organization that was born in battle during the last year of the war and fought exclusively on the Eastern Front. After their successful defense of Warsaw and the Vistula Front during the fall of 1944, the corps and its two famous Waffen-SS divisions, the Totenkopf and Wiking, as well as several divisions of the German Army, were sent south to reverse the military situation on the Hungarian Front.

On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun on Virginia Beach, a massive fireball erupted from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. By the next day, three ships lay at the bottom of the channel, victims of Lieutenant-Commander Horst Degen and his crew on the German submarine U-701. In The Burning Shore, acclaimed military reporter Ed Offley presents a thrilling account of Degen's rampage along the American coast and of US Lieutenant Harry J. Kane's quest to bring him down.

Weikart reveals the startling and fascinating truth about the most hated man of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler was a pantheist who believed nature was God. In Hitler's Religion, Weikart explains how the laws of nature became Hitler's only moral guide - how he became convinced he would serve God by annihilating supposedly "inferior" human beings and promoting the welfare and reproduction of the allegedly superior Aryansin accordance with racist forms of Darwinism prevalent at the time.

This epic story, set between the years 1918 and 1945, follows the life and times of a German officer and his family through both peace and war. Following the ascension of the Nazi Party to power in 1933 he gets caught up in the heady days of Germany's secret rearmament and the development of its panzer forces. When war breaks out he quickly achieves promotion and decoration for his exploits on the battlefield. But his rise in the ranks of the German Army exposes him to the crimes being committed by his country. As the war continues his devotion to duty and personal ambitions conflict more ...

June 1940 – Like every frightened boy in France, Raoud Le Meir dreads the arrival of the rampaging German Army. Rumors of fields drenched in blood, endless caravans of tanks and skies filled with airplanes dropping bombs by the thousands strike fear through the French countryside. Days after Hitler enters Paris, a garrison of soldiers appears in Chivegny. Raoud’s father, the mayor, urges neighbors and friends to cooperate and works to maintain an uneasy peace, but Papa cannot quell his desire to fight. Facing relentless German demands, he makes a drastic decision, which leads to his ...

Bismarck entered service in the summer of 1940. She was well-armed, with eight 15-inch guns as well as a powerful array of lighter weapons, while her armored protection earned her the reputation of being unsinkable. This claim was finally put to the test in May 1941, when she sortied into the Atlantic and fought the legendary battle of the Denmark Strait, destroying HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy. Bismarck was now loose in the North Atlantic.

Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet—and one of history’s greatest conspiracies is born.

Otto Kretschmer was only in combat from September 1939 until March 1941 but was Germany's highest-scoring U-boat commander, sinking forty-seven ships. This definitive work details his personal story and the political backdrop from his earliest days. After completing his officer training and time on the training ship Niobe, he served aboard the light cruiser Emden. In December 1934, he was transferred to the light cruiser Köln, then in January 1936 made the move to the fledgling U-boat service. D

Uncover the chilling rise—and catastrophic fall—of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in this gripping account of ambition, manipulation, and ultimate downfall. How did an Austrian-born soldier rise from obscurity to command the world’s most feared regime? Dictator’s Path traces Hitler’s calculated ascent to power, his brutal strategies for domination, and the unraveling of the Nazi empire during World War II.

Felix lives in a convent orphanage high in the mountains in Poland. He is convinced his parents are still alive and that they will one day come back to get him. When Nazi soldiers come to the orphanage Felix decides to escape and make his way home. The journey to find his parents is a long and difficult one, as all of Poland is occupied by the Nazis and a dangerous place for a Jewish boy.

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.

Mission at Nuremberg is Tim Townsend's gripping story of the American Army chaplain sent to save the souls of the Nazis incarcerated at Nuremberg, a compelling and thought-provoking tale that raises questions of faith, guilt, morality, vengeance, forgiveness, salvation, and the essence of humanity.

In the tradition of Shadow Divers, the story of the courageous men who dived on the last sunken U-Boat off the Eastern Seaboard. On April 16, 1944, the tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania was torpedoed and sunk by the U-550. In return the sub was sent to the bottom by three destroyer escorts that were guarding the convoy. For more than 60 years the location of the U-boat's wreck eluded divers. In 2012 a team found it.

General Erhard Raus was one of the German Army's finest panzer generals and a leading exponent of blitzkrieg in the east. German panzers were witnesses to the incredible onslaught that was the first few months of Barbarossa, then the gradual strengthening of Russian resistance, counterattack and, ultimately, the long and drawn-out German retreat. Raus and his panzers were tested in every conceivable tactical situation and, inevitably, Raus became highly versed in all aspects of mobilized warfare.

Whilst the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet, restricted for much of the period after 1919 by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, was relatively small in comparison to the Royal Navy, it did possess a number of highly potent battleships and other capital vessels that could - and did - pose a major threat to British interests in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. Amongst the most powerful were the two battleships - the Bismarck and the Tirpitz.

Hitler offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive war with the United States precisely because he considered it such a potent adversary.

With Allied armies poised on the banks of the Rhine, Nazi Germany tottered on the brink of collapse. The ensuing battles on German soil - especially those in the so-called Ruhr Pocket - were as fierce and hard-fought as any in the European theater. Going well beyond previous accounts, Derek S. Zumbro chronicles this key military campaign from a unique and fresh perspective - that of the defeated German soldiers and civilians caught in the final maelstrom of the war's Western front.

Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as Vichy France or the Vichy Regime after its spa-town capital, stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third Reich invasion.