Germany War Ii

A masterful biography of the U.S. Army in the European Theater of Operations, Citizen Soldiers provides a compelling account of the extraordinary stories of ordinary men in their fight for democracy. The story opens on June 7, 1944 on the beaches of Normandy and ends at the end of the war on May 7, 1945. Along the way, Ambrose draws on hundreds of interviews and oral histories to recreate the experience of the individuals who fought in the battle.

In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.

Stephen Ambrose describes how the Army Air Forces recruited, trained, and chose those few who would undertake the most demanding and dangerous jobs in the war. These are the boys -- turned pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners of the B24s -- who suffered over 50 percent casualties.

London in April, 1940, was a place of great fear and conflict. Everyone was on edge; civilization itself seemed imperiled. The Germans are marching. They have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. They now menace Britain. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, lose their control, and are divided. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence is the way to survive, attempt to usurp one another by any means possible.

In mid-1943 James Megellas, known as "Maggie" to his fellow paratroopers, joined the 82nd Airborne Division, his new "home" for the duration. His first taste of combat was in the rugged mountains outside Naples.

1915: A U-boat swiftly slips away as a torpedoed freighter sinks into the cold Atlantic, muffling the anguished cries of its burning crew. As war escalates around the world, Germany has shocked mankind by firing on civilian as well as military targets, including the doomed American cargo ship. Amid the international chaos, duty calls Bill Shafer from his humble home in Liverpool, and business draws Everett Stringham from his comfortable life in the United States. Their paths cross aboard the pride of the British fleet, the luxury cruise liner R.M.S. Lusitania, where Everett’s small copy ...

Under orders of the Fuhrer, the German General Staff reluctantly drew up a lackluster plan of invasion for France. Yet it was the audacious scheme of three of Hitler’s top generals that brought down France’s military force, Rather than simply move troops to engage the enemy, for the first time they would unleash the tank and drive straight into the heart of their foe.

At the close of World War I, Hitler was an impoverished young artist who scrapped by through selling souvenir paintings, but within a few years, his powerful oratory brought him to the forefront of the Nazi party in Munich and helped make the party much more popular. A smattering of followers in the hundreds quickly became a party of thousands. At the head of it all was a man whose fiery orations denounced Jews, communists, and other "traitors" for bringing upon the German nation the Treaty of Versailles, which had led to hyperinflation and a wrecked economy.

This is the secret and suspenseful account of how OSS spymaster Allen Dulles led a network of Germans conspiring to assassinate Hitler and negotiate surrender to bring about the end of World War II before the Soviet's advance. Agent 110 is Allen Dulles, a newly minted spy from an eminent family. Dulles met with and facilitated the plots of Germans who were trying to destroy the country's leadership.

It's 1943 and the world is at war. On the European front, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill have already picked a date for Allied soldiers to storm Normandy's beaches and take the battle to Germany. But the Germans may have new weapons to stop the invasion dead in its tracks. British Intelligence learned four years earlier that the Germans were developing rockets to be used for warfare but could not corroborate the information. Then, information from Polish Resistance and Royal Air Force reconnaissance photos revealed similar information. Finally, recorded conversations between ...

Trapped and surrounded by the Germans, the besieged Americans seemed doomed. But a daring action by General Patton would break through the German lines and end the siege of Bastogne, bringing supplies and reinforcements that would allow the Americans to prove their mettle at the largest battle fought on the Western Front in Europe.

In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from US soil.

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 the Second World War, Poznan was a key river crossing and railway junction on the Polish-German border. When the alarm was given indicating the Red Army's approach in January 1945, the city's 80-100,000 German civilians were speedily evacuated, leaving a garrison of some 15,000 men, mostly poorly-armed infantry, to face the rigors of a siege conducted by a massively superior and ruthless enemy anxious to acquire this transport center, which was vital for the advance on Berlin.

In Double Crossed, historian Matthew Avery Sutton tells the extraordinary story of the entwined roles of spy-craft and faith in a world at war. Missionaries, priests, and rabbis, acutely aware of how their actions seemingly conflicted with their spiritual calling, carried out covert operations, bombings, and assassinations within the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine.

Immensely powerful and thickly armored, armed with eight 15-inch guns aimed by one of the most sophisticated target acquisition systems of its day, the Third Reich's premier battleship, the KMS Bismarck, left an indelible trail of legends behind it during its single, fatal foray against the British in 1941.

A small band of courageous university students dare to stand up against Hitler who has seized power in Germany and plunged them into a world war. Calling themselves, "The White Rose," Hans and Sophie Scholl publish thousands of leaflets condemning the dictatorship of Hitler and urging the German people to resist. Without using violence, The White Rose opposes the Nazis with the power of the printed word, risking their lives for the precious gift of freedom.

On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.

In 1920s Munich, the body of Anna Gross, a young society wife, has been found in the English Gardens, still clothed in finery. Soon a second body is discovered, also a woman of high society. When a third body is found, homicide detective Axel Berg realizes he's dealing with unprecedented evil. Is the murderer politically motivated? Is he a lone madman? Or worse, is the killer possessed by both political and personal demons?

After the successful amphibious invasion on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies began racing east toward Germany and liberating France along the way. The Allies had landed along a 50 mile stretch of French coast, and despite suffering 8,000 casualties on D-Day, over 100,000 still began the march across the western portion of the continent. By the end of August 1944, the German army in France was shattered, with 200,000 killed or wounded and a further 200,000 captured.