Germany World War

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.

Before Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, there was 1924. This was the year of Hitler's final transformation into the self-proclaimed savior and infallible leader who would interpret and distort Germany's historical traditions to support his vision for the Third Reich. Everything that would come - the rallies and riots, the single-minded deployment of a catastrophically evil idea - all of it crystallized in one defining year.

With an introduction read by Max Hastings. Bomber Command's offensive against the cities of Germany was one of the epic campaigns of the Second World War. More than 56,000 British and Commonwealth aircrew and 600,000 Germans died in the course of the RAF's attempt to win the war by bombing. The struggle began in 1939 with a few score primitive Whitleys, Hampdens and Wellingtons, and ended six years later with 1,600 Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mosquitoes razing whole cities in a single night.

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."

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion.

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.

When World War II erupted, Philipp von Boeselager, son of an aristocratic Catholic family, fought enthusiastically for his country as a cavalry lieutenant. But in the summer of 1942, when he witnessed the regime's criminal brutality toward Jews and Gypsies, his patriotism quickly turned to disgust, and he joined a group of officers intent on killing Hitler. After one aborted attempt, it was decided that a bomb would be used to assassinate HItler.

South of the Norman city of Caen, the twin features of the Verrieres and Bourguebus ridges were key stepping stones for the British Second Army in late July 1944. To capture this vital ground, Allied forces would have to defeat arguably the strongest German armored formation in Normandy: the I. SS-Panzerkorps "Leibstandarte." The resulting battles of late July and early August 1944 saw powerful German defensive counterattacks south of Caen inflict tremendous casualties, regain lost ground, and at times defeat Anglo-Canadian operations in detail.

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.

This is the story of Germany after the Nazis, a time when two separate states rose from the ashes to face each other across the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, the people struggled to come to terms with both the physical and psychological impact of defeat, as well as guilt for the monstrous acts that had been committed under Hitler's regime.

This riveting account of German resistance is based on years of research by the distinguished journalist Anne Nelson. This is a beautiful and moving portrait of ordinary but heroic figures---an untold story of a circle of Germans and German-Americans in Berlin who took a principled stand against Hitler and the Holocaust.

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in Eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

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.

In 1941, with the dark star of Nazi conquest in the ascendant over Europe, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler continued seeking fresh ways to expand the Third Reich's domains. Two strategic issues occupied Hitler's immediate attention: dealing with Britain and the Soviet Union. Hitler and Goering disagreed fundamentally on the next steps to be taken, and Hitler's ideas naturally won out over the Reichsmarshal's objections.

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.

At once a murder mystery, a moving love story, and a riveting portrait of a unique time and place - Berlin, July 1945 - The Good German is a historical thriller of the first rank. The New York Times calls it "thoroughly captivating, a novel that brings to life the ambiguities at the heart of our country's moral legacy."

The night of 16 May, 1943: Nineteen specially adapted Lancaster bombers take off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, each with a huge 9000-lb cylindrical bomb strapped underneath it. Their mission: to destroy three dams deep within the German heartland, which provide the lifeblood to the industries supplying the Third Reich's war machine.

A story of heartbreak and survival by the stepsister of Anne Frank. Eva was arrested by the Nazis on her 15 birthday and sent to Auschwitz. Her survival depended on endless strokes of luck, her own determination and the love and protection of her mother, Fritzi, who was deported with her. When Auschwitz was liberated, Eva and Fritzi began the long journey home. They searched desperately for Eva's father and brother, from whom they had been separated. The news came some months later. Tragically, both men had been killed.

In the autumn of 1938, Europe believed in the promise of peace. But only a year later, the fateful decisions of just a few men had again led Europe to a massive world war. Drawing on contemporary diaries, memoirs, and newspapers, as well as recorded interviews, 1939 is a narrative account of what the coming of the Second World War felt like to those who lived through it.

Gunter Schrader was left behind when his brothers went to war in 1914. Two and a half years later, he makes his way to the front, though it means leaving the young woman he loves and lying to his widowed mother. The need to fight refuses to let him go, even after the guns fall silent in 1918. Reunited with his brother Jochen and hungry to continue the struggle to secure Germany's borders, it is only the desire for a deeper connection that threatens Gunter's plans. Discharged and no longer bound to his oath as a soldier, he is faced with a choice: Love for a woman, or love for his nation?***...