For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished.     For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account.     Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.

    Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."

    There would be few crimes listed in the indictment at Nuremberg of which one or other of the four prosecuting powers was not guilty of itself. In the cause of defeating Adolf Hitler, civilian populations had been burned and blasted, murdered, brutalised, intimidated, deported, and enslaved; aggressive wars had been launched, neutral countries occupied by pretext and deceit, and the unalterable paragraphs of international conventions flagrantly violated.

    It's the linguistic equivalent of a four-wheel drive to navigate through German, Austrian, and Swiss culture.

    What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the “Western legacy of positivity,” the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from “metaphysical experience.”In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: “Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” “Damaged Life,” “Administered World, Reified Thought,” “Art, Memory of Suffering,” and “A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive.”A substantial number of Adorno’s writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno’s work.

    In exploring the question of why Nazism flourished in the 'Athens of the Isar', David Clay Large has written a compelling account of the cultural roots of the Nazi movement, allowing us to see that the conventional explanations for the movement's rise are not enough. Large's account begins in Munich's 'golden age', four decades before World War I, when the city's artists and writers produced some of the outstanding work of the modernist spirit. He sees a dark side to the city, a protofascist cultural heritage that would tie Adolf Hitler's movement to its soul. Large prowls his volatile world of seamy basement meeting places, finding that attacks on modernity and liberalism flourished, along with virulent anti-Semitism and German nationalism. From the violent experience of the Munich Soviet, through Hitler's failed Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923 and on to his appointment as German chancellor in 1933, Large unfurls a narrative full of insight and implication.

    Taking issue with revisionist historians, Samuels argues that German success in battle can be explained by their superior tactical philosophy. The book provides a fascinating insight into the development of infantry tactics at a seminal point in the history of warfare.

    Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including Every Man Dies Alone, portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a powerful humanity.This acclaimed biography, newly revised and completely updated, tells the remarkable story of Hans Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen. Jenny Williams chronicles his turbulent life as a writer, husband, and father, shadowed by mental torment and long periods in psychiatric care. She shows how Ditzen's decision to remain in Nazi Germany in 1939 led to his self-destruction, but also made him a unique witness to his country's turmoil.More Lives Than One unpicks the contradictory, flawed and fascinating life of a writer who saw the worst of humanity, yet maintained his belief in the decency of the "little man."

    John Suchet journeys through Beethoven's early years as child prodigy to his later life as a musical master, haunted by personal tragedies. Based firmly on fact, this novel is sure to capture an audience of classical music devotees as well as history buffs.

    Geoffrey Wawro describes Prussia's successful invasion of Habsburg Bohemia, and the wretched collapse of the Austrian army in July 1866. Blending military and social history, he describes the panic that overtook Austria's regiments in each clash with the Prussians. He reveals the blundering of the Austrian commandant who fumbled away key strategic advantages and ultimately lost a war--crucial to the fortunes of the Habsburg Monarchy--that most European pundits had predicted they would win.

    the hero is not a sword-wielding barbarian, bent only upon establishing his own fame; such fame-seekers (including some famous medieval literary figures) might even fall outside the definition of the Germanic hero, the real value of whose deeds are given meaning only within the political construct. Individual prowess is not enough. The hero must conquer the blows of fate because he is committed to the conquest of chaos, and over all to the need for social stability. Brian Murdoch discusses works in Old English, Old and Middle High German, Old Norse, Latin and Old French, deliberately going beyond what is normally thought of as 'heroic poetry' to include the German so-called 'minstrel epic', and a work by a writer who is normally classified as a late medieval chivalric poet, Konrad von Wurzburg, the comparison of which with Beowulf allows us to span half a millennium.

    Before that she was acclaimed for her roles in silent feature films, when German cinema was in its artistic heyday in the 1920s. She pioneered the box office success of such classic mountaineering dramas as The White Hell of Piz Palu and then began to direct her own films. The Blue Light was admired by Hitler and led to her filming the Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally of 1934. After the war she was shunned by the film industry, despite a court in 1952 proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Her undoubted charisma led to many affairs and grandiose schemes - deep sea diving in her seventies and still filming wildlife in her nineties. Audrey Salkeld has sifted the fact from the legend and gives us a moving portrait of the great movie `star' who suffered more in the `wilderness' than her enduring fame suggests.

    Drawing upon original documentary sources, she explores how U.S. policy makers chose partition and mobilized reluctant West Europeans behind that approach. The book casts new light on the Berlin blockade, demonstrating that the United States rejected United Nations mediation and relied on its nuclear monopoly as the means of protecting its German agenda.

    

    A single ace with a hundred victories might have been credible, but one hundred six aces each recorded one hundred victories or more, and the top scorer claimed three hundred fifty-two. However, postwar research proved that German shoot-down confirmations were given only after rigorous checking.To discover the secret of the Luftwaffe pilots' success, aviation historian Mike Spick examines the exploits of Nazi Germany's most famous pilots, focusing on the methods and tactics of individual aces, examining the importance of machinery, training, climate, numbers, and theater of war, and using firsthand accounts to put the reader in the pilot's seat. This book is easily the best possible guide to how the German aces achieved such amazing results in battle.

    Based largely on Osmar White's own war diary and the articles he wrote as a war correspondent, this deeply personal account stands out among the vast literature on World War II. Selected among the best 100 articles in Australian journalism of the twentieth century, White's eloquent record of the climactic events in the final days of the Third Reich remains as fresh and timely as ever.

    Written by a well-known American scientist under the pseudonym of Rho Sigma, this book delves into international efforts at gravity control and discoid craft propulsion. Before the quantum field, there was 'ether'. Includes chapters on John Searle and Searle discs; T Townsend Brown and his work on anti-gravity; ether-vortex-turbines plus a Foreword by former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

    This triumph of espionage by the Soviet Military Intelligence took the Nazis over two years to crack. Made up of a diverse mixture of Russians, Jews, Poles, and other Europeans (including some Germans), the Red Orchestra played a vital role in the destruction of Nazism--despite the constant fear of discovery. Many were tortured. But, by the time the Germans finished their investigation, the Eastern front was already lost.

    In fact, says Michael Brenner in this intriguing book, the Jewish population of Weimar Germany became more aware of its Jewishness and created new forms of German-Jewish culture in literature, music, fine arts, education, and scholarship. Brenner presents the first in-depth study of this culture, drawing a fascinating portrait of people in the midst of redefining themselves.The Weimar Jews chose neither a radical break with the past nor a return to the past but instead dressed Jewish traditions in the garb of modern forms of cultural expression. Brenner describes, for example, how modern translations made classic Jewish texts accessible, Jewish museums displayed ceremonial artifacts in a secular framework, musical arrangements transformed synagogue liturgy for concert audiences, and popular novels recalled aspects of the Jewish past. Brenner's work, while bringing this significant historical period to life, illuminates contemporary Jewish issues. The preservation and even enhancement of Jewish distinctiveness, combined with the seemingly successful participation of Jews in a secular, non-Jewish society, offer fresh insight into modern questions of Jewish existence, identity, and integration into other cultures.

    In this memoir, Anne L. Fox has written about her childhood in Nazi Germany and her subsequent departure to England with the Kindertransport. As a 12-year-old girl, she came to live with a Jewish family in London until the outbreak of World War II when she was evacuated to the countryside. Although she missed her parents terribly, her stay in the village of Swineshead in Bedfordshire was a happy one. Her village education came to an end when she turned 14, however, and she was sent to the Bunce Court Boarding School in Shropshire. After graduating, she worked in a public library in Cardiff where she met her husband, a soldier in the US Army. She came to America as a GI bride and has made her home in Philadelphia.

    This book examines the use of that supreme sanction in Germany, from the seventeenth century to the present.Richard Evans analyses the system of `traditional' capital punishments set out in German law, and the ritual practices and cultural readings associated with them by the time of the early modern period. He shows how this system was challenged by Enlightenment theories of punishment and broke down under the impact of secularization and social change in the first half of the nineteenth century. The abolition of the death penalty became a classic liberal case which triumphed, if only momentarily, in the 1848 Revolution. In Germany far more than anywhere else in Europe, capital punishment was identified with anti-liberal, authoritarian concepts of sovereignty. Its definitive reinstatement by Bismarck in the 1880s marked not only the defeat of liberalism but also coincided with the emergence of new, Social Darwinist attitudes towards criminality which gradually changed the terms of debate. The triumph of these attitudes under the Nazis laid the foundations for the massive expansion of capital punishment which took place during Hitler's `Third Reich'. After the Second World War, the death penalty was abolished, largely as a result of a chance combination of circumstances, but continued to be used in the Stalinist system of justice in East Germany until its forced abandonment as a result of international pressure exerted in the regime in the 1970s and 1980s.This remarkable and disturbing book casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. Using sources ranging from folksongs and ballads to the newly released government papers from the former German Democratic Republic, Richard Evans scrutinizes the ideologies behind capital punishment and comments on interpretations of the history of punishment offered by writers such as Foucault and Elias. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishement, and to the current debate on the death penalty.

    What Sch�nbohm discovered and recorded in a diary was almost incredible: plans to conquer West Germany's major cities; blueprints for a surprise attack on West Berlin through the city's subways and sewer systems; papers documenting the planned use of chemical weapons. But there were also the more mundane problems of what to do with those 100,000 men whom the end of the Cold War had made superfluous. It is through accounts like this one that we are reminded of how dangerous a world we all lived in between 1945 and the fall of Communism.

    What unites these experiences? Focusing on the years between the end of the First World War and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a group of expert historians tackle this issue on a country-by-country basis, investigating how Catholicism represented not only a religious, but also a major political and social force in European politics.

    . .Build a simple machine like the ancient Egyptians might have usedto build the pyramids. Construct your own rocket thrusters tosimulate those used by U.S. astronauts. Make your own paper using a2,000-year-old recipe from China.These are just some of the exciting projects you'll find in Sciencearound the World, a fun and fact-filled book of experiments andactivities highlighting scientific discoveries from throughouthistory that shaped the way we live. Travel from England toAustralia, Germany to Japan, Mexico to Canada, as you explore someof history's most famous moments in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and more. Each experiment includes a list of requiredmaterials, illustrations, and easy-to-follow, step-by-stepinstructions.

    In the vain hope of protecting himself and his family, Calel Perechodnik made the wrenching decision to become a ghetto policeman in a small town near Warsaw, and the tragedy of his decision becomes clear when, during the "Aktion", he sees his wife and child forced onto a train bound for the Treblinka extermination camp. Filled with loathing for the Germans, the Poles, his Jewish brethren, and himself, Perechodnik fled the ghetto to shelter with a Polish woman in Warsaw, and in the course of 105 terror-filled days he poured his story into a diary. Shortly before his death in 1944, he entrusted the diary to a Polish friend, and the document was eventually deposited in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. Left nearly forgotten for half a century, it was finally published in Poland in 1993.

    Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer’s first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him.Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany’s conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler’s assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger’s untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger’s profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism.Winner of Germany’s highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.

    Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the dishonorable by virtue of their trades. It shows the extent to which dishonor determined the life chances and self-identity of these people. Taking Augsburg as a prime example, it investigates how honorable estates interacted with dishonorable people, and shows how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honorable society.

    While many historians have focused on France's failure to avoid this catastrophe, Kiesling is the first to show why the French had good reason to trust that their prewar defense policies, military doctrine, and combat forces would preserve the nation.Kiesling argues that France's devastating defeat was a consequence neither of blindness to the German military threat nor of paralysis in the face of it. Grimly aware of the need to prepare for another war with its arch enemy, French leaders created defense preparations and military doctrines in which they felt confident.Rather than simply focusing on what went wrong, Kiesling examines the fundamental logic of French defense planning within its cultural, institutional, political, and military contexts. In the process, she provides much new material about the inner workings of the French military, its relations with civilian leaders, its lack of adaptability, and its overreliance on an army reserve that was poorly organized, trained, and led. Ultimately, she makes a persuasive case for France's defense options and offers a useful warning about the utility of the lessons of history.The lesson for contemporary policymakers and strategists, Kiesling suggests, is not that the French made mistakes but that nations and armies make policy and strategy under severe constraints. Her study forcefully reminds us how hindsight can blind us to the complexities of preparing for every next war.

    This book describes and analyzes the reasons Hitler became chancellor of Germany, which included the harsh Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I; the Germans' lack of faith in democracy and the reasons behind it; the corruption and political and economic mismanagement which characterized the Weimar Republic; the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, when the cost of a dollar exploded to 4.2 trillion marks and the German currency lost 99.3% of its value; the Great Depression, during which nearly a quarter of the German work force was unemployed; the political and economic instability of the times, in which the Nazis thrived; and the evil genius of Hitler, the master politician. This book transports the reader back to the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, so he or she can experience what it was like to be there as Hitler and his cronies grasped for power and the foundations of the Weimar Republic crumbled.How did an Austrian tramp named Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany, in a position to launch the most infamous reign of terror experienced in the 20th century? Why Hitler? explains the Nazi rise to power in captivating prose and uncompromising detail. Why Hitler^ focuses on the issue of why and how Hitler and his party attained power in Germany, a question asked by all reflective Americans. Author Samuel Mitcham presents new information, dispensing with the hackneyed theory--presented by Hitler in Mein Kampf and repeated by historians as illustrious as William Shirer and Alan Bullock--that the heroic young Fuehrer struggled to survive against poverty and incredible odds, working as a day laborer and living in a flop house, hunger his constant companion. In fact, Hitler's income from his father's pension was higher than that of a junior postal employee, a teacher with less than five years' service, or a court lawyer with one year's salary.