Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's; representative institutions were thriving, and competing political parties and elections were a central part of life. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin?There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand, and Richard Evans has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans's history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as he shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. With many people angry and embittered by military defeat and economic ruin; a state undermined by a civil service, an army, and a law enforcement system deeply alienated from the democratic order introduced in 1918; beset by the growing extremism of voters prey to panic about the increasing popularity of communism; home to a tiny but quite successful Jewish community subject to widespread suspicion and resentment, Germany proved to be fertile ground for Nazism's ideology of hatred.The first book of what will ultimately be a complete three-volume history of Nazi Germany, The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian's art and the book by which all others on this subject will be judged.

    In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik Jegger' of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to 'no longer to exist'. Written with wit and literary flair, Stasiland provides a rivetting insight into life behind the wall.

    Alarmed by Bismarck's territorial ambitions and the Prussian army's crushing defeats of Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866, French Emperor Napoleon III vowed to bring Prussia to heel. Digging into many European and American archives for the first time, Geoffrey Wawro's Franco-Prussian War describes the war that followed in thrilling detail. While the armies mobilized in July 1870, the conflict appeared "too close to call." Prussia and its German allies had twice as many troops as the French. But Marshal Achille Bazaine's grognards ("old grumblers") were the stuff of legend, the most resourceful, battle-hardened, sharp-shooting troops in Europe, and they carried the best rifle in the world. From the political intrigues that began and ended the war to the bloody battles at Gravelotte and Sedan and the last murderous fights on the Loire and in Paris, this is the definitive history of the Franco-Prussian War.

    But while it lasted, his closest lieutenants competed ferociously for power and position as his chosen successor. This peculiar leadership dynamic resulted in millions of deaths and some of the worst excesses of World War II. The Devil's Disciples is the first major book for a general readership to examine those lieutenants, not only as individuals but also as a group. It focuses on the three most important Nazi paladins—Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler—with their nearest rivals—Bormann, Speer, and Ribbentrop—in close attendance. Perceptive, illuminating, and grandly ambitious, The Devil's Disciples is above all a powerful chronological narrative, showing how the personalities of Hitler's inner circle developed and how their jealousies and constant intrigues affected the regime, the war, and Hitler himself.

    The solitude of man and the bleak beauty of nature are prominent themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the great romantic painter whose importance and influence have often been underestimated.

    In "Death of the Leaping Horseman: 24th Panzer-Division in Stalingrad," the untold story of 24th Panzer-Division's savage fighting on Stalingrad's outskirts - and in the devastated ruins of the city itself - is revealed in a detailed day-by-day account. Beginning in the heady days of the victorious march toward Stalingrad in August 1942, the book follows the Division into Stalingrad's suburbs as it is slowly and inexorably suked into the fiery crucible that was Stalingrad. Panzer losses and casualties increased daily until finally, after three months of draining combat, the Division was reduced to a battlegroup consisting of a couple of panzers and a few hundred men. Woven through official combat reports and entries from the Division's war diaries are gripping accounts from the few remaining veterans - including an Oakleaves winner and several Knight's Cross winners. Contains over 200 photos and 85 maps and aerial photos.

    In Justice at Dachau, Joshua M. Greene, maker of the award winning documentary film Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, recreates the Dachau trials and reveals the dramatic story of William Denson, a soft-spoken young lawyer from Alabama whisked from teaching law at West Point to leading the prosecution in the largest series of Nazi trials in history. In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s first concentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team from lawyers who had no background in war crimes and determining charges for crimes that courts had never before confronted. Among the accused were Dr. Klaus Schilling, responsible for hundreds of deaths in his “research” for a cure for malaria; Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard psychologist turned Gestapo informant; and one of history’s most notorious female war criminals, Ilse Koch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins and human bone lamps made headlines worldwide. Denson, just thirty-two years old, with one criminal trial to his name, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but nearly two years of exposure to such horrors took its toll. His wife divorced him, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed from exhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure from his army superiors to bring the trials to a rapid end when their agenda shifted away from punishing Nazis to winning the Germans’ support in the emerging Cold War. Denson persevered, determined to create a careful record of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. When, in a final shocking twist, the United States used clandestine reversals and commutation of sentences to set free those found guilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try to prevent justice from being undone.

    Prussian military prowess became legendary.But the Franco-German army swept away at Rossbach, and the Austrian army routed at Leuthen, were not only larger and had a fair share of professional soldiers, but the Austrians had beaten the Prussians not long before. So how were they so humiliated? What made Frederick Great?For more than a century people believed it was because the Prussians were just naturally suited for war. Until 1945 many Germans, and their foes, remembered how Frederick miraculously saved Prussia against overwhelming odds, by marching through the snow towards Leuthen church.As always it was not so simple. The expert on 18th century armies, Christopher Duffy, shows why French, Austrian and Reichsarmee soldiers, though often enough brave and skilful, marched to defeat, and how Frederick, often unaware of the legend he was creating, won these famous battles. But it is no longer left to myth, but to reliable accounts of hard fighting, quick decisions, and the fate of the soldiers and civilians swept up by the fighting.

    In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk.From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.The Nazi Conscience chronicles the chilling saga of a modern state so powerful that it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, ultimately, compassion for all those banished from the ethnic majority.

    These kind people in America wanted to hear about Adolf Hitler, the man who was despised everywhere in the world. During her adolescene, constant propaganda and strictly enforced censorship influenced her thinking. As a young adult, the bombings and all the consequential suffering caused by World War II affected Annelee deeply. How could Annelee tell them that as a child, during 1935, she wanted nothing more than to be a member of Adolf Hitler's Jung Maidens' organization?

    Tragically, he committed suicide after having his work condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazis. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art Series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

    Army intelligence, World War II historian Steven H. Newton has translated, compiled, and edited the battle accounts of one of Germany's finest panzer commanders and a skilled tactician of tank warfare. Throughout most of the war, Erhard Raus was a highly respected field commander in the German-Soviet war on the eastern front, and after the war he wrote an insightful analysis of German strategy in that campaign.The Raus memoir covers the Russian campaign from the first day of the war to his relief from command at Hitler's order in the spring of 1945. It includes a detailed examination of the 6th Panzer Division's drive to Leningrad, Raus's own experiences in the Soviet winter counteroffensive around Moscow, the unsuccessful attempt to relieve Stalingrad, and the final desperate battles inside Germany at the end of the war. His battlefield experience and keen tactical eye make his memoir especially valuable for scholars, and his narrative is as readable as Heinz Guderian's celebrated Panzer Leader.

    A biography of William Joyce, the Irishman who became known as Lord Haw Haw for his Third Reich propaganda broadcasts.

    Each edition measures only 4" x 6," yet contains more than 70,000 entries, including full pronunciation guide, colloquialisms, neologisms, and more.

    Frank McDonough provides a detailed analysis of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The book begins with an overview of the personality and early life of Adolf Hitler and proceeds to examine the early years of the Nazi Party and the major factors which led to the growth of support for the Nazis, including the organisation and propoganda of the Nazi Party and the growth of electoral support. The book concludes by examining the reasons why Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in January 1943.

    In 1989, Chinese students played its finale through loudspeakers in Tiananmen Square, and Leonard Bernstein led a performance in Berlin to celebrate the razing of the Berlin Wall. This lively and up-to-date book focuses on Beethoven’s Ninth, exploring the cultural and musical meanings that surround this powerful work of genius.David B. Levy sets the scene with a brief survey of nineteenth-century Germanic culture and society, then analyzes the Ninth symphony in detail with special emphasis on the famous choral finale. He discusses the initial performances in 1824 under Beethoven’s direction and traces the symphony’s critical reception and legacy. In the final chapter of the book, Levy examines interpretations of the work by prominent conductors, including Wagner, Mahler, and Weingartner. A fully annotated discography of selected recordings completes this comprehensive volume.

    "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" and "The Bust of the Emperor" are Roth's most acclaimed works of shorter fiction.

    It delivers across the board. Stout, who served as a Marine F/A-18 pilot in the First Gulf War, asks questions about aviation combat history and technique that any modern combat pilot would be dying to ask. He carries the ball far beyond the goal post set by all other Ploesti historians. He has gone out of his way to describe the defenses throughout the campaign, and he brings in the voices of Ploesti's defenders to complement the tales of Allied airmen who brought Ploesti to ruin. He describes the role of the bombers, that of the fighters, the ant-aircraft defenses, even the technique of obscuring the Ploesti complex with smoke. In the end, Stout's narrative describes the entire Ploesti effort for the very first time in print, and, by proxy, guides the reader through the intricacies of the entire Allied strategic bombing campaign in Europe, and all the weapons and techniques the Axis powers used to parry it. His lucid presentation of complex issues at the tactical and strategic levels is impressive.Jay Stout's previous books include Hornets Over Kuwait, his Gulf War memoir and, as co-author, The First Hellcat Ace.

    Uses a question-and-answer format to present a variety of information about cats.

    Army in Germany in 1952-to swim across the Danube River to what was then referred to as the Soviet Zone? How are we to understand his decision to forsake the land of his birth and build a new life in the still young German Democratic Republic? These are the questions at the core of this memoir by Victor Grossman, who was born Stephen Wechsler but changed his name after defecting to the GDR. A child of the Depression, Grossman witnessed firsthand the dislocations wrought by the collapse of the U.S. economy during the 1930s. Widespread unemployment and poverty, CIO sit-down strikes, and the fight to save Republican Spain from fascism-all made an indelible impression as he grew up in an environment that nurtured a commitment to left-wing causes. He continued his involvement with communist activities as a student at Harvard in the late 1940s and after graduation, when he took jobs in two factories in Buffalo, New York, and tried to organize their workers. Fleeing McCarthyite America and potential prosecution, Grossman worked in the GDR with other Western defectors and eventually became, as he notes, the "only person in the world to attend Harvard and Karl Marx universities." Later, he was able to establish himself as a freelance journalist, lecturer, and author. Traveling throughout East Germany, he evaluated the failures as well as the successes of the GDR's "socialist experiment." He also recorded his experiences, observations, and judgments of life in East Berlin after reunification, which failed to bring about the post-Communist paradise so many had expected. Written with humor as well as candor, Crossing the River provides a rare look at the Cold War from the other side of the ideological divide. Mark Solomon, a distinguished historian of the American left, provides a historical afterword that places Grossman's experiences in a larger Cold War context.

    Now, Shoah Train collects more than seventy poems written over the last dozen years, lyrics of “discipline and honesty and courage and restraint,” as Archibald MacLeish described The Swastika Poems. Shoah Train was a National Book Award finalist for poetry in 2004.William Heyen is a former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany and has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, Poetry, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in many leading journals and more than one hundred anthologies. Shoah Train was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2004. He is professor of English and poet in residence at the State University of New York at Brockport.

    The author had access to hitherto inaccessible documents, including newly discovered material in American archives, to fully illuminate this secret connection for the first time. The book also includes surprising new details about the alarming military threats Switzerland faced in March 1943.Masson's extraordinary secret channel to Berlin was not, of course, the only Swiss intelligence operation during the war. Braunschweig outlines in detail the gradual buildup, tasks and functions of Swiss Intelligence during World War II. He furthermore describes conflicts between Swiss Intelligence and the Federal government in Bern and within the Intelligence service itself.During World War II, Switzerland was famous as a center of spies and espionage fielded by Allies and Axis alike. Less has been known, however, about Switzerland's own Intelligence activities, including its secret sources in Hitler's councils and its counterespionage program at home. With this intensely researched, scholarly, yet exciting book, that gap in the history of wartime Intelligence operations has been filled.PIERRE-TH. BRAUNSCHWEIG earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Bern and later served as an assistant to Hans Senn, the Chief of Staff of the Swiss Army. He is a member of the United States Strategic Institute in Washinton DC, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and the National Intelligence Study Center in Washington.

    

    Domestically, the country had to integrate eight million expellees forced out of their homes in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the lost war. Externally, it had to re-establish relations with Eastern Europe, despite the burdens of the Nazi past, the expulsions, and the ongoing East-West struggle in the Cold War.

    Multi-award-winning author Stephen Brook addresses the strange and complex question of why this has been so, focusing in on some controversial German wine laws and issues such as vineyard classification. In addition, he guides wine lovers to the top vintages and producers and the best vineyard sites, and discusses a wide range of grape varieties and lesser-known wine styles.

    Harold Mah explores the interweaving paths of German and French cultural identity that emerged in the Enlightenment and continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.Mah argues that the efforts of German and French intellectuals and artists to formulate stable cultural identities constantly collapsed in the face of other powerful images and the rush of history. In Mah's view, these shifting conceptions of cultural identity are problematic phantasies, internally unstable and prone to falling apart under the pressure of events, only to be replaced by new, equally problematic constructions. Mah offers fresh analyses of a wide range of iconic texts and artworks, including those of Jacques-Louis David, de Sta�l, Diderot, and Rousseau in France and Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Mann, Marx, and Nietzsche in Germany.Mah's book examines how attempts to define cultural identities were caught up in issues of language, gender, classical revival, politics, and modernity. Enlightenment Phantasies presents the shaping of cultural identity in narratives accessible not only to specialists but also to students and all readers concerned with the history of Western culture.

    Luther's revolutionary translation, very modernin vernacular and interpretation, made the Bible accessible to laypeople for the first time in history and gave life to a new religion: Protestantism. The Luther Bible remains the most widely used version in the Germanic world today. In commemoration of Year of the Bible (2003), TASCHEN is publishing a sumptuous reprint of this seminal book. Including both the Old and New Testaments, separated into two volumes totaling over 1800 pages, TASCHEN's complete Luther Bible has been meticulously reproduced from a rare colored copy of the original. Careful attention has been paid to Lucas Cranach's woodcuts and elaborate ornaments, which are printed in color and gold so as to be perfectly faithful to the original. Contained in a third volume is Stephan F]ssel's introduction, providing an overviewof Luther's life, a discussion of the significance of his bible, and detailed descriptions of the illustrations. The author: Stephan F]ssel is Director of the Institute of the History of the Book at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and holder of the Gutenberg Chair at the same university. He is Presidentof the Willibald Pirckheimer Society for Renaissance and Humanist Studies, member of the board of the International Gutenberg Society and editor of the annual Gutenberg Jahrbuch and Pirckheimer Jahrbuch. He has published widely on early printing, on bookselling and publishing from the 18th to the 20th century, and on the future of c

    Readers can traverse a wordless cross-section of Provencal images, which together paint a vivid mosaic of life in Provence.

    While Hitler fantasized about deploying divisions and armies that had long since ceased to exist, boys of fifteen, officer cadets, sailors and veterans of the Great War joined the survivors of shattered formations on the front line. Leading historian Tony Le Tissier gives a German perspective to the mayhem and bloodshed of the last months of the Second World War in Europe. Teenaged Flak auxiliaries recount their experiences alongside veteran Panzergrenadiers attempting to break out of Soviet encirclement. Struggles between the military, industry and the Nazi Party for influence over the defenders of Berlin contrast with a key participant's account of Goebbel's abortive attempt to conclude a cease-fire with the Soviets. This is fascinating reading for anybody interested in the ordinary soldier's experience of the culminating battles in central Europe in 1945.