This book reveals little-known information about regular people living under the bleak, macabre and bizarre reality of the Nazi dictatorship.

    Over three decades he has interviewed and investigated some of the most professional, dangerous and ruthless killers in Ireland. Now Dillon explores their personalities, motivations and bizarre crimes.Many of Ireland's assassins learned their trade in fields and on hillsides in remote parts of Ireland, while others were trained in the Middle East or with Basque separatist terrorists in Spain. Some were one-target-one-shot killers, like the sniper who terrorised the inhabitants of Washington State in the autumn of 2002, while others were bombers skilled in designing the most sophisticated explosive devices and booby traps. Another more powerful group of 'trigger men' were the influential figures in the shadows, who were experts in motivating the killers under their control. All of these men, whether they squeezed the trigger on a high-powered rifle, set the timer on a bomb or used their authority to send others out to commit horrific and unspeakable acts of cruelty, are featured in this book. The Trigger Men takes the reader inside the labyrinthine world of terrorist cells and highly classified counter-terrorism units of British Military Intelligence. The individual stories are described in gripping, unflinching detail and show how the terrorists carried out their ghastly work. Dillon also explores the ideology of the cult of the gunmen and the greed and hatred that motivated assassins in their killing sprees. There are penetrating insights into the mindset of the most infamous assassins: their social and historical conditioning, their callousness......

    Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

     LAST PLANE OUT OF SAIGON is a faithful reproduction of the journal he kept as a draftee working in the operating room of Vietnam's largest military hospital during the final year of the war. Supporting historical and political context is provided by award-winning scholar, John Hagan. Richard’s entries were written in real time and, as they chronicle the last desperate year of this tragic war, present readers with a better understanding of the complicated final year of the Vietnam War from the inside, looking out. A year that tragically remains unfamiliar to most Americans. This landmark book describes, in part, the hasty departure of American troops from Vietnam but is timely now as America again withdraws from war and is challenged with multiple global conflicts. It is a gripping real-time account of the anger, resistance and resilience forged in one man by the horrors of Vietnam witnessed up close, in graphically human terms, touching on mistakes that were made then and which our country continues to make today. The reader will feel the weight of this compelling account, as the Vietnam War continues to plague the consciousness of our country. All Americans should read this important piece of history, bound to leave them with chills. Richard Pena served in Vietnam as an Operating Room Specialist for the United States Army and left on the last day of American withdrawal. He is now a nationally renowned practicing attorney in Austin, Texas. He is a former President of the American Bar Foundation and State Bar of Texas and served on the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association. John Hagan is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Co-Director of the Center of Law & Globalization at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. He has published nine books and more than 150 articles in nationally renowned magazines and journals.

    Born in Berlin in 1920 and raised by the same parents, one boy is Jewish, his adopted brother is Aryan. At first, their origins are irrelevant. But as the political landscape changes they are forced to make decisions with horrifying consequences.

    Prussia military headquarters of Hitler. Altho the bomb failed to maim or kill Hitler, the explosion dramatically announced to the world the existence of a secret, indigenous opposition to the Nazi regime. In this definitive new book, Joachim Fest, an acclaimed biographer of Adolf Hitler, details the events leading up to 7/20, the tense, confused moments before the explosion, & the roundup & executions that followed. Fest recounts the heroic & unsuccessful efforts of senior military officials to persuade the Allies to help them oust the Nazis. He recreates the ill-fated schemes to blow up Hitler's private plane & to kill the Fuhrer at the opening of a museum exhibition. Cataloged here are no fewer than 15 separate assassination attempts during Hitler's reign, attempts that on several occasions came within minutes-or inches-of succeeding, but always failed: in some instances because of bad timing or poor planning; in others, because of the omnipresent scrutiny of the Gestapo or Hitler's own instinct for danger. In the end, however, Fest's singular accomplishment is to portray the human side of the German resistance-the conviction & resolve that gave them the courage to defy almost impossible odds, & the fatal indecisiveness that caused them to fail time & again. Plotting Hitler's Death will stands as one of the definitive accounts of a tortured, misunderstood era.PrefaceThe resistance that never wasThe army succumbs The September plot From Munich to ZossenThe new generationThe army groupsStauffenberg The eleventh hourJuly 20, 1944 Persecution & judgment The wages of failureNotesNote on the TextsChronologyShort BiographiesIndex

    Published to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, highlights of this unique collection include the break-out from Omaha beach as told by the GI who led it, a French housewife’s story of what it was like to wake up to the invasion, German soldiers’ accounts of finding themselves facing the biggest seaborne invasion in history, a view from the command post by a member of Eisenhower’s staff, combat reports, diaries and letters of British veterans of all forces and services, and accounts of the follow-up battle for Normandy, one of the bloodiest struggles of the war.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    But they must face both German suspicion and British disapproval of relations with ‘the enemy’.Presenting a street-level view of a city reduced to rubble, populated with refugees, black marketeers, corrupt businessmen and cynical soldiers, Love Among the Ruins is a unique snapshot of a terrible period in Europe’s history, a passionate love letter to a city, to a woman, and to life itself.

    Historian Grace Cole steps back and reviews the long history of barbarian invaders who pushed into Europe from the steppes of Asia, beginning 3,000 years ago with the nomadic Scythians, and then traces the tribes from Scandinavia, who migrated south to plague the empire until it finally crumbled. She examines the successes and failures of the principal barbarian tribes over the six centuries of their dominance and explores the surprising role of the Church as the era progressed. She covers the rise of France and the Holy Roman Empire and shows how the last great wave of barbarians - the Vikings -colonized a new world in Greenland and North America. Finally, she explains feudalism, the strange structure that held society together into the early Renaissance, outlining how it foreshadowed and laid the foundations for the civilization that became Europe. This rich heritage - the flowering of learning, the bold exploration and colonization of the globe, new political and economic structures, the idea of personal freedom - all were, in large part, the fruit of barbarism. And finally, the belief that barbarians and medieval Europe belonged to a dark age is conclusively put to rest.

    Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage—in name only—to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too—atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken once again by the inescapable rumble of war. As Anton struggles to adapt to the roles of husband and father, he learns of the Red Orchestra, an underground network of resisters plotting to assassinate Hitler. Despite Elisabeth’s reservations, Anton joins this army of shadows. But when the SS discovers his schemes, Anton will embark on a final act of defiance that may cost him his life—even if it means saying goodbye to the family he has come to love more than he ever believed possible.

    It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities.... Not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Nazism, but for its own purposes aided Nazism wherever possible (and profitable)―with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.” Penetrating a cloak of falsehood, deception, and duplicity, Professor Sutton reveals one of the most remarkable and under-reported facts of World War II―that key Wall Street banks and American businesses supported Hitler’s rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany. Carefully tracing this closely guarded secret through original documents and eyewitness accounts, Sutton comes to the unsavory conclusion that the catastrophe of World War II was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders. He presents a thoroughly documented account of the role played by J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric, Standard Oil, and the National City, Chase, and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in helping to prepare the bloodiest, most destructive war in history.

     Throughout the 1970s, there was no more feared group of terrorists. On the surface, they were militant revolutionaries. But in reality they were 'Hitler's Children' - both in the sense that most of them were born during the Nazi regime, and in the sense that they were fiercely opposed to individual freedom and liberal democracy. In this ground-breaking book, Jillian Becker examines the roots of the Gang. The terrorists in the Federal Republic of Germany came out of the pacifist ‘new left’ student protest movement of the late 1960s. Few in number, almost all of them came from prosperous, educated families. Unaware how closely they resembled their Nazi predecessors, they described themselves as ‘anti-fascist’. ‘Fascism’, they claimed, lay just under the surface of liberal democracy and would be called into the open by the use of terrorist violence. They were beneficiaries of American aid, and of the West German ‘economic miracle’, and they had no cause of their own to fight for. And so they identified themselves with Third World victims of wars, poverty and oppression, whose plight they blamed on ‘Western imperialism’. In the name of ‘peace’, ‘national liberation’, ‘anti-imperialism’, and ‘anti-capitalism’, they killed Germans, Americans, Jews and others with bullets and bombs. Their dreams of leading a revolution were ended when one after another of them died in shoot-outs with the police, or was blown up with him own bomb, or was arrested and condemned to long terms of imprisonment. All four leader of the Gang eventually committed suicide in prison. Detailed biographical portraits, especially of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, reveal how they laid waste their own lives, and drove themselves furiously to their own destruction. 'A first rate piece of journalism in the best sense of the word ... Ms Becker is the only person who has managed in recent years to tell me something which I had not heard before about these desperate, hysterical, perverted idealists whose revolt against authoritarianism ... made them indistinguishable from fascists' The Times 'Jillian Becker finds an uncanny similarity between those supposedly leftist views and those expressed in Mein Kampf more than 50 years ago' TIME 'An important and highly readable book, thoroughly researched and written with the pace and excitement of a crime thriller' TLS 'A serious and readable study of events which few people in Britain have seriously tried to understand' The Observer 'Superbly researched . . . Mrs Becker has performed a great service with this book' Sunday Telegraph Jillian Becker was born in Johannesburg in 1932. She has had a strong interest in Germany for many years, a concern which now finds expression in Hitler's Children. Jillian Becker also writes fiction. Her titles include ‘The Keep’, ‘The Union’, and ‘The Virgins’, all of which have been highly praised by the critics.

    This classic insider's account has been updated and supplemented with rare photographs from the LRDG collection in the Imperial War Museum.

    Len Deighton brings to bear all the skills of a best-selling novelist in this compelling study.In Blitzkrieg, Len Deighton turns a searchlight on the rise of Hitler, the lightning dash of his armies to the Channel coast in 1940 and on the debacle of Dunkirk, where — in a mistake that was to trigger his eventual downfall — a quarter of a million British troops were allowed to escape.

     When the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a Soviet submarine, with the loss of nearly 10,000 lives in January 1945, it wrote itself an unenviable record in the history books as the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Yet, aside from its grim fate in the icy waters of the Baltic, the story of the Gustloff is a fascinating one, which sheds light on a number of little-known aspects of the wider history of the Third Reich. Launched in Hamburg in 1937, the luxury liner Wilhelm Gustloff was originally to be christened the “Adolf Hitler”, but instead was named after the Swiss Nazi leader, who had been assassinated by a Jewish gunman the previous year. The ship was the pride of the Nazi Labour Movement, and would be run as a cruise liner by the subsidiary KdF, an organisation responsible for German workers’ leisure time, cruising the Baltic and Scandinavian coast, seducing its passengers with the apparent benefits of belonging to the Nazi ‘national community’. The Gustloff also served a vital propaganda function for Hitler’s Reich. It was moored in London in 1938 to allow Austrian citizens in the city to participate in the plebiscite over Hitler’s annexation of the country and the following year, it brought the elite German ‘Condor Legion’ home from service alongside Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. When war came in 1939, the Gustloff was used as a hospital ship and ferried wounded soldiers and sailors home from the 1940 campaign in Narvik. Later, moored in the harbour at Gdynia, it served as a floating barracks for U-Boat crews undergoing training. In 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff would meet its nemesis. That spring, it would be requisitioned for “Operation Hannibal”, the attempt to evacuate civilians, soldiers and officials westwards from the German eastern provinces threatened by the Soviet advance. While many ships made numerous crossings, the Gustloff would not survive her first voyage. Packed to the gunnels with desperate evacuees, she was torpedoed off the Pomeranian coast on January 30 – ironically the twelfth anniversary of Hitler coming to power – with the loss of almost 10,000 lives. The story of the Wilhelm Gustloff’s sinking in the freezing waters of the Baltic is dramatic and it has rarely been satisfactorily told in the English language. This gripping Kindle Single will explore the history of the German ship that suffered the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Roger Moorhouse is a critically-acclaimed freelance historian specialising in modern German and Central European history. Published in 15 languages, he is the author of the international bestseller Berlin at War (Bodley Head, 2010), and The Devils’ Alliance which was published in the UK & US in the autumn of 2014. He is also author of the eBook His Struggle: Hitler in Landsberg, 1924. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers.