1924: The Year That Made Hitler


Peter Ross Range - 2016
    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. 1924 was the year that Hitler spent locked away from society, in prison and surrounded by co-conspirators of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. It was a year of deep reading and intensive writing, a year of courtroom speeches and a treason trial, a year of slowly walking gravel paths and spouting ideology while working feverishly on the book that became his manifesto: Mein Kampf. Until now, no one has fully examined this single and pivotal period of Hitler's life. In 1924, Peter Ross Range richly depicts the stories and scenes of a year vital to understanding the man and the brutality he wrought in a war that changed the world forever.

Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol


Alfréd Wetzler - 1964
    His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews#58; the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." middot; Sir Martin Gilbertbrbr"Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. [...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans." middot; [From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett]brbrTogether with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing,however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive's revelations met with after their return.brbrEwald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp


Leonard Berney - 2015
    T.D. is the only book to be published that recounts the events that led up to the British Army’s uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners, how the Army dealt with the unprecedented horror that existed in the camp, how the surviving prisoners were rescued, how the inmates were evacuated, how the Royal Army Medical Corps established the world’s largest hospital to care for the many thousands of sick and emaciated ex-inmates, how the survivors were rehabilitated and cared for, how they were repatriated to their own countries, why many thousand refused to return ‘home’ and the eventual establishment of the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the largest DP camp in Germany. The author of this book was a senior British Army officer who participated in the liberation of the Camp, who was in charge of evacuating the ex-prisoners to the vast Rehabilitation Camp that the Army set up, and who was then appointed as the Commandant of that Camp until its management was handed over to the United Nations, and who gave evidence against the SS guards at the Belsen War Crimes Trial. Forewords by Nanette Blitz Konig, Belsen survivor and former classmate of Anne Frank, and Major-General Nicholas Eeles CBE, with the introduction by the Oscar®-nominated film director, Joshua Oppenheimer.

Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945


Richard N. Lutjens Jr. - 2019
    Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany


William L. Shirer - 1960
    It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known.No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.The accounts of how the United States got involved and how Hitler used Mussolini and Japan are astonishing, and the coverage of the war-from Germany's early successes to her eventual defeat-is must reading

Two Sisters: A Journey of Survival Through Auschwitz


Livia Krancberg - 2018
    Would she have made it on her own? Who knows, even with Livia’s remarkable resilience which she still exhibits today in her nineties. It was Rose, with her desire to protect Livia and her instincts for survival that kept them, time and time again, from the many dangers which could have cost both of them their lives. From the moment they were on the transport to Auschwitz, and then saw their mother, along with Rose’s little son taken away and sent to the gas chambers, it was Rose who seem to anticipate what lay ahead. Maybe it was an extra morsel of food that could be obtained or an article of warm clothing. Rose always came through, even at great risk. Two Sisters is so much more than a story of survival during the Holocaust. It is the beautiful portrayal of a young girl―and later young woman―coming of age in rural Romania. Her academic achievements, schoolgirl crushes, and family life are all explored, revealed in detail for all of us. Carefully written and beautifully crafted, it serves as an extraordinary example of the power of the memoir in Holocaust understanding.

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust


Mary Fulbrook - 2012
    He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war.But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945.This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.

A House For Spies: SIS Operations into Occupied France from a Sussex Farmhouse


Edward Wake-Walker - 2011
     From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house. But who were these men and women that passed through the Bertram’s house? And what activities did they conduct whilst in France that meant that so many of them never returned? Edward Wake-Walker charts the experiences of numerous agents, such as Gilbert Renault, Christian Pineau and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and the networks of operatives that they created that provided top-secret intelligence on German defences and naval bases, U-boats, as well as Hitler’s devastating new weapons, the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs. A House For Spies provides fascinating insight into the lives of SIS agents and their Lysander pilots who provided invaluable intelligence to Allied forces. This is a much-forgotten aspect of the Second World War that is only now being told by Edward Wake-Walker. “Utterly fascinating, very moving and funny. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.” — Hugh Grant “Edward Wake-Walker's meticulously researched chronicles of desperate resistance, audacity, duty, determination and daring are a valuable addition to the history of World War II” — Bel Mooney, Daily Mail “It kept me up at night as I wanted to know what happened to all the various characters [brought] so admirably back to life” — Russell England, Director of Bletchley Park: Codebreaking's Forgotten Genius and Operation Mincemeat

A Nazi in the Family: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany


Derek Niemann - 2015
    Every day Karl Niemann commutes to work, a business manager in charge of various factories. In the evenings he returns home to life as a normal family man.For many years this was all Derek Niemann had known about his grandfather – until he made the chilling discovery that Karl had actually been an officer in the SS; and that his “business” used thousands of slave labourers in concentration camps. Suddenly, a lifetime of unsettling hints and clues fell into place.With the help of surviving relatives and hundreds of previously unknown photographs, Derek reconstructs the lives of his German forebears and uncovers the true story of what Karl did. A Nazi in the Family is an illuminating portrayal of how ordinary people can fall into the service of a monstrous regime."All families have secrets, but few are as shocking as Derek Niemann's." Culture Trip"Extraordinary." Glasgow Evening Times"Vividly captures the complex life of an ordinary man." Andrew Bomford, BBC Radio 4

The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition


Michael Good - 2005
    Who was this enigmatic officer Pearl Good had spoken of so often?After five years of research--interviewing survivors, assembling a team that could work to open German files untouched for fifty years, following every lead he could, Good was able to uncover the amazing tale of one man's remarkable courage. And in April 2005 Karl Plagge joined Oskar Schindler and 380 other Germans as a "Righteous among Nations," honored by the State of Israel for protecting and saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.This expanded edition features new photographs and a new epilogue on the impact of the discovery of Karl Plagge--especially the story of 83-year-old Alfons von Deschwanden, who, after fifty years of silence, came forward as a veteran of Plagge's unit. His testimony is now part of this growing witness to truth.

Behind the Fireplace: Memoirs of a girl working in the Dutch Resistance


Andrew Scott - 2016
    The youngest daughter, Kieks, joined the Resistance, delivering illegal newspapers, guiding British parachutists around The Hague and preparing safe houses for Special Forces who were dropped in from England. As the War continued, she fell in love with a Resistance commander, and worked with him to rescue wounded colleagues, steal weapons from German arms dumps and move weapons around the country. They had a tumultuous parting and she continued her work, acting as a courier with a two hundred km bike ride to the north of Holland. When she returned home, she appreciated how much the war had changed her and her boyfriend, and prepared to try a reconciliation.She escaped a firing squad four times, and survived the war, mentally scarred by her experiences. She sought help, but the help she was offered came in a poisoned chalice, and she kept her secret to herself for almost fifty years.Her family in Holland was recognised by Yad Vashem, the Israeli organisation that records those who saved Jews from the Holocaust, and she was awarded a pension for her work in the Resistance by the Dutch foundation Stichting 1940-1945. It was only when these organisations acknowledged the truth of her claims that she had the confidence to tell her family of the events from long ago.

The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich's Press Chief


Otto Dietrich - 2010
    Only at the end, when I watched the inglorious collapse and the obstinacy of his final downfall, was I able suddenly to fit together the bits of mosaic I had been amassing for twelve years into a complete picture of his opaque and sphinx like personality. If my contemporaries fail to understand me, those who came after will surely profit from this account.”—Otto Dietrich When Otto Dietrich was invited in 1933 to become Adolf Hitler’s press chief, he accepted with the simple uncritical conviction that Adolf Hitler was a great man, dedicated to promoting peace and welfare for the German people. At the end of the war, imprisoned and disillusioned, Otto Dietrich sat down to write what he had seen and heard in twelve years of the closest association with Hitler, requesting that it be published after his death. Dietrich’s role placed him in a privileged position. He was hired by Hitler in 1933, was his confidant until 1945, and he worked—and clashed—with Joseph Goebbels. His direct, personal experience of life at the heat of the Reich makes for compelling reading.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps


Yitzhak Arad - 1987
    Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution.... Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."--New York Times Book Review..". some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read.... the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul HilbergArad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.

Hitler's Children


Guido Knopp - 2000
    Even today, some former members of the Nazi youth organisations are unable to come to terms with the part they played in Germany's dark past. This book is the first comprehensive history of the youth organisations used by the Third Reich to indoctrinate the young people of Germany.

Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19


Lawrence Malkin - 2006
    of photos. 2 maps.