This expanded second edition includes over 250 rare historical photographs, maps and images and over 10,000 more words.Winner of Book of the Year in War & Military by the Foreword Indies Review board. Amazon best-seller in four categories and a solid 5-star rating, one of the highest of any book in its categories.

    Culminating in Hitler's historic climb to totalitarian reign, this period marks his progression through the shifting political maze of the Weimar Republic and the tumultuous rise of the Nazi Party. Far from an irresistible force of politics, Hitler's passage was one underscored by personal power plays, economic instability, gloating triumphs, and near failures. A political chapter that spans Germany's wobbly recovery from World War I through years of growing prosperity and crippling depression, this period marks Hitler's unrelenting struggle for control over his radical, raucous movement. It includes brushes with power and quests for revenge, non-stop electioneering and American-style campaign tactics and, for Hitler, moments of immense success and feared humiliation. Following an improbable, serpentine journey, The Unfathomable Ascent is a complex story with one dangerous climax: Hitler's sweeping ascent into political power, and the western world's descent into historic darkness.

    mailed home a Japanese flag. Fifty years later, his daughter unfolded the past. Growing up, Louise Steinman knew little about her father's experiences in World War II. All she knew was that the whistling teakettle was banned from the kitchen and that she was never to cry in front of him. Years later, after her parents' death, she found an old ammunition box, filled with nearly five hundred letters her father had written to her mother during the War. She also found a silk Japanese flag inscribed to Yoshio Shimizu. Who was Yoshio Shimizu and why did her father have his flag? So began Steinman's quest to return this "souvenir" to its owner, and in the process, to learn more about the war that transformed the expressive young man in those letters into the reserved father she had known. Weaving together her father's raw, poignant letters with her own journey, Steinman presents a powerful view of how war changed one generation and shaped another.

    An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured.Published on the seventieth anniversary of the bombing, Nagasaki takes readers from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the first-hand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation. Susan Southard has spent years interviewing hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) and researching the physical, emotional, and social challenges of post-atomic life. She weaves together dramatic eyewitness accounts with searing analysis of the policies of censorship and denial that colored much of what was reported about the bombing both in the United States and Japan.A gripping narrative of human resilience, Nagasaki will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.

    Britain now stood alone to face Hitler's inevitable invasion attempt.For the German Army to be landed across the Channel, Hitler needed mastery of the skies - the RAF would have to be broken - so every day, throughout the summer, German bombers pounded the RAF air bases in the southern counties. Greatly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, the pilots of RAF Fighter Command scrambled as many as five times a day, and civilians watched skies criss-crossed with the contrails from the constant dogfights between Spitfires and Me-109s. Britain's very freedom depended on the outcome of that summer's battle.Britain's air defences were badly battered and nearly broken, but against all odds, 'The Few', as they came to be known, bought Britain's freedom - many with their lives.These are the personal accounts of the pilots who fought and survived that battle. We will not see their like again.

    In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany.These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and―perhaps most disturbing of all―the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes.Military historian John C. McManus sheds new light on this often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on a rich blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts―including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections― Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history.

    All over the country, people are on the move- concentration camp survivors, Allied PoWs, escaping Nazis- and the civilian population is running out of food. The man who orchestrated this nightmare is in his bunker beneath the capital, saying his farewells. This is the gripping story of Hitler's final hours, as seen through the eyes of those who were with him in the bunker; those fighting in the streets of Germany; and those pacing the corridors of power in Washington, London and Moscow.30th April 1945 was a day that millions had dreamed of, and millions had died for.

    Concentrating purely on the role of German girls in Hitler's Third Reich, we learn of their home lives, schooling, exploitation and eventual militarization from firsthand accounts of women who were indoctrinated into the Jung Madel and Bund Deutscher Mädel as young girls. From the prosperous beginnings of 1933 to the cataclysmic defeat of 1945, this insightful book examines in detail their specific roles as defined by the Nazi state. Few historical literary works have gone as deep to find the truth, the conscience and the regret, and in this sense 'Hitler's Girls' is a unique work unlike any other yet published. Written in an attempt to provide a definitive voice for this unheard generation of German females, it will leave the reader to decide for themselves whether or not the girls were the obedient accessories to genocide, and it will lead many readers to question many aspects of what they have previously thought about the role of girls and young women in Hitler's Third Reich. This is their story.

    Through exclusive access to this material - as well as fascinating new research from other sources - Simon Pearson, Chief Night Editor of The Times, has now written the first biography of this iconic figure. Born in South Africa in 1910, Roger Bushell was the son of a British mining engineer. By the age of 29, this charismatic character who spoke nine languages had become a London barrister with a reputation for successfully defending those much less fortunate than him. He was also renowned as an international ski champion and fighter pilot with a string of glamorous girlfriends. On 23 May, 1940, his Spitfire was shot down during a dogfight over Boulogne after destroying two German fighters. From then on his life was governed by an unquenchable desire to escape from Occupied Europe.Over the next four years he made three escapes, coming within 100 yards of the Swiss border during his first attempt. His second escape took him to Prague where he was sheltered by the Czech resistance for eight months before he was captured. The three month's of savage interrogation in Berlin by the Gestapo that followed made him even more determined. Prisoner or not, he would do his utmost to fight the Nazis. His third (and last escape) destabilised the Nazi leadership and captured the imagination of the world.He died on 29 March 1944, murdered on the explicit instructions of Adolf Hitler.Simon Pearson's revealing biography is a vivid account of war and love, triumph and tragedy - one man's attempt to challenge remorseless tyranny in the face of impossible odds.

    The story of the Warsaw Rising from the the leading British authority on the history of Poland.

    One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political "reeducation" was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into "normalcy" stand in many ways for his generation's experience.A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

    He also had a secret to keep.In 1942, the Brooklyn-born Erickson was a millionaire oil mogul who volunteered for a dangerous mission inside the Third Reich: locating the top-secret synthetic oil plants that kept the German war machine running. To fool the Nazis, Erickson played the role of a collaborator. He hung a portrait of Hitler in his apartment and “disowned” his Jewish best friend, then flew to Berlin, where he charmed Himmler and signed lucrative oil deals with the architects of the Final Solution. All the while, he was visiting the oil refineries and passing their coordinates to Allied Bomber Command, who destroyed the plants in a series of B-17 raids, helping to end the war early. After the war, Erickson's was revealed as a secret agent and received the Medal of Freedom for his bravery. William Holden even played him in a hit Hollywood movie. For a brief moment in the early '60s, Erickson was the most famous spy in the world. His secret? He hadn't played a Nazi collaborator. He'd actually been one - a war profiteer who'd made millions of trading with Hitler before having a change of heart. Black-listed by the Allies and disowned by his family, Erickson had volunteered for the spy mission in order to redeem himself, and ended up saving thousands of Allied lives. Based on newly-discovered archives in Sweden, The Secret Agent is a riveting piece of narrative nonfiction that tells the true story of Erickson's remarkable life for the first time. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephan Talty is the author of five acclaimed non-fiction books, including Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Spy Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day. He's written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Men's Journal and many other publications.

    Tomorrow they will be taken to the ghetto, the last step before deportation to Auschwitz and certain death. But one man defies the Nazis and seeks to deny them these victims. Alone, unarmed and crippled, Joseph Cseh, a smooth talking (black marketer), struggles to rescue the woman he loves and her entire family. Surrounded on all sides he stands up to the fascists, playing a life and death con game. But can he bluff the Gestapo and defeat an army? This is the amazing true story of the Weisz family and the man who took it upon himself to try and do some good in a world turned evil.

     A paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, James Sheeran was just a kid when he floated into Normandy on D-Day-only to be captured soon afterward by the Germans. Escaping from a POW train bound for Germany, Sheeran traveled behind enemy lines in France, eventually fighting alongside the French Resistance. After hooking up with Patton's advancing army, he fought admirably in Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, and was ultimately awarded the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and the Chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor. Sheeran's breathtaking chronicle of his capture, daring escape, fierce guerilla resistance, and valor under fire is an unforgettable testament to the spirit of the American soldier.

    Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order.