Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich
Robert Gerwarth - 2011
Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities, and up to his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich.Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer, Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich's adult character, his motivations, the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities, and the consequences of his murderous efforts toward re-creating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe.
Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat
Giles Milton - 2016
The guerrilla campaign that followed was every bit as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, Cecil Clarke, was a maverick engineer who had spent the 1930s inventing futuristic caravans. Now, his talents were put to more devious use: he built the dirty bomb used to assassinate Hitler's favorite, Reinhard Heydrich. Another, William Fairbairn, was a portly pensioner with an unusual passion: he was the world's leading expert in silent killing, hired to train the guerrillas being parachuted behind enemy lines. Led by dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins, these men—along with three others—formed a secret inner circle that, aided by a group of formidable ladies, single-handedly changed the course Second World War: a cohort hand-picked by Winston Churchill, whom he called his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.Giles Milton's Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a gripping and vivid narrative of adventure and derring-do that is also, perhaps, the last great untold story of the Second World War.
How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust
Dan McMillan - 2014
Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of western civilization? In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanation and comprehensive analysis of the genocide's many causes, revealing how a once-progressive society like Germany could have carried out this crime. The Holocaust, he explains, was caused not by one but by a combination of factors -- from Germany's failure to become a democracy until 1918, to the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and scientific racism, to the effects of World War I, which intensified political divisions within the country and drastically lowered the value of human life in the minds of an entire generation. Masterfully synthesizing the myriad causes that led Germany to disaster, McMillan shows why thousands of Germans carried out the genocide while millions watched, with cold indifference, as it enveloped their homeland. Persuasive and compelling, How Could This Happen explains how a perfect storm of bleak circumstances, malevolent ideas, and damaged personalities unleashed history's most terrifying atrocity.
Adolf Hitler
John Toland - 1976
At a certain distance yet still with access to many of the people who enabled and who opposed the führer and his Third Reich, Toland strove to treat this life as if Hitler lived and died a hundred years before instead of within his own memory. From childhood and obscurity to his desperate end, Adolf Hitler emerges as, in Toland’s words, “far more complex and contradictory . . . obsessed by his dream of cleansing Europe Jews . . . a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer.”
A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland
Mary Platt Parmele - 1895
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule
Gordon Thomas - 2019
But beneath the surface, countless ordinary, everyday Germans actively resisted Hitler. Some passed industrial secrets to Allied spies. Some forged passports to help Jews escape the Reich. For others, resistance was as simple as writing a letter denouncing the rigidity of Nazi law. No matter how small the act, the danger was the same--any display of defiance was met with arrest, interrogation, torture, and even death.Defying Hitler follows the underground network of Germans who believed standing against the Fuhrer to be more important than their own survival. Their bravery is astonishing--a schoolgirl beheaded by the Gestapo for distributing anti-Nazi fliers; a German American teacher who smuggled military intel to Soviet agents, becoming the only American woman executed by the Nazis; a pacifist philosopher murdered for his role in a plot against Hitler; a young idealist who joined the SS to document their crimes, only to end up, to his horror, an accomplice to the Holocaust. This remarkable account illuminates their struggles, yielding an accessible narrative history with the pace and excitement of a thriller.
Outcry: Holocaust Memoirs
Manny Steinberg - 2007
This is his story.Born in 1925 in the Jewish ghetto in Radom (Poland), Manny soon realized that people of Jewish faith were increasingly being regarded as outsiders. In September 1939 the Nazis invaded, and the nightmare started. The city’s Jewish population had no chance of escaping and was faced with starvation, torture, sexual abuse and ultimately deportation.Outcry is the candid and moving account of a teenager who survived four Nazi camps: Dachau, Auschwitz, Vaihingen and Neckagerach. While being subjected to torture and degradation, he agonized over two haunting questions: "Why the Jews?" and "How can the world let this happen?" These questions remain hard to answer.Manny’s brother Stanley had jumped off the cattle wagon on the way to the extermination camp where his mother and younger brother were to perish. Desperately lonely and hungry, Stanley stood outside the compound hoping to catch a glimpse of Manny and their father. Once he discovered that they were among the prisoners, he turned himself in. The days were marked by hunger, cold, hard labor, and fear. Knowing that other members of the family were in the same camp kept them alive. Since acknowledging each other would have meant death, they pretended to be complete strangers.Manny relates how he was served human flesh and was forced to shave the heads of female corpses and pull out their teeth. Cherishing a picture of his beloved mother in his wooden shoe, he miraculously survived the terror of the Polish and German concentration camps together with his father and brother.When the Americans arrived in April 1945, Manny was little more than a living skeleton, with several broken ribs and suffering from a serious lung condition, wearing only a dirty, ragged blanket.This autobiography was written to fulfil a promise Manny made to himself during the first days of freedom. By publishing his Holocaust memoirs, he wants to ensure that the world never forgets what happened during WWII. The narrative is personal, unencumbered and direct.Outcry touches the reader with its directness and simplicity. The story is told through the eyes of an old man forcing himself to relive years of intense suffering. It is an account of human cruelty, but also a testimony to the power of love and hope. Memoirs worthy of being adapted for the big screen."I read this book with a very heavy heart and tears running down my face. For Manny's endurance and his brother Stanley to be so tested is truly a testament to life! Bad people can do all the harm you want, but if one never gives up, the enemy will never win. Manny and his brother along with others, won. This is proven in this Holocaust book. A book well worth reading and learning from now and for future generations. It proves 'We will survive' ... Very well written as it goes straight to the reader's heart! The pictures are a treat, past, present and future, with a lovely tribute to his beloved, Mimi. Thank you for sharing 'YOU' with the rest of the world, Mr Steinberg! Bless you always.""Manny Steinberg shares his extraordinary teenage story of surviving four concentration camps in an account noteworthy for its straightforward, unencumbered narrative. His is a story almost everyone can imagine happening to themselves - no less harrowing than more dramatic renditions of Holocaust survival, but somehow more compelling, and universal, for the unembellished simplicity of his style.""You must read Outcry. You will have tears and joy how this young boy survived the six years in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. It is a hand-made story for a motion picture. Hollywood producers and directors, grab it. We must not allow this to happen again to human people."
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
Francine Prose - 2009
Approved by both the Anne Frank House Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, run by the Frank family, this work of literary criticism unravels the complex, fascinating story of the diary and effectively makes the case for it being a work of art from a precociously gifted writer.
The Children's Block: Based on a True Story by an Auschwitz Survivor
Otto B. Kraus - 2019
There was so little space on the berth that when one of us wanted to ease his hip, we all had to turn in a tangle of legs and chests and hollow bellies as if we were one many-limbed creature, a Hindu god or a centipede. We grow intimate not only in body but also in mind because we knew that though we were not born of one womb, we would certainly die together.'Alex Ehren is a poet, a prisoner and a teacher in block 31 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the children’s block. He spends his days trying to survive while illegally giving lessons to his young charges while shielding them as best he can from the impossible horrors of the camp. But trying to teach the children is not the only illicit activity that Alex is involved in. Alex is keeping a diary…Originally published as THE PAINTED WALL, Otto Kraus’s autobiographical novel, tells the true story of 500 Jewish children who lived in the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau between September 1943 and June 1944.
The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust
Edith Hahn Beer - 1999
Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not: With the woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.In vivid, wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, Edith was bombed out of her house and had to hide in a closet with her daughter while drunken Russians soldiers raped women on the street.Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. On exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of an epic story - complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.
Defying Hitler
Sebastian Haffner - 2000
Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism and precursor to the Nazi storm troopers, to the Hitler Youth movement; from the apocalyptic year of 1923 when inflation crippled the country to Hitler's rise to power. This fascinating personal history elucidates how the average German grappled with a rapidly changing society, while chronicling day-to-day changes in attitudes, beliefs, politics, and prejudices.
Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler
Bruce Henderson - 2017
Army to play a key role in the Allied victory.In 1942, the U.S. Army unleashed one of its greatest secret weapons in the battle to defeat Adolf Hitler: training nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and making use of their mastery of the German language, history, and customs. Known as the Ritchie Boys, they were sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they interrogated German POWs and gathered crucial intelligence that saved American lives and helped win the war.Though they knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured, the Ritchie Boys eagerly joined the fight to defeat Hitler. As they did, many of them did not know the fates of their own families left behind in occupied Europe. Taking part in every major campaign in Europe, they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions. A postwar Army report found that more than sixty percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.Bruce Henderson draws on personal interviews with many surviving veterans and extensive archival research to bring this never-before-told chapter of the Second World War to light. Sons and Soldiers traces their stories from childhood and their escapes from Nazi Germany, through their feats and sacrifices during the war, to their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones in war-torn Europe. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.
Citizens of London: The Americans who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour
Lynne Olson - 2010
Murrow, the handsome, chain-smoking head of CBS News in Europe; Averell Harriman, the hard-driving millionaire who ran FDR’s Lend-Lease program in London; and John Gilbert Winant, the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain. Each man formed close ties with Winston Churchill—so much so that all became romantically involved with members of the prime minister’s family. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Lynne Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time. Deeply human, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, Citizens of London is a new triumph from an author swiftly becoming one of the finest in her field.
The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz
Jack Fairweather - 2019
The name of the detention centre -- Auschwitz.It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying designs. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities to the West, culminating in the mass murder of over a million Jews. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust - yet his story was all but forgotten for decades.This is the first major account of his amazing journey, drawing on exclusive family papers and recently declassified files as well as unpublished accounts from the camp’s fighters to show how he saved hundreds of thousands of lives.The result is a enthralling story of resistance and heroism against the most horrific circumstances, and one man’s attempt to change the course of history.
The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War
William Manchester - 1968
William Manchester's account of the rise and fall of the Krupp dynasty is history as it should be written, alive with all its terrifying power.