The Nuremberg Interviews


Leon Goldensohn - 2004
    Leon Goldensohn–a psychiatrist for the U.S. Army–monitored the mental health of two dozen German leaders charged with carrying out genocide. These recorded conversations have gone largely unexamined for more than fifty years, until Robert Gellately–one of the premier historians of Nazi Germany–made them available to the public in this remarkable collection.Here are interviews with the likes of Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Joachim von Ribbentrop–the highest ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails. Here too are interviews with lesser-known officials essential to the inner workings of the Third Reich. Candid and often shockingly truthful, The Nuremberg Interviews is a profound addition to our understanding of the Nazi mind and mission.

The Hazards of War


Jonathan Paul Isaacs - 2015
    Hitler's war machine has decimated the Allies and the people of Europe must now learn the terror of living under the Third Reich.For Gabrielle Conti, a young French girl working at her family's winery, such news seemed incredibly distant and abstract. Surely these events wouldn't impact her simple life in the French countryside?That was before the body of an SS officer was found in the basement.When her family becomes the subject of a brutal murder investigation, Gabrielle must match wits with SS Captain Hans Tiedemann, a veteran of the Russian Front who is hell-bent on singling out the killer. Gabrielle bets that if she can fool Tiedemann into thinking he is making progress, she just might buy enough time for her family to escape.But that will be no easy task. For as the Germans gather their clues, Gabrielle starts to learn more about her family's true involvement in the war--and saving them could spell the end of the French Resistance.

The Third Reich: Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, World War II And The Last German Empire


Frank D. Kennedy - 2015
    This empire dominates western Europe from 800 until 1806, when it is defeated by Napoleon. The Second Reich: All of Germany is united behind Prussia under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, victor of the Franco-Prussian War. Only Germany's defeat in World War I can break the power of the second German empire.What was the Third Reich?In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany after convincing other members of the Reichstag that the Nazi party was better for the country than their feared rivals, the Communists. Within the year, the President of the German Republic will be dead, and Hitler will declare himself supreme leader of Germany.But how did it happen?The Third Reich: Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, World War II and The Last German Empire takes you on a guided tour of German history for the last thousand years. You'll study the constitution of the Weimar republic and the Treaty of Versailles, and come to understand why Hitler believed it was crucial to build a new Nazi empire that was second to no one other nation in Europe in terms of military development. You'll learn how Hitler used the rhetoric of racism and nationalism to transform himself from a democratically elected member of government into a dictator whose word was law.Most importantly, you'll learn how those changes paved the way to World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust.

War on the Eastern Front: The German Soldier in Russia 1941-1945


James Sidney Lucas - 1980
    Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle.A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They were faced by the unremitting hostility of the climate, the people and even, at times, their own leadership. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler s ambition and the German military machine. In this classic account leading military historian James Lucas examines different aspects of the fighting, from war in the trenches to a bicycle-mounted antitank unit fighting against the oncoming Russian hordes. Told through the experiences of the German soldiers who endured these nightmarish years of warfare, War on the Eastern Front is a unique record of this cataclysmic campaign."

Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe


Mark Mazower - 2008
    Control of this vast territory was meant to provide the basis for Germany's rise to unquestioned world power. Eastern Europe was to be the Reich's Wild West, transformed by massacre and colonial settlement. Western Europe was to provide the economic resources that would knit an authoritarian and racially cleansed continent together. But the brutality and short-sightedness of Nazi politics lost what German arms had won and brought their equally rapid downfall.Time and again, the speed of the Germans' victories caught them unprepared for the economic or psychological intricacies of running such a far-flung dominion. Politically impoverished, they had no idea how to rule the millions of people they suddenly controlled, except by bludgeon.Mazower forces us to set aside the timeworn notion that the Nazis' worldview was their own invention. Their desire for land and their racist attitudes toward Slavs and other nationalities emerged from ideas that had driven their Prussian forebears into Poland and beyond. They also drew inspiration on imperial expansion from the Americans and especially the British, whose empire they idolized. Their signal innovation was to exploit Europe's peoples and resources much as the British or French had done in India and Africa. Crushed and disheartened, many of the peoples they conquered collaborated with them to a degree that we have largely forgotten. Ultimately, the Third Reich would be beaten as much by its own hand as by the enemy.Throughout this book are fascinating, chilling glimpses of the world that might have been. Russians, Poles, and other ethnic groups would have been slaughtered or enslaved. Germans would have been settled upon now empty lands as far east as the Black Sea—the new "Greater Germany". Europe's treasuries would have been sacked, its great cities impoverished and recast as dormitories for forced laborers when they were not deliberately demolished. As dire as all this sounds, it was merely the planned extension of what actually happened in Europe under Nazi rule as recounted in this authoritative, absorbing book.

Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil


Ron Rosenbaum - 1998
    Hitler did not escape the bunker in Berlin but, half a century later, he has managed to escape explanation in ways both frightening and profound. Explaining Hitler is an extraordinary quest, an expedition into the war zone of Hitler theories. This is a passionate, enthralling book that illuminates what Hitler explainers tell us about Hitler, about the explainers, and about ourselves.

Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis


Nicholas Stargardt - 2005
    In this groundbreaking study–based on a wide range of new sources–Nicholas Stargardt details what happened to children of all nationalities and religions living under the Nazi regime. Their stories open a world we have never seen before. As the Nazis overran Europe, children were saved or damned according to their race. Drawing on an untouched wealth of original material–school assignments; juvenile diaries; letters; and even accounts of children’s games–Nicholas Stargardt breaks stereotypes of victimhood and trauma to give us the gripping individual stories of the generation Hitler made.

Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law


James Q. Whitman - 2017
    Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship


Brigitte Hamann - 1998
    Hitler's Vienna was not the artistic and intellectual center normally associated with Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Instead, it was a cauldron of fear and indignation, a city teeming with the little people who rejected Viennese modernity as too international, too Jewish, and too libertine. Indeed, Hitler's Vienna was a breeding ground for obscure political theories, usually propagated by disadvantaged men living together in hostels. To them, being better in this multinational city meant belonging to the noble German people. Brigitte Hamann compellingly depicts the undercurrent of disturbing social and political ideologies that permeated this city of civil unrest. Drawing on previously untapped resources, she gives us the fullest account ever rendered of the young fuhrer. Hitler's Vienna reveals the vital connection between Hitler's indoctrination into the devastating racial politics that swept Germany's multinational state and the hotbed of nationalistic activity that was Vienna in the early 20th century. It is a profoundly important addition to present Hitler scholarship.

The Lion's Den


Eoin Dempsey - 2021
    A new opportunity in a country on the precipice of unspeakable evil.November 1932. Seamus Ritter, a widower with four children, returns from riding the rails in an America crippled by the great depression. Realizing that his homecoming will not be how he envisioned it, and in a desperate attempt to make amends with his 16-year-old daughter, Maureen, Seamus accepts an invitation to come and work for his long-lost uncle in Berlin. With little other choice, Seamus takes the ship to Germany with his family. Maureen leaves everything to go with her father she no longer trusts, dedicated to taking care of her younger siblings.The Germany the Ritter family encounters is vastly different than the one Seamus spent time living in as a child. An upstart politician called Adolf Hitler has come to the fore, but surely it’s only a matter of time before the right-thinking members of society banish him to the fringes of the political landscape he emerged from.As the Ritter family struggles to adjust to life in a country ravaged by unemployment and internal strife, Seamus meets Lisa, a beautiful and mysterious woman weighed down by the ghosts of her past life. When tragedy strikes, Lisa and Seamus will be forced to act together to save their lives and build a future together in a nation that, unbeknownst to the citizens there, is about to descend into the greatest evil the world has ever known.

Desperate Ground


James R. Benn - 2000
    He hears the haunting voice of his dead fiancé and the demons that roar through his mind as he perfects a plan to save Nazi Germany from defeat and insure a greater and deadlier new world war. Captain Dieter Neukirk, once a protégé of Faust's, is more concerned with saving the lives of his remaining men than in sacrificing them in a fanatical last stand.Meanwhile, Elsa Klein, Dieter's lover and the chief social worker at a Berlin hospital, is engaged in her own dangerous work, providing medical care and identity papers to hidden Jews in the city. American Captain Mack Mackenzie, pulled from a military hospital before his wounds are healed, is assigned to investigate reports of a secret Nazi operation. Wanting only to make it home alive, Mack finds himself in a life and death struggle with unlikely allies and a ferociously determined opponent.Americans and Germans alike are drawn to a hilltop in the remote German countryside, where they find themselves between powerful armies and forced into a terrible decision that could end one war or begin a new one.

Inferno: The Fall of Japan 1945


Ronald Henkoff - 2016
    atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ensuing death and destruction that led to the end of World War II. The events that culminated in the fall of Japan - which forever changed the course of diplomacy, geopolitics, and warfare in the twentieth century - are vividly recreated through dramatic first-hand accounts of the major participants on both sides of the Pacific. They include: Harry Truman, the inexperienced American president who made the decision that would lead to unprecedented death and destruction; the war-mongering, but mysterious, Japanese Emperor Hirohito, who ultimately presided over his country's surrender; General Leslie Groves, the no-nonsense director of the Manhattan Project; and Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane, the Enola Gay, which dropped the very first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945.

A Doctor's Occupation, The dramatic true story of life in Nazi-occupied Jersey


John Lewis - 1982
    Possessed of great warmth, wit and, above all a humanity which informs every word in this extraordinary account of Jersey life during the German Occupation, he served the island community with unfailing resourcefulness and not a little courage for five long and stressful years. However, despite the awfulness of the time, Dr Lewis infuses his account of it with an irrepressible joie de vivre which is utterly delightful. It is an uplifting story of winning against the odds, by turns hysterically funny and then unbearably sad. Above all it has an immediacy which takes the reader right into the heart of the Occupation, you can smell the fear, feel the pain, suffer the loss, sense the victory as do the characters in this history and they are many and varied. You will meet the good Jersey folk like the brave and tragic Mrs Gould from St Ouens and the not so good Jersey folk in the shape of the collaborators and informers or the “Jerry bags” like the exotic Ginger Lou. Here too you will meet some of the most wretched victims of the war, the Russian Todt workers who were hidden and helped by the locals and of course the many sorts of Germans who made up the occupying force. It is a story of compelling interest.I had the good fortune to meet John Lewis and his wife in 1991 at his lovely Jersey home. He talked for hours that seemed like minutes of his life during the war years. He was just as I’d hoped he would be - endlessly kind, witty and understanding. I came away from that meeting feeling happy, elated and much wiser, as you will surely do after reading of the Doctor’s Occupation. John Nettles

The Last Zero Fighter


Dan King - 2012
    All are veterans of the pivotal battles of the Pacific War including; USS Panay, Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Rabaul, Port Darwin, Indian Ocean Raid, Ceylon, Midway, Guadalcanal, Marshall Islands, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Kamikaze in the Philippines, the home defense and the dropping of the atomic bomb. The book is 348 pages includes 78 photos (many from the veterans' own albums), 9 original maps and illustrations. Includes an introduction to the Japanese pilot training system for both officers and enlisted men. Each pilot is followed from the time he joined the navy until war's end. They explain in their own words; why they joined the navy, what they thought about the war, about the aircraft they flew, how they felt about their friends and their former adversaries. The interviews were conducted firsthand in their own language by KING who is a linguist and Pacific War historian who spent 10 years living in Japan.

Inside the Third Reich


Albert Speer - 1969
    B&W photos.