England During the Dark Ages


John Richard Green - 1895
    Complete with maps and illustrations the work reveals the momentous events that were occurring in England during the Dark Ages.

The Night of the Long Knives: Forty-Eight Hours That Changed the History of the World


Paul R. Maracin - 2004
    The story of how Hitler seized control in Germany during his ruthless quest for world domination.

The Far Shore (Annotated)


Edward Ellsberg - 1959
    A principal actor in the invasion, Ellsberg describes in detail the massive preparations for the launch of the greatest armada in history. He devotes the second half of his book to an unforgettable real-time account of the bloody D-Day landings. *Annotated edition with footnotes. *Illustrated with original WW2 photographs.

When the War is Over


Anja May - 2018
     The true account of a teenage soldier in World War 2 Germany. Germany, 1945. Ever since Anton Kohler first heard the vibrant sound of the violin, he’s dreamed of mastering the instrument. But when his father dies, the fifteen-year-old must give up his passion to support his seven younger siblings. As the Russian army marches closer to his hometown, Anton and his best friend Gerhard are pulled from their families and forced to help defend their home in a last desperate stand. When Anton witnesses the slaughter of concentration camp prisoners, he vows to escape the war and find a way home to his family and his girl, Luise. In the chaos of impending defeat, Anton is torn between his promise to protect the life of his best friend and his desire to survive the war with his conscience intact. Based on a true account, this coming-of-age story set in the last turbulent months of World War 2, Germany, is a tale of love and friendship, of hope and loss. Read When the War is Over now to experience the poignant journey of a teenage soldier.

The Lies That Bind: An Adoptee's Journey Through Rejection, Redirection, DNA, and Discovery


Laureen Pittman - 2019
     Born in a California women’s prison in 1963, Laureen Pittman was relinquished for adoption. As a child, Laureen was conditioned to believe that being adopted didn’t matter. So, it didn’t . . . until it did. Through scraps of information, Laureen stitched together her history – one that started in the psychedelic sixties and ended up in a future where DNA could solve mysteries. She never imagined that spitting into a plastic tube, along with painstaking research and the explosion of technology would reveal the answers to her identity. Laureen’s tale is for anyone who has ever questioned who they are, where they came from, or how they fit in. Her journey to find her truth illustrates the strength and power of our need for connection, belonging, and healing through knowledge. What people are saying about The Lies That Bind "Pittman walks, with grace and wisdom, through the uncharted and difficult territory, where she uncovers secrets long buried and finds those who embrace one another as a family. Hers is a story of resilience and tenacity. It is about the peace that comes when we are in the shadows no more, and it will inspire others on their own healing path." ~ Linda Hoye, Author of Two Hearts: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Grief to Gratitude "Laureen’s tale from the point of view of an adoptee is one of incredible bravery and courage. Her beautiful voice echoes through the pages with pain and joy, disappointment and redemption. No matter if you have been involved in adoption directly or not, there is beauty to be found in this heart-wrenching book." ~ From the Foreword by Angie Martin, Bestselling & Award-winning author of Conduit and Chrysalis

What She Lost


Melissa W. Hunter - 2019
    Will Sarah’s strong will and determination be enough for her to survive when everything she loves is taken from her? Part memoir, part fiction, What She Lost is the reimagined true-life story of the author’s grandmother growing into a woman amid the anguish of the Holocaust. It is a tale of resilience, of rebuilding a life, and of rediscovering love. About the Author Melissa W. Hunter is an author and blogger from Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied creative writing and journalism at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a BA in English literature and a minor in Judaic studies. She received the English Department’s Undergraduate Essay Award and Undergraduate Fiction Award over two consecutive years. In her senior year, she received a grant to study and write about the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Her articles have been published on Kveller.com and LiteraryMama.com, and her short stories have appeared in the Jewish Literary Journal. She is a contributing blogger to the Today Show parenting community, and her novella Through a Mirror Clear was published as a serial installment on TheSame.blog, an online literary journal written for women by women. Her novel What She Lost is inspired by her grandmother’s life as a Holocaust survivor. When not writing, Melissa loves spending family time with her husband and two beautiful daughters.

Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women


Sarah Helm - 2015
    He called it Ravensbrück, and during the years that followed thousands of people died there after enduring brutal forms of torture. All were women. There are a handful of studies and memoirs that reference Ravensbrück, but until now no one has written a full account of this atrocity, perhaps due to the mostly masculine narrative of war, or perhaps because it lacks the Jewish context of most mainstream Holocaust history. Ninety percent of Ravensbrück's prisoners were not Jewish. Rather, they were political prisoners, Resistance fighters, lesbians, prostitutes, even the sister of New York's Mayor LaGuardia. In a perverse twist, most of the guards were women themselves. Sarah Helm's groundbreaking work sheds much-needed light on an aspect of World War II that has remained in the shadows for decades. Using research into German and newly opened Russian archives, as well as interviews with survivors, Helm has produced a landmark achievement that weaves together various accounts, allowing us to follow characters on both sides of the prisoner/guard divide. Chilling, compelling, and deeply unsettling, Ravensbrück is essential reading for anyone concerned with Nazi history.

Crack! and Thump: With a Combat Infantry Officer in World War II


Charles Scheffel - 2007
    CRACK! AND THUMP is Scheffel's chilling account of ground combat of a young company-grade officer who fought with the 9th Infantry Division in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany. Scheffel vividly recalls the terror, mind-numbing fatigue, raw emotions, and horrific conditions fighting men endured to achieve victory in World War II.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century


Edward Dolnick - 2008
    The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.

One Step Ahead - A Mother of Seven Escaping Hitler's Claws: A True History - Jewish Women, Family Survival, Resistance and Defiance against the Nazi War Machine in World War II


Avraham Azrieli - 2004
    On the first day of Operation Barbarossa, in the midst of battle, Esther Parnes leads her family east, away from the Polish village of Skalat. A step ahead of Hitler's earth-scorching troops, Esther and her children endure hunger, disease, and bloodshed. But Hitler's four-year campaign defeats neither Mother Russia nor Esther Parnes. In an era when women were confined to traditional household roles, at a time when proud men bowed their heads as they stood at the edge of a pit waiting to be shot, this redheaded woman challenged Adolf Hitler. Based on extensive interviews and independent research into the Parnes family's plight and the Nazi war on Russia, this book tells the story of an extraordinary mother's battle to save her seven children.

The Dark Ages - Book I of III


Charles William Chadwick Oman - 2013
    Names of Kings and major political/military persons have been updated and major typographical errors found with the previous Kindle edition have been corrected. Combined with copious illustrations, maps and images, the newly revised Dark Ages is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand a critical period in Western history that saw the transition from Roman Imperial rule to conquest-driven tribal rule and, ultimately, a flowering into the High Middle Ages. Oman provides one of the best historical examinations and explanations about the period widely known as the Dark Ages, when the end of total and complex Roman Imperial rule over Europe and the Mediterranean collapsed, taking the institutions that provided so much cultural sophistication and stability with it. Very much a work about how Europe, and the Western Tradition, survived after the Roman collapse. The Dark Ages has also been split into three books, mainly for ease of reading; the original book published in 1893 was a massive tome that covered the period from 476 CE to 918 CE. This first book in the new edition covers the period from 476 CE to 603 CE:ODOACER AND THEODORIC 476-493THEODORIC KING OF ITALY 493-526THE EMPERORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 476-527CLOVIS I AND THE FRANKS IN GAUL 481-511JUSTINIAN AND HIS WARS 528-540JUSTINIAN 540-565 CETHE EARLIER FRANKISH KINGS 511-561THE VISIGOTHS IN SPAIN 531-603

An Unusual Journey Through Royal History, Volume I (Unusual History, #1)


Victoria Martinez - 2011
    The table of contents reads more like a menu at a good restaurant, where there’s something for everyone’s taste. Each of the 18 chapters tells a unique story about an overlooked or unusual aspect of royal history, spanning centuries and countries, but in no particular order. From first to last, they will take you on a journey through royal history you’ve probably never seen or thought of before. In few – if any – other books will you find the British Monarchy compared to London’s sewer system, or read of the challenges of finding a suitable husband for a 200-plus pound Victorian princess who was nonetheless a “remarkably light dancer.” Rarely are the lives of historic and modern royals from Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great to Prince Charles and Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark “illustrated” not by paintings but by tattoos. Even more intimate topics, like the practice of circumcision among royals – including Princes William and Harry – are explored for the sake of inquiring minds. Chances are, even readers who usually find historic royalty boring and stuffy or modern royalty anachronistic and detached will find something to enjoy. Who wouldn’t feel a bit satisfied reading about a celebrated 19th century courtesan being paid to steal the thunder of an old and frumpy queen just to prove that queens are expected to be beautiful? It can also be quite amusing to find that a supposedly formal portrait of the current British Royal Family holds hidden, enigmatic clues to family dynamics and individual personalities that amuse and baffle.In short (much like the Court dwarfs you’ll read about), this book will leave you with a sense that you not only know royal history – and enjoy it – but that you have also journeyed through it and know the royals personally, from who exterminates their palaces right down to their infamous last words."I enjoyed these essays on royalty, which range widely from the beauty of Queens to court dwarfs and royal circumcision. Readers will find an impressively wide span of history enjoyably investigated." – Hugo VickersHugo Vickers, author of “Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of The Duchess of Windsor,” is a writer and broadcaster who has written biographies of many twentieth century figures.

The M Room: Secret Listeners who Bugged the Nazis in WW2


Helen Fry - 2012
    These grand houses were rigged with the latest and most advanced listening equipment. Bugging devices were hidden in the prisoners ‘cells, the light fittings, the fireplaces, behind mirrors, in plants and even in trees in the grounds, and wired back to the ‘M’ Room. At the heart of this clandestine unit were German-Jewish émigrés who had fled Nazi persecution and were serving in the British army. In an ironic turn of events they became British Intelligence’s most valuable asset. They were the ‘secret listeners’ and spent up to twelve hours a day eavesdropping on the conversations of German PoWs. This included not only the conversations of U-boat commanders, U-boat crew, infantry soldiers or Luftwaffe pilots but significantly 59 of Hitler’s Generals. The results were to prove astounding and beyond anything Churchill could have imagined when he authorised unlimited funds in its set-up. It gave British Intelligence unprecedented access to secrets that were not obtained by any other means. Providing a detailed, oft humorous, insight into life of the Generals in captivity, the book shows the farcical ‘stage-set’ in which they found themselves. But against this backdrop, the secret listeners eavesdropped on admission of war crimes and terrible atrocities against Russians, Poles and Jews; as well as details of an SS mutiny in a concentration camp in 1936, and Hitler’s human ‘stud farms’. This story places firmly on record just how much British Intelligence knew about the Holocaust. Why, at the end of the war, were these files not released for the war crimes trials? These and other transcripts of some of the most important German military secrets of the war remained classified until 1999.During their clandestine work the secret listeners did not set eyes on a single German PoW, yet their classified work and the intelligence they gained was as significant for winning the war as Bletchley Park and cracking the Enigma Code. For over sixty years the listeners never spoke about their work, not even to their families. Many went to their grave bearing the secrets of the nation which had saved them from certain death in the Holocaust.

Wood, Luck & Survival: The Journey of a Father and his Son Through the Holocaust Horrors


Reuven (Gutkin) Govrin - 2018
    When the German army invaded Riga, Latvian Jewry numbered about 95,000, of which only about 1,000 survived the war. The story of how Wood and luck somehow enabled Max and his father to survive the Holocaust, unlike so many, is riveting. The family business was engaged with forestry and wood, so Max, his older brother, and their father were forced to work in wood for the Nazis, while his mother and little brother were murdered. A harrowing journey replete with painful memories… The book traces their harrowing journey from work camp to work camp, a terrible choice that the father is forced to make, the aftermath of the war in Europe, and finally arrival in Israel. For 65 years Max silently bore the burden of these memories until the author led him on a path of discovery through his painful personal history. Scroll up now and get your copy of Wood, luck & survival!

Serial Killers: Shocking, Gripping True Crime Stories of the Most Evil Murderers


Brian Innes - 2017
    Yet they endlessy fascinate and continue to capture the public's attention with their strange charisma and deadly deeds. From Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy and the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, these killers transfix us with their ability to commit utterly savage acts of cruelty and depravity. Only with modern police detection methods and psychological profiling, have these figures that have existed throughout human history finally been identified in the deadliest category: serial killers. These methods, the killers' characters and their crimes are described here in fascinating and terrifyingly gripping detail. The whole history of serial killers is brought to life in 50 chapters, including: Herman Webster Mudget, Devil in the White City John Christie, 10 Rillington Place murders Zodiac Killer Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, The Moors Murderers Ted Bundy Fred and Rosemary West Jeffrey Dahmer Aileen Wuornos Harold Shipman, Dr Death