His family was among the few who worked underground to resist Nazi rule. Then came the day he was drafted into Hitler's army and shipped out to fight on the Eastern front as part of the German infantry―in spite of his having confessed his own Jewish ancestry. Thus begins the incredible journey of a nineteen year old thrust unwillingly into an unjust war, who must use his smarts, skills, and bare-knuckled determination to stay alive in the trenches, avoid starvation and exposure during the brutal Russian winter, survive more than one Soviet labor camp, and somehow find his way back home. Unlikely Warrior is Rauch's true account of this extraordinary adventure.

    They uncover evidence of collusion at worst and the turning of a blind eye at best, which enabled many leading Nazi's to escape apprehension and to hold onto their ill-gotten gains.Alford and Savas describe how the principal powermongers of the "Reich Sicherheits Hauptamt" - The Reich Main Security Office, established by Himmler and Kaltenbrunner to oversee all security departments of the German State - squirreled away vast fortunes. Towards the end of the war, blackmail, unrestrained looting, theft and the bartering of human lives became sources of great profit for these men. Never ideologically motivated, these RSHA managers, who included college professors, bank executives and engineers - all of whom are named in this book - preyed on the misfortunes of others. After stealing and destroying in the most brutal fashion, most of the RSHA leaders returned to a "normal" existence after the war, continuing their lives as if nothing untoward had ever happened How did they mislead U.S. Army criminal investigators and walk away free men? What part did money, blackmail, counter-spying and murder play in these events? Ken Alford and Ted Savas address these and many other questions in this detailed investigation and exposé.

    Her survival depended on endless strokes of luck, her own determination and the love and protection of her mother Fritzi, who was deported with her.When Auschwitz was liberated, Eva and Fritzi began the long journey home. They searched desperately for Eva's father and brother, from whom they had been separated. The news came some months later. Tragically, both men had been killed.Before the war, in Amsterdam, Eva had become friendly with a young girl called Anne Frank. Though their fates were very different, Eva's life was set to be entwined with her friend's for ever more, after her mother Fritzi married Anne's father Otto Frank in 1953.This is a searingly honest account of how an ordinary person survived the Holocaust. Eva's memories and descriptions are heartbreakingly clear, her account brings the horror as close as it can possibly be.But this is also an exploration of what happened next, of Eva's struggle to live with herself after the war and to continue the work of her step-father Otto, ensuring that the legacy of Anne Frank is never forgotten.

    But what if this was not the case? What if the war had its roots in Germany's weakness, not its strength? This is the radical argument in this pathbreaking book, the first account of the Nazi era for the twenty-first century and our globalized world.There was no aspect of Nazi power untouched by economics, yet Adam Tooze is the first to place economics alongside race and politics at the heart of the story of the Third Reich. And America, in Tooze's view, is the true pivot for Hitler's epic challenge to a shift in the world order. Hitler intuitively understood how Germany's relative poverty in the 1930s was the result not just of global depression, but also of Germany's limited resources. He predicted the dawning of a globalized world in which Europe would be crushed by America's overwhelming power, against which he saw only one last chance: a German super-state dominating Europe. Doing what Europeans had done for three centuries, he sought to carve out an imperial hinterland through one last land grab to the east, to give him the self-sufficiency to prevail in the coming superpower competition. With the odds stacked against him, he launched his underresourced armies on their unprecedented and ultimately futile rampage across Europe.Hitler knew by the summer of 1939 that his efforts to prepare for a long war with the West were doomed to failure. Ideology drove him forward. Hitler became convinced that Jewish elements in Washington, London, and Paris were circling round him, and from 1938, the international "Jewish question: was synonymous with America in his mind. Even in the summer of 1940, at the moment of Germany's greatest triumphs, Hitler was still haunted by the looming threat of Anglo-American air and sea power, orchestrated by, he believed, the world Jewish conspiracy.Tooze also casts a stark new light on Albert Speer's role in sustaining the Third Reich to its bloody end, after the catastrophe of the Soviet invasion. Speer, Tooze proposes, was no apolitical agent of technocratic efficiency but a Hitler loyalist who would stop at nothing to continue a hopeless battle of attrition, at the cost of tens of millions of lives.The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that will fundamentally change the way in which we view Nazi Germany and the Second World War.

    

    

    It started like a Hollywood thriller, secretly transporting from England $25 million in British gold bullion, delivered to the ship in unguarded bread trucks, a pre-war “Neutrality Patrol” that was really an unofficial hostile search for the far bigger and more powerful German battleship Prinz Eugen, and sneaking through the Panama Canal at night with the ship’s name and hull number covered for secrecy. Now, with the ship bulging with an unusual load of fuel and supplies, in the company of a large fleet quietly passing under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the crew was about to learn of their latest (but not last) and most improbable adventure yet as the captain made an announcement that would change the war and their lives forever, “We are going to Tokyo!”. Over three years, scores of battles and hundreds of thousands of ocean miles later, the Nashville and her crew had earned 10 Battle Stars, served from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the Aleutians to the Yangtze River, as McArthur’s flagship and suffered heavy casualties from a devastating kamikaze attack. Tokyo Rose reported her sunk, repeatedly. Earlier, with goodwill trips that included France, England, Scandinavia, Bermuda and Rio de Janeiro, the new, sleek Nashville built a pre-war reputation as a “glamour ship”. But with war came the secret missions, capturing the second and third Japanese POWs of the war, having a torpedo pass just under the stern, being strafed and bombed by Japanese planes, losing a third of the crew in a single devastating Kamikaze attack, swimming in shark infested waters protected by marines with machine guns, enjoying the beauty of Sydney and her people, planning a suicide mission to destroy the Japanese fishing fleet, and bombarding Japanese troops and airfields across the Pacific. The Nashville crew served their ship and country well. They came from Baltimore row-houses, New York walk-ups, San Francisco flats, Kansas wheat farms, Colorado cattle ranches, Louisiana bayous and Maine fishing towns. Many had never traveled more than 25 miles from home and had never seen the ocean until they joined the service. They were part Irish, part Italian, part Polish and All-American. Battered, burnt and bombed, they made the USS Nashville their home and lived and died as eternal shipmates. Historical narrative enriched with the personal stories of the crew, this is the story of a ship and crew of ordinary men who did extraordinary things.

    On May 11, 1945, McKinney returned fire on the Japanese attacking his unit, using every available weapon-even his fists-standing alone against wave after wave of dedicated Japanese soldiers. At the end, John McKinney was alive-with over forty Japanese bodies before him. This is the story of an extraordinary man whose courage and fortitude in battle saved many American lives, and whose legacy has been sadly forgotten by all but a few. Here, the proud legacy of John McKinney lives on.

    Through clever subterfuge and daring, the Graf Spee takes ship after ship, ultimately forcing the British Navy to send twenty ships in search of the elusive Spee.

    The outcome of WWII could very possibly have been much different if Knut Haukelid & his small, but courageous band of Norwegian soldiers had not been successful in sabotaging the Nazis supply of heavy water. The heavy water produced at a facility in occupied Norway was vital to Hitler's race with the USA to develop the atomic bomb. Skis Against the Atom gives the reader an intimate account of the valiant & self-sacrificing service that the not-to-be-subdued Norwegians performed for the whole free world.

    With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different and neither woman had a good word to say for the other.Hanna was middle-class, vivacious, and distinctly Aryan, while the darker, more self-effacing Melitta came from an aristocratic Prussian family. Both were driven by deeply held convictions about honor and patriotism; but ultimately, while Hanna tried to save Hitler's life, begging him to let her fly him to safety in April 1945, Melitta covertly supported the most famous attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer. Their interwoven lives provide vivid insight into Nazi Germany and its attitudes toward women, class, and race.Acclaimed biographer Clare Mulley gets under the skin of these two distinctive and unconventional women, giving a full--and as yet largely unknown--account of their contrasting yet strangely parallel lives, against a changing backdrop of the 1936 Olympics, the Eastern Front, the Berlin Air Club, and Hitler's bunker. Told with brio and great narrative flair, The Women Who Flew for Hitler is an extraordinary true story, with all the excitement and color of the best fiction.

    Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda kept a diary throughout his time as a member of the Nazi Party and this covers the period of the last weeks of WW2 from February-April, 1945. Edited, Introduced and annotated by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, this is a remarkable account from within of the crumbling of the Nazi empire by its arch-apologist.

    The Third Reich restores a broad perspective and intellectual unity to issues that have become academic subspecialties and offers a brilliant new interpretation of Hitler's evil rule.Filled with human and moral considerations that are missing from theoretical accounts, Michael Burleigh's book gives full weight to the experience of ordinary people who were swept up in, or repelled by, Hitler's movement and emphasizes international themes-for Nazi Germany appealed to many European nations, and its wartime conduct included efforts to dominate the Continental economy and involved gigantic population transfers and exterminations, recruitment of foreign labor, and multinational armies.

    The story of the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem involved not only an Airborne Corps of three Divisions but also the bulk of the British 2nd Army in Europe. Gen. Urquhart has told the story of those fateful nine days clearly, frankly and, despite the terrible circumstances, not without humor.It ranks as an important work, describing an operation which opened with such high hopes and left its name forever as a feat of the highest endurance and valor.

    George H. Stein examines in detail the structure and organization of the Waffen SS and describes the rigid personnel selection and intensive physical, military, and ideological training that helped to create the tough and dedicated cadre around which the larger force of the later war years was built.