Book picks similar to
Quest: Searching for Germany's Nazi Past by Ib Melchior
history
germany
c-hist-fic-era-war
world-war-2
The Cover-Up at Omaha Beach: D-Day, the US Rangers, and the Untold Story of Maisy Battery
Gary Sterne - 2013
They were to lead the assault on Omaha Beach and break out inland. Simultaneously, other Ranger units would scale the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to destroy the ostensibly huge gun battery there and thus protect the invasion fleet from being targeted. But was the Pointe du Hoc mission actually necessary? Why did the Allies plan and execute an attack on a gun battery that they knew in advance contained no field guns? And more importantly, why did they ignore the position at Maisy that did? Using personal interviews with the surviving Rangers who fought on the beach and at Pointe du Hoc, The Cover-Up at Omaha Beach presents exceptionally detailed new research that takes the reader into the middle of the action with the Rangers.Gary Sterne has made a painstaking study of what the Allies actually knew in advance of D-Day, including what was known about Maisy Battery. Maps, orders, and assault plans have been found in US, UK, and German archives, many of which have only been recently released after having been classified for more than sixty years. Radio communications of the Rangers as they advanced inland have been found, and Royal Air Force intelligence evaluations of bombing missions directed at the site have now been released. All these combine to make The Cover-Up at Omaha Beach one of the most up-to-date references on the subject.
Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949
Siegfried Knappe - 1992
The Somme. The Italian Campaign. The Russian Front. And inside Hitler's bunker during The Battle of Berlin . . . World War II through the eyes of a solider of the Reich.Siegfried Knappe fought, was wounded, and survived battles in nearly every major Wehrmacht campaign. His astonishing career begins with Hitler's rise to power--and ends with a five-year term in a Russian prison camp, after the Allies rolled victoriously into the smoking rubble of Berlin. The enormous range of Knappe's fighting experiences provides an unrivaled combat history of World War II, and a great deal more besides.Based on Knappe's wartime diaries, filled with 16 pages of photos he smuggled into the West at war's end, Soldat delivers a rare opportunity for the reader to understand how a ruthless psychopath motivated an entire generation of ordinary Germans to carry out his monstrous schemes . . . and offers stunning insight into the life of a soldier in Hitler's army."Remarkable! World War II from inside the Wehrmacht."--Kirkus Reviews
They Flew Hurricanes
Adrian Stewart - 2006
Many pilots, including Douglas Bader, thought it was superior to the Spit--but together they saved Britain from Nazi invasion and possible defeat.Adrian Stewart has produced a gloriously atmospheric and nostalgic book capturing the spirit of these great aircraft and the pilots who flew them. It tracks the aircraft as it was developed and improved, and follows it to the many theaters of the war where it saw service. Among the lesser-known are Burma and hazardous convoy protection in the Arctic and Mediterranean, flying from makeshift carriers. This book will fascinate specialist aviation historians and those who enjoy a rattling good war story, and includes a superb selection of rare photographs.
A Fine Night for Tanks: The Road to Falaise
Ken Tout - 1998
Using eye-witness accounts from tank crews and infantry, Ken Tout reveals how on 7 August 1944 a combined Canadian and British force sent four armoured columns south of Caen to close the Falaise gap. Caen had been an objective of the British forces assaulting Sword Beach on D-Day. However, the German defences were strongest in this sector, and most of the German reinforcements sent to Normandy were committed to the defence of the city.Driving through the night, the British tanks reached their objectives behind German lines and linked up with their Canadian colleagues.The elite Wittman Troop counter-attacked with Tiger tanks, the most feared weapon of the Normandy campaign, only to be wiped out for minimal Allied loss. Operation Totalize I was a stunning success and sealed the fate of the German forces now encircled and trapped in the Falaise Pocket.Ken Tout served with the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry during the Second World War, fighting in Sherman tanks and seeing action in Operation ‘Totalize I’. Tout’s books have attracted many plaudits and have been described as Second World War classics. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.
Napoleon and Hitler
Desmond Seward - 1989
First published in 1992.
Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor
Joshua M. Greene - 2003
In Justice at Dachau, Joshua M. Greene, maker of the award winning documentary film Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, recreates the Dachau trials and reveals the dramatic story of William Denson, a soft-spoken young lawyer from Alabama whisked from teaching law at West Point to leading the prosecution in the largest series of Nazi trials in history. In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s first concentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team from lawyers who had no background in war crimes and determining charges for crimes that courts had never before confronted. Among the accused were Dr. Klaus Schilling, responsible for hundreds of deaths in his “research” for a cure for malaria; Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard psychologist turned Gestapo informant; and one of history’s most notorious female war criminals, Ilse Koch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins and human bone lamps made headlines worldwide. Denson, just thirty-two years old, with one criminal trial to his name, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but nearly two years of exposure to such horrors took its toll. His wife divorced him, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed from exhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure from his army superiors to bring the trials to a rapid end when their agenda shifted away from punishing Nazis to winning the Germans’ support in the emerging Cold War. Denson persevered, determined to create a careful record of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. When, in a final shocking twist, the United States used clandestine reversals and commutation of sentences to set free those found guilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try to prevent justice from being undone.
Escape: Our journey home through war-torn Germany
Barbie Probert-Wright - 2019
Trapped between advancing armies, stranded hundreds of miles from their mother, and with their father missing in action, sisters Barbie and Eva were confronted with an impossible choice.Should they stay and face invasion or risk their lives to find their mother?Together, they set out on a perilous three-hundred mile journey on foot across a country ravaged by war. Fuelled by courage and love, Eva and seven-year-old Barbie encounter incredible hardship, extraordinary bravery, and overwhelming generosity.Against all odds, they both survived.But neither sister came out of the journey unscathed . . .This is the powerful true story of their escape.(Previously published as Little Girl Lost)
Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler
Mark Riebling - 2015
But this conventional narrative is not the full story.In Church of Spies, the intelligence expert Mark Riebling draws on a wealth of recently uncovered documents to argue that, far from being Hitler’s lackey, Pius was an active anti-Nazi spymaster. He directed a vast network of Vatican operatives—priests and laypeople alike—who partnered with the German resistance, tipped the Allies off to Hitler’s invasions of France and Russia, and involved themselves in three separate plots to assassinate Hitler.A fast-paced and gripping tale of secrecy, danger, and self-sacrifice, Church of Spies takes readers from hidden crypts beneath the Vatican to Nazi bunkers in Germany to chart the true legacy of Pius’s secret war. Although these revelations do not excuse Pius’s public silence during the war, they provide us with a deeper understanding of the man reviled by so many.
We Will Not Go to Tuapse: From the Donets to the Oder with the Legion Wallonie and 5th SS Volunteer Assault Brigade 'Wallonien' 1942-45
Fernand Kaisergruber - 2016
However, it also ventures far beyond the usual soldier's story and approaches a travelogue of the Eastern Front campaign, seldom attained by the memoirs of the period. His self-published book in French is highly regarded by Belgian historian and expert on these volunteers Eddy de Bruyne, and Battle of Cherkassy author Douglas Nash. This book merits attention as the SS volunteer equivalent of Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, a bestseller in the USA and Europe. By comparison, Kaisergruber’s story has the advantage of being completely verifiable by documents and serious historical narratives already published, such as Eddy de Bruyne’s For Rex and for Belgium and Kenneth Estes' European Anabasis.Until recent years, very little was known of the tens of thousands of foreign nationals from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France and Spain who served voluntarily in the military formations of the German Army and the German Waffen-SS. In Kaisergruber’s book, the reader discovers important issues of collaboration, the apparent contributions of the volunteers to the German war effort, their varied experiences, their motives, the attitude of the German High Command and bureaucracy, and the reaction to these in the occupied countries. The combat experiences of the Walloons echoed those of the very best volunteer units of the Waffen-SS, although they shared equally in the collapse of the Third Reich in May, 1945.Although unapologetic for his service, Kaisergruber makes no special claims for the German cause and writes not from any postwar apologia and dogma, but instead from his firsthand observations as a young man experiencing war for the first time, extending far beyond what had been imaginable at the time. His observations of fellow soldiers, commanders, Russian civilians and the battlefields prove poignant and telling. They remain as fresh as when he first wrote some of them down in his travel diary, ‘Pensées fugitives et Souvenirs (1941–46)’. Fernand Kaisergruber draws upon his contemporary diaries, those of his comrades and his later work with them while secretary of their postwar veteran's league to present a thoroughly engaging epic.
A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy's Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland
Philip Bialowitz - 2008
Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war. Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust. In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise.
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
Arrival of Eagles: Luftwaffe Landings in Britain 1939–1945
Andy Saunders - 2014
Some had got lost, others were brought by defectors; some were lured through electronic countermeasures by the RAF, others brought down in unusual combat circumstances. All manner of types appeared He111, Go145, Me110, Ju88, Me109 F and G, FW190, Do217 and all were of great interest to the RAF. In some cases aircraft were repaired and test flown, betraying vital and invaluable information. Distinguished author Andy Saunders examines a selection of such fascinating cases and draws upon his own research, interviews, official reports and eyewitness accounts to bring alive these truly unusual accounts, all richly illustrated with contemporary photographs."
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.
Against the Odds: Survival on the Russian Front 1944-1945
John Stieber - 1995
Caught there by the outbreak of the Second World War, he was unable to return to his parents for seven years. In due course, he was called to serve in an anti-aircraft battery and in the National Labour Service. Just after his eighteenth birthday, he was sent to the Russian Front with the elite Paratrooper and Tank Division, Hermann Göring. He lived through an amazing series of events, escaping death many times and was one of the few survivors of his division when the war ended. In this narrative of his early life, John Stieber describes how he went from a carefree childhood through increasing hardships, until every day of his life became a challenge for survival.
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina
Uki Goñi - 1996
Goni uncovers an elaborate network that relied on the complicity of the Vatican, the Argentine Catholic Church, and the Swiss authorities. The discoveries made in this meticulously researched book reveal the entangled web of the Nazi regime and its sympathizers and has prompted Argentine officials to demand closed files on the Nazi era from their current government.