After the war, Gretel fell in love with a British officer. When he was transferred back to England, her determination and bravery were tested once more.

    This is the unbelievable autobiographical story of Ruth Uzrad, a Jewish teenager whose life was turned upside down by the Nazi regime. After her father was arrested one night from their Berlin apartment by the Gestapo, Ruth’s mother sends 13 year-old Ruth and her two younger sisters out on their escape route across Europe by train to the safety of Belgium. But then the Nazis also reach Belgium, driving Ruth into the French Jewish underground… Later, when the Nazis conquer Belgium, Ruth and one of her sisters escape to France, leaving the youngest sister behind to be taken in by a Belgian foster family. Later, Ruth joins the Jewish underground movement in France and takes on a false identity and a new name, Renee. As an underground fighter, she participates in special operations aimed at rescuing Jews in danger. When the German police set out to arrest her, she manages to cross the border into Spain and eventually makes her way to Israel, where she makes her home and spends the rest of her life.

    Clay Bonnyman Evans has honored that lineage with this masterful melding of military history and personal quest.”—Ron Powers, co-author of New York Times #1 bestseller Flags of Our FathersIn November 1943, Marine 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. was mortally wounded while leading a successful assault on a critical Japanese fortification on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa, and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor. The brutal, bloody 76-hour battle would ultimately claim the lives of more than 1,100 Marines and 5,000 Japanese forces. But Bonnyman's remains, along with those of hundreds of other Marines, were hastily buried and lost to history following the battle, and it would take an extraordinary effort by a determined group of dedicated civilians to find him.In 2010, having become disillusioned with the U.S. government's half-hearted efforts to recover the "lost Marines of Tarawa," Bonnyman's grandson, Clay Bonnyman Evans, was privileged to join the efforts of History Flight, Inc., a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding and repatriating the remains of lost U.S. service personnel.In Bones of My Grandfather, Evans tells the remarkable story of History Flight's mission to recover hundreds of Marines long lost to history in the sands of Tarawa. Even as the organization begins to unearth the physical past on a remote Pacific island, Evans begins his own quest to unearth and reclaim the true history of his grandfather, a charismatic, complicated hero whose life had been whitewashed, sanitized, and diminished over the decades.On May 29, 2015, Evans knelt beside a History Flight archaeologist as she uncovered the long-lost, well-preserved remains of his grandfather. And more than seventy years after giving his life for his country, a World War II hero finally came home.

    Hoffmann published his first book of photographs in 1919, following his work as an official photographer for the German army. In 1920 he joined the Nazi Party, and his association with Hitler began.He became Hitler's official photographer and traveled with him extensively. He took over two million photographs of Hitler, and they were distributed widely, including on postage stamps, an enterprise that proved very profitable for both men. Hoffmann published several books on Hitler in the 1930s, including The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933). Hoffmann and Hitler were very close, and he acted not only as a personal confidante - his memoirs include rare details of the F�hrer - but also as a matchmaker - it is Hoffmann who introduced Eva Braun, his studio assistant, to Hitler.At the end of the war, Hoffmann was arrested by the US military, who also seized his photographic archive, and was sentenced to imprisonment for Nazi profiteering.This edition of a classic book includes photographs by Hoffmann and a new introduction by Roger Moorhouse.

    The atrocities unleashed by the Nazi regime were unprecedented; families were torn apart, millions were murdered, and a cloud of fear cast over the world. But somewhere, love and hope remained ignited. World War II Love Stories tells the unforgettable stories of those couples brought together by war. They are enduring tales of great love, intense passion, and often tragedy, but most of all they are tales that celebrate the human spirit at its time of greatest trial.

    Their goal: to smash the main factories and production centers of the Luftwaffe while also drawing German planes into an aerial battle of attrition to neutralize the Luftwaffe as a fighting force prior to the cross-channel invasion, planned for a few months later. Officially called Operation ARGUMENT, this aerial offensive quickly became known as "Big Week," and it was one of the turning-point engagements of World War II. In Big Week, acclaimed World War II historian James Holland chronicles the massive air battle through the experiences of those who lived and died during it. Prior to Big Week, the air forces on both sides were in crisis. Allied raids into Germany were being decimated, but German resources--fuel and pilots--were strained to the breaking point. Ultimately new Allied aircraft--especially the American long-range P-51 Mustang--and superior tactics won out during Big Week. Through interviews, oral histories, diaries, and official records, Holland follows the fortunes of pilots, crew, and civilians on both sides, taking readers from command headquarters to fighter cockpits to anti-aircraft positions and civilian chaos on the ground, vividly recreating the campaign as it was conceived and unfolded. In the end, the six days of intense air battles largely cleared the skies of enemy aircraft when the invasion took place on June 6, 1944--D-Day.Big Week is both an original contribution to WWII literature and a brilliant piece of narrative history, recapturing a largely forgotten campaign that was one of the most critically important periods of the entire war.

    He was convicted of treason by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians, and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous espionage agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?Using archives long hidden in Germany as well as intimate correspondence, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan brings into sharp focus the moral and political ambiguity of the times in which Fuchs lived and the ideals with which he struggled. As a university student in Germany, he stood up to Nazi terror without flinching, and joined the Communists largely because they were the only ones resisting the Nazis. After escaping to Britain, he was arrested as a German �migr�--an "enemy alien"--and sent to an internment camp in Canada. His mentor at university, Max Born, worked to facilitate his release. After years of struggle and ideological conflict, when he joined the atomic bomb project, first in Manhattan and later at Los Alamos, his loyalties were firmly split. In 1944, in New York with the British Scientific Mission, he started handing over research, partly because of his Communist convictions but seemingly also to level the playing field of the world powers.With thrilling detail from never-before-seen archives, Atomic Spy places readers in the Germany of an ascendant Nazi party; the British university classroom of Max Born; a British internment camp in Canada; the secret laboratories of Los Alamos; and Eastern Germany at the height of the Cold War. Atomic Spy shows the real Klaus Fuchs--who he was, what he did, why he did it, and how he was caught. His extraordinary life is a cautionary tale about morality and the prisms through which we perceive it--and a classic anti-hero story.

    Long before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been supporting the Allies. While Americans were sympathetic to the people being crushed under the Axis powers, they were unwilling to enter a foreign war. FDR knew he had to fight against isolationism, anti-Semitism, and the scars of World War I, and win the war of public sentiment. In 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, A Divided America in a World at War Marc Wortman explores the "complex, contentious, and portentous" journey of America’s entry into World War II.FDR used all the powers at his disposal, from helping Winston Churchill and the British Navy with loans, to espionage at home and abroad, to battle with Hitler in the shadows. To gain public opinion, the largest obstacle was Charles Lindberg and his Committee for America First with its following of thousands. Wortman tracks journalist Philip Johnson and William Shirer as they report on the invasion of Poland: one a Nazi sympathizer, the other fervently anti-Nazi. Johnson and Shirer’s story are threads woven throughout the book. Combining military and political history, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, A Divided America in a World at War tells the story of how FDR led the country to war.

    By the time she was twelve, the war had begun. Abandoned by her father when he realized the price of being associated with a Jewish wife and family, Anita and her mother were ultimately left to fend for themselves. Anita's teenage years are spent desperately fighting for survival yet learning to trust in the One she discovered would not leave her ...

    After their attempts to penetrate the Ghetto had failed, they decided to spare themselves casualties by destroying it from outside with cannon and aerial bombings. A few days later the Ghetto was totally destroyed. . . . The 'streets' were nothing but rows of smoldering ruins. It was hard to cross them without stepping on charred bodies."—Kazik When the Nazis decided to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, five hundred young Jewish fighters within the Ghetto rose up to defy them. With no weapons, no influence, and no experience in warfare, they managed to resist the Germans for almost a month. In the end, when the battle was lost, the surviving Jews were led out of the ruins through the sewers by a nineteen-year-old fighter known as Kazik. As head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which had planned and executed the uprising, Kazik spent the rest of the war helping to care for the several thousand Jews who still remained in Warsaw. This book—an extraordinary story of courage and perseverance—is Kazik's wartime memoir. In stark, spare detail, Kazik reports on the efforts to prepare for the defense of the Warsaw Ghetto, the calamitous battle with the Germans, and the rescue of the few Jews who were still alive after the Ghetto was destroyed. He describes how he assumed a false Aryan identity in order to pass through the city as he collected money and found hiding places for the survivors. Constantly on guard, fearful of informers, his life always in danger, he nevertheless plotted resourcefully to aid his fellow Jews. He tells how he joined the Poles during their ill-fated uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw in 1944, had further brushes with death assisting the Polish underground, and returned to Warsaw to watch its liberation by the Russian army. Suspenseful, moving, and remarkably heroic, Kazik's memoir is only the second source to be published on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It will help demolish the image of Jews as submissive victims in the Holocaust.

    In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It does so not by looking at political leaders in Vichy or Paris or London but rather at those who were caught up in daily horrors of war. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy. It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars. It recounts the fate of a couple of estranged middle-aged Jews, separated by the mobilisation of 1939, who found themselves (in July 1942) on the same train to Auschwitz. Extremely moving and brilliantly readable, The Unfree French is a remarkable addition to the literature of the Second World War.

    He devised survival strategies—stamp collecting, watching soccer, and the like—that served as screens to block out the increasingly oppressive world around him. Even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.

    German engineers have fortified Montfaucon, a rocky butte in northern France, with bunkers, trenches, and giant guns. Following a number of bloody, unsuccessful attacks, the French deem Montfaucon impregnable and dub it the Little Gibraltar of the Western Front. Capturing it requires 1.2 million American soldiers, and 122,000 American casualties. But at the heart of the victory is a betrayal of Americans by Americans. Now William T. Walker tells the full story in his masterful Betrayal at Little Gibraltar.In the assault on Montfaucon, American forces became strangely bogged down, a delay that cost untold thousands of lives as the Germans defended their position with no mercy. Years of archival research demonstrate that the actual cause of the failure was the disobedience of a senior American officer, Lieutenant General Robert E. Lee Bullard, who subverted orders to assist the US 79th Division, under the command of General John J. Pershing. The result was unnecessary slaughter of American doughboys. Although several officers discovered the circumstances, Pershing protected Bullard—an old friend from West Point days—and covered up the story. The true account of the battle was almost lost to time.Betrayal at Little Gibraltar tells vivid human stories of the soldiers who fought to capture the giant fortress and push the American advance. Using unpublished first-person accounts—and featuring photographs, documents, and maps that place you in the action—Walker describes the horrors of World War I combat, the sacrifices of the doughboys, and the determined efforts of two participants to pierce the cover-up and to solve the mystery of Montfaucon. Like Stephen Ambrose and S.C. Gwynne, Walker is writing popular history at its best.

    The Russian armies are closing in. When Hanno Frisch sees his twin brother killed, he's had enough. On the run, he meets streetwise Effi. She's on her way to the West to find her father, who's in the US Army. Effi's learned the hard way that she must keep secrets to herself - and she's even less keen to trust Hanno when she finds out he's a policeman's son. But there are far more dangerous people on the road: Russian soldiers, German deserters - and Major Otto, who likes to play games with people before he kills them.

    Shortly after this unforgettable game, many of the players and coaches left their respective colleges, entered the military, and went on to serve around the world in famous battlegrounds, from Iwo Jima and Okinawa to Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, where fate and destiny would bring them back together on faraway battlefields, fighting on the same team.Fields of Battle is a powerful story that sheds light on a little-known slice of American history where World War II and football intersect. Author Brian Curtis captures in gripping detail an intimate account of the teamwork, grit, and determination that took place on both the football and battle fields.