In it, he grapples with perhaps the most challenging questions of modern history: Why was the twentieth century history's bloodiest by far? Why did unprecedented material progress go hand in hand with total war and genocide? His quest for new answers takes him from the walls of Nanjing to the bloody beaches of Normandy, from the economics of ethnic cleansing to the politics of imperial decline and fall. The result, as brilliantly written as it is vital, is a great historian's masterwork.

    Fest tells and interprets the extraordinary story of a man's and a nation's rise from impotence to absolute power, as Germany and Hitler, from shared premises, entered into their covenant. He shows Hitler exploiting the resentments of the shaken, post-World War I social order and seeing through all that was hollow behind the appearance of power, at home and abroad. Fest reveals the singularly penetrating politician, hypnotizing Germans and outsiders alike with the scope of his projects and the theatricality of their presentation. Fest also, perhaps most importantly, brilliantly uncovers the destructive personality who aimed at and achieved devastation on an unprecedented scale. As history and as biography, this is a towering achievement, a compelling story told in a way only a German could tell it, "dispassionately, but from the inside." (Time)

    It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known.No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.The accounts of how the United States got involved and how Hitler used Mussolini and Japan are astonishing, and the coverage of the war-from Germany's early successes to her eventual defeat-is must reading

    Buoyed by millions of packages soldiers sent from the front, Germans also benefited from the systematic plunder of Jewish possessions. Any qualms were swept away by waves of tax breaks and government handouts.Hitler's Beneficiaries has been hailed as "startling" by Richard Evans, and as "fascinating and important" by Christopher Browning. Above all, as Omer Bartov testifies, this remarkable book "irreversibly transforms our understanding of the Third Reich."

    Under furious attack both from the ground and the air, the average survival time of a First World War reconnaissance pilot is eighteen hours. George Duckwell, reluctant novice-hero of the Royal Flying Corps, is living on borrowed time. Having joined up to escape disgrace at home, George can only watch in horror as a succession of comrades - inexperienced, under-trained and hopelessly idealistic - are shot down, burned, maimed and killed, while somehow he survives. Struggling to make sense of the conflict, George forms an awkward friendship with William 'Mac' MacBride, an enigmatic Canadian ace, waging his own private war against the legendary Red Baron. But when Mac falls for George's sweetheart - front-line nurse Emily - heartbroken George learns that Mac's mysterious past is darker than he imagined, and the fragile bond that keeps the two men alive comes under threat on the eve of the most lethal conflict the modern world has known.

    Forty years after his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny set a standard for scholarship of the Nazi era, Lord Alan Bullock gives readers a breathtakingly accomplished dual biography that places Adolf Hitler's origins, personality, career, and legacy alongside those of Joseph Stalin--his implacable antagonist and moral mirror image.

    During both wars, fantastic atrocity stories were invented by Allied propaganda to create hatred of the German people for the purpose of bringing public opinion around to support the wars. The "Holocaust" propaganda which emerged after World War II further solidified this image of Germany as history's ultimate villain. But how true is this "official" story? Was Germany really history's ultimate villain? In this book, the author paints a different picture. He explains that Germany was not the perpetrator of World War I nor World War II, but instead, was the victim of Allied aggression in both wars. The instability wrought by World War I made the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia possible, which brought world Communism into existence. Hitler and Germany recognized world Communism, with its base in the Soviet Union, as an existential threat to Western, Christian Civilization, and he dedicated himself and Germany to a death struggle against it. Far from being the disturber of European peace, Germany served as a bulwark which prevented Communist revolution from sweeping over Europe. The pity was that the United States and Britain did not see Communist Russia in the same light, ultimately with disastrous consequences for Western Civilization. The author believes that Britain and the United States joined the wrong side in the war.

    Now author Paul Roland turns the tables with this brilliant new exposé - a fascinating psychological profile of the leading Nazis and their lesser-known associates.

    But in this groundbreaking book, prize-winning historian Edith Sheffer exposes that Asperger was not only involved in the racial policies of Hitler’s Third Reich, he was complicit in the murder of children.As the Nazi regime slaughtered millions across Europe during World War Two, it sorted people according to race, religion, behavior, and physical condition for either treatment or elimination. Nazi psychiatrists targeted children with different kinds of minds—especially those thought to lack social skills—claiming the Reich had no place for them. Asperger and his colleagues endeavored to mold certain "autistic" children into productive citizens, while transferring others they deemed untreatable to Spiegelgrund, one of the Reich’s deadliest child-killing centers.In the first comprehensive history of the links between autism and Nazism, Sheffer uncovers how a diagnosis common today emerged from the atrocities of the Third Reich. With vivid storytelling and wide-ranging research, Asperger’s Children will move readers to rethink how societies assess, label, and treat those diagnosed with disabilities.

    The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone." In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century.

    Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by three hundred watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism—totalitarianism and freedom—that would stand for nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West on which rested the fate of all humanity. Many brave people risked their lives to overcome this lethal barrier, and some paid the ultimate price.In this captivating work, sure to be the definitive history on the subject, Frederick Taylor weaves together official history, archival materials, and personal accounts to tell the complete story of the Wall's rise and fall, from the postwar political tensions that created a divided Berlin to the internal and external pressures that led to the Wall's demise. In addition, he explores the geopolitical ramifications as well as the impact the wall had on ordinary lives that is still felt today. For the first time the entire world faced the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse, a fear that would be eased only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on the historic night of November 9, 1989.Gripping and authoritative, The Berlin Wall is the first comprehensive account of a divided city and its people in a time when the world seemed to stand permanently on the edge of destruction.

    Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five-month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost; then, in an astonishing reversal, encircled and trapped their Nazi enemy. This battle for the ruins of a city cost more than a million lives. Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides, fighting in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has interviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable.

    A nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs, was suddenly subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors. Rape was rampant. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German-speakers died in the course of brutal deportations from Eastern Europe. By the end of the year, Germany was literally starving to death. Over a million German prisoners of war died in captivity, where they were subjected to inadequate rations and often tortured. All told, an astounding 2.25 million German civilians died violent deaths in the period between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift. A shocking account of a massive and vicious military occupation, After the Reich offers a bold reframing of the history of World War II and its aftermath. Historian Giles MacDonogh has unearthed a record of brutality which has been largely ignored by historians or, worse, justified as legitimate retaliation for the horror of the Holocaust. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary firstperson accounts, MacDonogh has finally given a voice to tens of millions of civilians who, lucky to survive the war, found themselves struggling to survive a hellish peace.

    16 pages of photographs.

    Drawing on a variety of resources, including original documents, Frank McDonough tells the story of her brave struggle against the Nazi regime and examines her legacy of heroism in Germany.