Book picks similar to
Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945 by Anton Weiss-Wendt
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The Other Schindler... Irena Sendler: Savior of the Holocaust Children
Abhijit Thite - 2009
This is the incredible true story that combines many facts - together, they form one of history’s most fascinating and at the same time, gruesome eras.Germany’s occupation of Poland during the Second World War set off a chain of events that were unprecedented in their complexities of human behaviour. With the largest Jewish population in Europe, Poland suffered the worst fallout of German atrocities. From containment of Jews in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto to their ultimate annihilation in the extermination camps, World War II forms a sordid tale of discrimination and hate.Against this is the fragrance of hope and kindness. When the world is in peril, deliverance always comes, and so it was that a few people defied the odds to emerge angel in times of distress, beacons of hope amidst the throes of darkness.This is the true account of a woman who was as gentle as she was steely-minded.Irena Sendler, a little lady who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto is today known all over the world, with thousand of websites dedicated to her. This, though, is the first complete published book of her incredible journey from an inspired young girl to a nonagenarian who spurned all personal glory.
Hitler
Joachim Fest - 1974
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)
The Labyrinth: Memoirs Of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief Of Counterintelligence
Walter Schellenberg - 1956
Schellenberg recounts with firsthand knowledge the motivations and machinations surrounding the Nazi Army's every move in Poland, Austria, and Russia. But this remarkable inside account is perhaps most memorable for its riveting portraits of Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich Mueller, Ernst Kaltenbrunner—men whom Schellenberg calls, with stunning lack of irony, ”Hitler's willing executioners.”
The Bravest Battle: The Twenty-eight Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Dan Kurzman - 1975
Despite the starvation and disease that claimed 50,000 lives per year, the Jews were not dying swiftly enough to suit Heinrich Himmler, who ordered in 1942 that the Warsaw Ghetto be dismantled and the 450,000 inhabitants be deported to the gas chambers at Treblinka. On April 19, 1943, the first day of Passover, two thousand German troops, singing confidently, marched into the ghetto to round up the remnant of remaining Jews. Suddenly, a fifteen-year-old girl tossed a grenade in their midst. Within minutes the German army had been routed. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had begin.This is the first full-scale, step-by-step account of the climatic twenty-eight-day struggle of the poorly armed Jews against their Nazi exterminators. The Bravest Battle took more than two years to write and involved interviewing more than 500 people, including most of the surviving fighters. This moving history cannot be matched for its authenticity and drama. The Bravest Battle is a testament to the Warsaw Jews, who fought for survival with dignity and courage.
The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology
Fritz Stern - 1965
By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair. Lagarde, Langbein, and Moeller van den Bruck-their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich-attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit. But they were more than the critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well. Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth. Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian. It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality.
Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
Larry Wolff - 1994
The author argues that this conceptual reorientation from the previously accepted "Northern" and "Southern" was a work of cultural construction and intellectual artifice created by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. He shows how the philosophers viewed the continent from the perspective of Paris and deliberately cultivated an idea of the backwardness of "Eastern Europe" the more readily to affirm the importance of "Western Europe".
Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It
Bruni de la Motte - 2015
Such descriptions are based largely on prejudice, ignorance and wilful animosity. This book is an attempt to provide a more balanced evaluation and to examine GDR-style socialism in terms of what we can learn from it. The authors, while not ignoring the real deficiencies of GDR society, emphasise the many aspects that were positive, and demonstrate that alternative ways of organising society are possible. This volume is an updated and much expanded edition of their booklet first published in 2009. The authors have added more detail on how the GDR came into being as a separate state, and about how society functioned and what values determined the every-day life of its citizens. There is also a whole new section on what happened in the aftermath of unification, particularly to the economy. While unification brought East Germans access to a more affluent society, freedom to travel throughout the world and the end to an over-centralised political system, it also brought with it unemployment, social breakdown and loss of hope, particularly in the once thriving rural areas.
The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945
Michael Burleigh - 1991
This book deals with the ideas and institutions that underpinned this mission, and shows how Nazi policy affected various groups of people, both victims and beneficiaries. The book begins with a serious discussion of the origins of Nazi racial ideology, and then demonstrates the way in which this was translated into official policy. It deals with the systematic persecution not only of the Jews, but also with the fate of lesser-known groups such as Sinti and Roma, the mentally handicapped, the asocial, and homosexuals.
Citadel: The Battle of Kursk
Robin Cross - 1993
Two vast armies engaged one another on land and in the air, in a conflict that included the most costly single day of aerial warfare of all time. This was the battle of Kursk - a battle so terrible that even Hitler confessed it made his ‘stomach turn over’. Citadel was the last great German offensive on the Eastern Front; its aim was to claw back the initiative after the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in January 1943. The location chosen by Hitler was the Kursk salient in the heartland of the Ukraine. The date was 5 July 1943, the codename ‘Citadel’. The Red Army, warned of the German plans by the ‘Lucy’ spy network in Switzerland, was prepared to defend the salient in massive strength and depth. Against its breakwaters Hitler launched his finest armoured divisions, only to see them mangled beyond repair. No sooner had the German thrusts been contained, while within the tantalizing grasp of success, than the Red Army delivered a series of crushing counter-blows with were to drive the Wehrmacht back beyond the River Dnieper. Characteristically, Hitler had gambled all on a throw of a single dice and had lost the initiative in the East - never to regain it. 'Citadel' provides a detailed picture of the Battle of Kursk, from the strategic tug-of-war waged within both high commands in the agonizing months which preceded the German offensive, to the first-hand experiences of the troops on the ground and the airmen flying over the blazing steppe as the battle reached fever pitch. Robin Cross places the battle firmly within the wider strategic context of the spring and summer of 1943, months in which Hitler and Stalin steeled themselves to take decisions which would decide the course of the war and the shape of the peace which followed. Praise for 'Fallen Eagle': "Mesmerising account of those final, bloody weeks of war ... Cross's account of the final hysterical days in his Berlin Bunker is masterful." Sunday Express Robin Cross is a distinguished journalist and military historian whose books include VE Day: Victory in Europe, The Bombers: Strategy and Tactics and The US Marine Corps. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.
French and Indian War: A History From Beginning to End
Hourly History - 2017
Fought chiefly between the two imperial powers of England and France in the mid-18th century, the struggle would also draw in native Indian nations who sought to exert their own strength and sovereignty over the North American continent. Inside you will read about... ✓ Imperial Appetites ✓ Sparks Ignite ✓ Rumours of War ✓ Pitt Rising ✓ The Montcalm Before the Storm ✓ Fortresses Fall ✓ From the Plains of Abraham to Peace From the first shots fired in the Ohio Valley wilderness in 1754 until the Treaty of Paris signed in 1763, the French and Indian War became a conflict that encircled the globe, drawing in nation after nation and inciting battles from the Caribbean to the Philippines. This book tells the story of this mighty struggle and how its outcome ultimately laid the foundations for the modern world we inhabit today.
The Eastern Front: Memoirs of a Waffen SS Volunteer, 1941-1945
Leon Degrelle - 1985
In a laudatory review appearing in an official US Army Department magazine, US Army Brigadier General John C. Bahnsen wrote: "The pace of the writing is fast; the action is graphic, and a warrior can learn things from reading this book. I recommend its reading by students of the art of war. It is well worth the price." Here is the epic story of the Walloon Legion, a volunteer Belgian unit of the World War II pan-European SS force, as told by the legendary figure whose unmatched frontline combat experience and literary talent made him the premier spokesman for his fallen comrades. Captures the grit, the terror and the glory of Europe's crusade against Communism in absorbing prose. Includes fascinating first-person descriptions of Hitler, Himmler, and other Third Reich personalities. Degrelle vividly describes how he and his comrades endured danger, privation and torrents of shot and shell -- on the sun-baked steppes of Ukraine, at the foothills of the Caucasus, in the depths of bone-chilling winter, through the stinking mud and the flaming hell of Cherkassy, and across the rolling plains of Estonia and the Pomeranian lake country. You’ll learn what moved the 35-year-old Degrelle -- a brilliant intellectual and his country’s most colorful political leader -- to enlist as a private in the volunteer legion he himself organized to join with Third Reich Germany and its allies in their titanic fight against the Bolshevik enemy.
The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin`s War with Germany
John Erickson - 1975
. . has written the outstanding history of the Soviet-German war in English, or, for that matter, any language. The research alone is breathtaking. Erickson has mastered all the Russian sources and compared them with the German records. . . . He has shed light on many heretofore murky matters.”—Reid Beddow, Washington Post Book World“Masterly. . . . A vividly detailed yet comprehensive account of the decisive Eastern-front battleground.”—Christopher Hudson, London Evening Standard“The outstanding book on the Soviet war in any language.”—A. J. P. Taylor, Observer“This authoritative book by a first-class military historian is easily read.”—Philip Warner, Daily Telegraph
A Compelling Unknown Force - The Dyatlov Pass Incident: AKA "Six Hours to Live"
Clark Wilkins - 2014
It is one of the great mysteries of our times. They would be found with missing eyes, even a missing tongue, crushed bones, and stripped of their clothes in minus 50 degree temperatures . Theories range from their being being murdered by the CIA to space aliens, to "Abominable Snowmen". This book explores this famous incident using a technique known as "Higher criticism" to explain their terrifying deaths. It provides hitherto unexplored answers and is now the leading source on the incident, debunking all previous explanations while pointing to eleven points of overwhelming evidence that tell us what really happened on this tragic night of horror.
Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund
Arnie Bernstein - 2013
The rise and fall of Fritz Kuhn and his German-American Bund at the hands of these disparate fighters is a sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, and always compelling story from start to finish.
Travellers in the Third Reich
Julia Boyd - 2017
How easy was it to know what was actually going on, to grasp the essence of National Socialism, to remain untouched by the propaganda or predict the Holocaust?Travellers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including students, politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, journalists, fascists, artists, tourists, even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler – one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere.These are the accidental eyewitnesses to history. Disturbing, absurd, moving, and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, their tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes and its ultimate destruction.