Soldiers

Author: Sonke Neitzel
Publisher: Signal
ISBN: 0771051069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Book Description
On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Netizel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington. These were discoveries that would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general -- almost all of whom had insisted on their own honourable behaviour during the war. Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations -- and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them -- from a historical and psychological perspective, and in reconstucting the frameworks and situations behind these conversations, they have created a powerful narrative of wartime experience.

Soldaten - On Fighting, Killing and Dying

Author: Sonke Neitzel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1849839506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 651

Book Description
In November 2001, as the world still reeled from the attack on the Twin Towers, German historian Sonke Neitzel discovered an extraordinary cache of documents from the Second World War. The documents were the transcripts of German prisoners of war talking among themselves in prisoner of war camps, and secretly recorded by the allies. In these apparently private conversations the soldiers talked freely and openly about their hopes and fears, their concerns and their day-to-day lives. With a banality and ease which to the modern reader can appear shocking, they also talked about the horrors of war -- about rape, death and killing. Sonke Neitzel shared the material with renowned and bestselling psychologist Harald Wezler and they set about trying to make sense of the vast piles of documents, the hours of transcripts. The result is SOLDATEN, a landmark book which will change the way we look at soldiers and war, and is as relevant to our modern conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as it was to the soldiers of the German Army in 1945. Published to huge acclaim and controversy in Germany it was a number one bestseller there and reignited the debate about the banality of evil under the Nazi regime.

Tapping Hitler's Generals

Author: Sönke Neitzel
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1783830557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 863

Book Description
These transcripts of wiretapped conversations between Nazi officers reveal “a fascinating—and chilling—insight into the German view of the war” (Financial Times). Between 1939 and 1942, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence created a number of POW interrogation camps in and around London where they secretly recorded private conversations between senior German staff officers. In this extraordinary work, historian Sonke Neitzel examines these transcripts in depth and presents the private thoughts, opinions, and secrets of Nazi officers during the Second World War. These transcripts address important questions regarding the officers’ attitudes towards the German leadership and Nazi policies: How did the German generals judge the overall war situation? From what date did they consider it lost? How did they react to the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944? What knowledge did they have of the atrocities? By turns insightful and horrifying, this unprecedented research is a must for any serious scholar of the period. “A goldmine of information about what the German High Command privately thought of the war, Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and each other.” —Daily Mail

A Stranger to Myself

Author: Willy Peter Reese
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 142999875X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941-44 is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead. Bearing witness to--and participating in--the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching, and illuminating perspective on life on the eastern front. He documented the carnage perpetrated by both sides, the destruction which was exacerbated by the young soldiers' hunger, frostbite, exhaustion, and their daily struggle to survive. And he wrestled with his own sins, with the realization that what he and his fellow soldiers had done to civilians and enemies alike was unforgivable, with his growing awareness of the Nazi policies toward Jews, and with his deep disillusionment with himself and his fellow men. An international sensation, A Stranger to Myself is an unforgettable account of men at war.

Jacob's Courage

Author: Charles S. Weinblatt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780896729452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In 1939, seventeen-year-old Austrians Jacob Silverman and Rachael Goldberg are bright, talented, and deeply in love. Because they are Jews, their families lose everything: their jobs, possessions, money, contact with loved ones, and finally their liberty. Jacob and Rachael and their families are removed from their comfortable Austrian homes into a decrepit ghetto where they are forced to live in squalor. From there, the families are sent to the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt, where Rachael and Jacob secretly become man and wife. Revel in their excitement as they escape through a harrowing tunnel and join local partisans to fight the Nazis. Ride the fetid train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where only slavery, sickness, brutality, and death await. Stung by the death of loved ones, enslaved and starved, the young lovers have nothing to count on but faith, love, and courage.

Fighting the Russians in Winter: Three Case Studies

Author: A. F. Chew
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428915982
Category : Soviet Union
Languages : en
Pages : 56

Book Description

Für Volk and Führer

Author: Erwin Bartmann
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1909384534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Like many Germans, Berlin schoolboy Erwin Bartmann fell under the spell of the Zeitgeist cultivated by the Nazis. Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and just seventeen-years-old, Erwin fulfilled his dream on Mayday 1941, when he gave up his apprenticeship at the Glaser bakery in Memeler Strasse and walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw, volunteer recruit. On arrival at the Eastern Front in late summer 1941, Erwin was assigned to a frontline communications squad attached to 4.Kompanie and soon discovered that survival was a matter of luck - or the protection of a guardian angel. Good fortune finally deserted Erwin on 11 July 1943 when shrapnel sizzled through his lung during the epic Battle of Kursk-Prokhorovka. Following a period of recovery, and promotion to Unterscharführer, Erwin took up a post as machine-gun instructor with the Ausbildung und Ersatz Bataillon, a training unit based close to the eastern section of the Berliner Ring Autobahn. When the Red Army launched its massive assault on the Seelow Heights, Erwin's unit, now incorporated into Regiment Falke, was deployed to the southern flank of the Berlin-Frankfurt Autobahn, close to the River Oder. The German defenses soon crumbled and with the end of the Reich inevitable, Erwin was forced to choose between a struggle for personal survival and the fulfillment of his SS oath of 'loyalty unto death. From the war on the southern sector of the Eastern Front to a bomb-shattered Berlin populated largely by old men and demoralized lonely women, this candid eyewitness account offers a unique and sometimes surprising perspective on the life of a young Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler volunteer.

The Pope's Jews

Author: Gordon Thomas
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250013550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
This revelatory account of how the Vatican saved thousands of Jews during WWII shows why history must exonerate "Hitler's Pope" Accused of being "silent" during the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican of World War II are now exonerated in Gordon Thomas's newest investigative work, The Pope's Jews. Thomas's careful research into new, first-hand accounts reveal an underground network of priests, nuns and citizens that risked their lives daily to protect Roman Jews. Investigating assassination plots, conspiracies, and secret conversions, Thomas unveils faked documentation, quarantines, and more extraordinary actions taken by Catholics and the Vatican. The Pope's Jews finally answers the great moral question of the War: Why did Pope Pius XII refuse to condemn the genocide of Europe's Jews?

Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich

Author: Walter Kempowski
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039324816X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
A monumental work of history that captures the last days of the Third Reich as never before. Swansong 1945 chronicles the end of Nazi Germany through more than 1,000 extracts from letters, diaries, and autobiographical accounts, written by civilians and soldiers alike. Together, they present a panoramic view of four tumultuous days that fateful spring: Hitler’s birthday on April 20, American and Soviet troops meeting at the Elbe on April 25, Hitler’s suicide on April 30, and the German surrender on May 8. An extraordinary account of suffering and survival, Swansong 1945 brings to vivid life the end of World War II in Europe.

Empire of Destruction

Author: Alex J. Kay
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300262531
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
The first comparative, comprehensive history of Nazi mass killing – showing how genocidal policies were crucial to the regime’s strategy to win the war Nazi Germany killed approximately 13 million civilians and other non-combatants in deliberate policies of mass murder, mostly during the war years. Almost half the victims were Jewish, systematically destroyed in the Holocaust, the core of the Nazis’ pan-European racial purification programme. Alex Kay argues that the genocide of European Jewry can be examined in the wider context of Nazi mass killing. For the first time, Empire of Destruction considers Europe’s Jews alongside all the other major victim groups: captive Red Army soldiers, the Soviet urban population, unarmed civilian victims of preventive terror and reprisals, the mentally and physically disabled, the European Roma and the Polish intelligentsia. Kay shows how each of these groups was regarded by the Nazi regime as a potential threat to Germany’s ability to successfully wage a war for hegemony in Europe. Combining the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror, this is a vital and groundbreaking work.