Author: Hanna Diamond
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191622990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Wednesday 12th June 1940. The Times reported 'thousands upon thousands of Parisians leaving the capital by every possible means, preferring to abandon home and property rather than risk even temporary Nazi domination'. As Hitler's victorious armies approached Paris, the French government abandoned the city and its people, leaving behind them an atmosphere of panic. Roads heading south filled with ordinary people fleeing for their lives with whatever personal possessions they could carry, often with no particular destination in mind. During the long, hard journey, this mass exodus of predominantly women, children, and the elderly, would face constant bombings, machine gun attacks, and even starvation. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Hanna Diamond shows how the disruption this exodus brought to the lives of civilians and soldiers alike made it a defining experience of the war for the French people. As traumatized populations returned home, preoccupied by the desire for safety and bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, they put their faith in Marshall Pétain who was able to establish his collaborative Vichy regime largely unopposed, while the Germans consolidated their occupation. Watching events unfold on the other side of the channel, British ministers looked on with increasing horror, terrified that Britain could be next.

Author: Hanna Diamond
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199532591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
As Hitler's victorious armies approached Paris, panic gripped the city and the roads heading south filled with millions of French citizens, fleeing for their lives, with scant supplies and often no destination in mind. All hoped, as famed author Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her diary, "not to be taken like a rat in Occupied Paris." In Fleeing Hitler, historian Hanna Diamond paints a gripping picture of the harrowing escape from Paris, highlighting the hardships people suffered in their desperate flight, and underscoring the impact this exodus had on life under Vichy rule. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Diamond shows how this ordeal became for civilians and soldiers alike the defining experience of the war. She tells how, in the Paris region alone, close to four million people left their homes and fled south, swelling the numbers of refugees until is was impossible to direct the flow of humanity. The result was total chaos with an enormous price to pay in terms of human misery and suffering. Many lost their lives as this vast caravan of predominantly women, children, and the elderly faced truly harsh conditions, and even starvation. Then, after the German offer of peace, as the traumatized population returned home, preoccupied by the desire for safety and bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, they put their faith in Marshall Petain who was able to establish his collaborative Vichy regime largely unopposed, while the Germans consolidated their occupation. The first time this important story has been told in English, Fleeing Hitler captures in moving detail the devastating flight and early days of occupation after the fall of France.

Author: Robert J. Hutchinson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621578895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Think You Know Everything about the death of Hitler? Think Again. After World War II, 50 percent of Americans polled said they didn’t believe Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in 1945, as captured Nazi officials claimed. Instead, they believed the dictator faked his death and escaped, perhaps to Argentina. This wasn’t a crazy opinion: Joseph Stalin told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler’s body and that he personally believed the Nazi leader had escaped justice. At least two German submarines crossed the Atlantic and landed on the coast of Argentina in July 1945. Plus, there were numerous reports of top Nazi officials successfully fleeing to South America where there was a large German colony. Incredible as it sounds, the mystery surrounding Adolf Hitler’s final days only deepened in 2009 when a U.S. forensic team announced that a piece of Hitler’s skull held in Soviet archives was not actually Hitler’s. International interest increased further in 2014 when the FBI released previously classified files detailing investigations surrounding Hitler’s possible escape. And the following year, The History Channel launched a three-year reality TV series investigating if it was possible Hitler did somehow survive. So what really happened? Popular history writer Robert J. Hutchinson, author of What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination, takes a fresh look at the evidence and discovers, once and for all, the truth about Hitler’s last week in Berlin. Among the questions the book explores are... * What did surviving Nazi eyewitnesses really say about the Führer’s final days in the bunker—and could they have been lying to aid Hitler’s escape? * If Hitler didn’t escape, why did the Allies not find his body? * What about Hitler’s proven use of body doubles? Could Hitler have used a body double in the bunker while he and Eva Braun flew to safety in a long-range aircraft that took off from a runway in Berlin’s Tiergarten? * Why did the FBI continue to investigate reports of Hitler’s survival for more than a decade after World War II—reports that were only declassified in 2014? * What about sensational claims in books such as The Grey Wolfthat Hitler and Eva Braun lived in an isolated chalet in the Andes – and that Hitler died in 1962? * Why were forensic tests on crucial physical evidence only conducted in 2016, more than 70 years after World War II ended? * And lots MORE.

Author: Marion Kaplan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300249500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

Author: Phyllida Scrivens
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 147387873X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Escaping Hitler is the true story, covering ninety years, of a fourteen-year-old boy Gnter Stern who, when Adolf Hitler threatened his family, education and future, resolved to escape from his rural village of Nickenich in the German Rhineland. In July 1939 Gnter boarded a bus to the border with Luxembourg, illegally crossed the river and walked alone for seven days through Belgium into Holland, intent on catching a ferry to England and freedom. The outcome was not exactly as he had planned. The author gathered her information through interviews with Gnter, now known as Joe Stirling, and with those closest to him. During an emotional foot-stepping journey in September 2013 the author visited Gnters birthplace, met with a school friend, discovered the apartment in Koblenz where he fled following Kristallnacht in 1938, drove the route of Gnters walk through Europe and retraced the final steps of his parents prior to their deportation to a Nazi death camp in Poland during 1942.

Author: Simon Dunstan
Publisher: Union Square + ORM
ISBN: 1402789335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Did Hitler—code name “Grey Wolf”—really die in 1945? Gripping new evidence shows what could have happened. The basis for the titular documentary. When Truman asked Stalin in 1945 whether Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, “No.” As late as 1952, Eisenhower declared: “We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler’s death.” What really happened? Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams have compiled extensive evidence—some recently declassified—that Hitler actually fled Berlin and took refuge in a remote Nazi enclave in Argentina. The recent discovery that the famous “Hitler’s skull” in Moscow is female, as well as newly uncovered documents, provide powerful proof for their case. Dunstan and Williams cite people, places, and dates in over 500 detailed notes that identify the plan’s escape route, vehicles, aircraft, U-boats, and hideouts. Among the details: the CIA’s possible involvement and Hitler’s life in Patagonia—including his two daughters. “Describes a ghastly pantomime played out in the names of the Fuhrer and the woman who had been his mistress.” —The Sun “Grey Wolf is more than a conspiracy yarn . . . Its authors show Hitler’s escape was possible . . . a gripping read.” —South China Morning Post “Remarkable detail.” —Sir David Frost, Frost Over the World “Stunning saga of intrigue.” —Pravda “Stunning account of the last days of the Reich.” —Parapolitical.com “I thought the book was hugely thought-provoking and explores some of the untold, murky loose ends of World War Two.” —Dan Snow, broadcaster and historian, The One Show BBC 1 “Laid out in lavish detail.” —Daily Mail

Author: Pat Lorraine Simons
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781479299089
Category : Brothers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Based on a true story, Brothers on the Run takes you on a high-velocity ride across pre-World War II Europe. In 1933, two teenage Jewish brothers barely escape death at the Nazis' hands, only to find themselves crisscrossing Europe as refugees whose survival depends on their luck, daring, and wits. In 1936, when the US denies them entry, the boys enlist as foreign soldiers in the Spanish Civil War-a fateful decision that indelibly scars them, brutally delivers them into manhood, and serendipitously opens the door to freedom.

Author: Gerald Steinacher
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191653772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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This is the story of how Nazi war criminals escaped from justice at the end of the Second World War by fleeing through the Tyrolean Alps to Italian seaports, and the role played by the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Secret Services of the major powers in smuggling them away from prosecution in Europe to a new life in South America. The Nazi sympathies held by groups and individuals within these organizations evolved into a successful assistance network for fugitive criminals, providing them not only with secret escape routes but hiding places for their loot. Gerald Steinacher skillfully traces the complex escape stories of some of the most prominent Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, showing how they mingled and blended with thousands of technically stateless or displaced persons, all flooding across the Alps to Italy and from there, to destinations abroad. The story of their escape shows clearly just how difficult the apprehending of war criminals can be. As Steinacher shows, all the major countries in the post-war world had 'mixed motives' for their actions, ranging from the shortage of trained intelligence personnel in the immediate aftermath of the war to the emerging East-West confrontation after 1947, which led to many former Nazis being recruited as agents turned in the Cold War.

Author: Kurt G. W. Ludecke
Publisher: Third Reich from Original Sour
ISBN: 9781781592236
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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First published in 1938 "I Knew Hitler" is the missing link in the literary trail, which traces the fortunes of Adolf Hitler from Linz to Berlin. There are surprisingly few personal accounts of life with Hitler from inside the inner circle during the years before he seized power and besides Goebbels' diaries, Ludecke is by far the most important of them. Dedicated by its author to the memory of Ernst Roehm, the publication of this brand new edition means that Ludecke's explosive memoir is back in print for the first time in 75 years. Kurt Ludecke was a former confident of Hitler's who had the misfortune to find himself on the wrong side of the political gulf which led to the 1934 blood purge better known outside of Germany as "The Night Of The Long Knives. As the power struggle between the SS and the SA threatened to engulf him, Hitler finally took decisive action and was personally involved in the vicious in fighting which saw the arrest and execution of many senior SA figures including Roehm himself. Ludecke was a man in the wrong place at the wrong time and was actually incarcerated twice on Hitler's orders before finally escaping to Switzerland. For many years, this fascinating and highly readable account of life with Hitler's inner circle was dismissed by the academic world as a heavily biased and therefore unreliable as a main primary resource. However, a number of recent scholarly assessments have confirmed what most historians suspected all along; Ludecke is in fact an excellent and highly reliable original source. The rehabilitation of Ludecke is a timely development as he provides the only detailed account surrounding the actions of Adolf Hitler into the world of Adolf Hitler as he took the first steps from Landsberg prison to achieve power through the horse-trading following the ill-starred election of 1933. Ludecke also throws a powerful new light on the events of the Night Of the Long Knives and gives the clearest indication that we have today that there was indeed a genuine SA plot to overthrow Hitler and set the party on a more rigorous route towards a truly National socialist state. Ludecke is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the political history of the Third Reich.

Author: Kati Marton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743261151
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed author Kati Marton brings to life an unknown chapter of World War II: the tale of nine men who grew up in Budapest's brief Golden Age, then, driven from Hungary by anti-Semitism, fled to the West, especially to the United States, and changed the world. These nine men, each celebrated for individual achievements, were actually part of a unique group who grew up in a time and place that will never come again. It is Marton's extraordinary achievement to trace what for a few dazzling years was common to all of them -- the magic air of Budapest -- and show how their separate lives and careers were, in fact, all shaped by Budapest's lively cafe life before the darkness closed in.Marton follows the astonishing lives of four history-changing scientists, all just one step ahead of Hitler's terror state, who helped usher in the nuclear age and the computer (Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner); two major movie myth-makers (Michael Curtiz, who directedCasablanca, and Alexander Korda, who producedThe Third Man); two immortal photographers (Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz); and one seminal writer (Arthur Koestler,Darkness at Noon).Marton follows these brilliant products of Budapest's Golden Age as they flee fascism in the 1920s and 1930s en route to sanctuary -- and immortality. As the scientists labor in the secret city of Los Alamos in the race to build the atom bomb, Koestler, once a communist agent imprisoned by Franco, writes the most important anticommunist novel of the century. Capa, the first photographer to go ashore on D-Day, later romances Ingrid Bergman and is acknowledged as the world's greatest war photographer before his tragic death in Vietnam. Curtiz not only gives usCasablanca, consistently voted the greatest romantic movie ever made, but also discovers Doris Day and directs James Cagney in the quintessential patriotic film,Yankee Doodle Dandy.Ultimately,The Great Escapeis an American story and an important, previously untold chapter of the tumultuous last century. Yet it is also a poignant story -- in the words of the great historian Fritz Stern, "an evocation of genius in exile . . . an instructive, moving delight." An epilogue relates the journey into exile of three members of the next generation of Budapest exiles: financier-philanthropist George Soros, Intel founder Andy Grove, and 2002 Nobel laureate in literature Imre Kertesz.