Author: John R. AngoliaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
The German Army, 1933-1945
Author: Matthew CooperPublisher: Scarborough House Publishers
ISBN: 9780812885194
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
It will shake up the ideas of all those who regard the staff of the Nazi-dominated German Army as paragons of military competence.--The Economist
Uniforms & Traditions of the German Army, 1933-1945
Author: John R. AngoliaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
Hitler's Army
Author: Command MagazinePublisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780306812606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
A novel, analytical look at the development of the German army under Hitler, incorporating maps, battle analysis, and candid discussion.
German Army Shoulder Boards and Straps 1933-1945
Author: Thomas J. SuterPublisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN: 9780764340376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
One of the distinguishing features of the World War II German Army uniform is the use of shoulder straps and boards to denote rank, branch of service, and in some cases the assigned unit right down to the company. This heavily illustrated book covers construction methods, material, types and styles of embroidery and metal devices, as well as the identification of branch and unit. Detailed charts are used to identify unit affiliation of Gothic letters, Latin letters, Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, and Symbolic Devices. Containing over 1,000 color photographs of straps and boards, as well as other loose cloth insignia, collar tabs, and tunics to assist the collector or historian in identifying original examples, this book is the definitive reference.
Hitler's Army
Author: Omer BartovPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But in this compelling account Omer Bartov reveals a very different history, as he probes the experience of the average soldier to show just how thoroughly Nazi ideology permeated the army. In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months--often depicted as a time of easy victories--undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Facing scarce supplies and enormous casualties, the average soldier sank to ta a primitive level of existence, re-experiencing the trench warfare of World War I under the most extreme weather conditions imaginable; the fighting itself was savage, and massacres of prisoners were common. Troops looted food and supplies from civilians with wild abandon; they mercilessly wiped out villages suspected of aiding partisans. Incredible losses led to recruits being thrown together in units that once had been filled with men from the same communities, making Nazi ideology even more important as a binding force. And they were further brutalized by a military justice system that executed almost 15,000 German soldiers during the war. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men--men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army. In six years of warfare, the vast majority of German men passed through the Wehrmacht and almost every family had a relative who fought in the East. Bartov's powerful new account of how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the army sheds new light on how deeply it penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today.
They Thought They Were Free
Author: Milton MayerPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652597X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
Riders of the Apocalypse
Author: David R DorondoPublisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612510876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407
Book Description
Despite the enduring popular image of the blitzkrieg of World War II, the German Army always depended on horses. It could not have waged war without them. While the Army’s reliance on draft horses to pull artillery, supply wagons, and field kitchens is now generally acknowledged, D. R. Dorondo’s Riders of the Apocalypse examines the history of the German cavalry, a combat arm that not only survived World War I but also rode to war again in 1939. Though concentrating on the period between 1939 and 1945, the book places that history firmly within the larger context of the mounted arm’s development from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Third Reich’s surrender. Driven by both internal and external constraints to retain mounted forces after 1918, the German Army effectively did nothing to reduce, much less eliminate, the preponderance of non-mechanized formations during its breakneck expansion under the Nazis after 1933. Instead, politicized command decisions, technical insufficiency, industrial bottlenecks, and, finally, wartime attrition meant that Army leaders were compelled to rely on a steadily growing number of combat horsemen throughout World War II. These horsemen were best represented by the 1st Cavalry Brigade (later Division) which saw combat in Poland, the Netherlands, France, Russia, and Hungary. Their service, however, came to be cruelly dishonored by the horsemen of the 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division, a unit whose troopers spent more time killing civilians than fighting enemy soldiers. Throughout the story of these formations, and drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources, Dorondo shows how the cavalry’s tradition carried on in a German and European world undergoing rapid military industrialization after the mid-nineteenth century. And though Riders of the Apocalypse focuses on the German element of this tradition, it also notes other countries’ continuing (and, in the case of Russia, much more extensive) use of combat horsemen after 1900. However, precisely because the Nazi regime devoted so much effort to portray Germany’s armed forces as fully modern and mechanized, the combat effectiveness of so many German horsemen on the battlefields of Europe until 1945 remains a story that deserves to be more widely known. Dorondo’s work does much to tell that story.
The Wehrmacht, 1935-1945
Author: Michael E. HaskewPublisher:
ISBN: 9781907446955
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Focusing on the German land forces, with chapters on the history of the German Army, pre-war development, command structures, infantry, armoured formations, artillery and support services. The book offers interesting facts and figures of every sort, from infantry tactical doctrine through the make-up of a Type 1944 infantry division to the number of operational panzers Rommel had at his disposal during the El Alamein campaign and the types of artillery employed in the Atlantic Wall fortifications before the D-Day landings. It also includes colour artworks of key equipment and weapons, reference tables, diagrams, maps and charts, presenting all the core data in easy-to-follow formats.
Hitler's Soldiers
Author: Ben H. ShepherdPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300219520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 681
Book Description
For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people’s army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army’s early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler’s mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings—moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational—of the army’s own leadership.
History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945
Author: Peter HoffmannPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773566406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 872
Book Description
The English version of the book has been extensively revised and expanded since its original publication in German. This edition includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.