Author: Danny S. Parker Publisher: Da Capo Press ISBN: 0306824345 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
Handsome, intelligent, impetuous, and dedicated to the Nazi cause, SS Colonel Jochen Peiper (1915–1976) was one of the most controversial figures of World War II. After volunteering for the Waffen-SS at an early age, Peiper quickly rose to prominence as Heinrich Himmler's ever-present personal adjutant in the early years of the war. Sent later to the fighting front with the fearsome 1st SS Panzer Division, Peiper became a legend for his flamboyant and brutal style of warfare. As one of Hitler's favorites, he was chosen to spearhead the Ardennes Offensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Peiper became the central subject in the bitterly disputed Malmédy war crimes trial. Convicted but later released, he moved to eastern France. There, he and his past were discovered, and he died in a fiery gun battle by killers unknown even today. In Hitler's Warrior, historian Danny Parker describes Peiper both on and off the battlefield and explores his complex personality. The rich narrative is supported by years of research that has uncovered previously unpublished archival material and is enhanced with information drawn from extensive interviews with Peiper's contemporaries, including German veterans. This major new historical work is both a definitive biography of Hitler's most enigmatic warrior and a unique study of the morally inverted world of the Third Reich.
Author: Christopher Ailsby Publisher: Pen and Sword Military ISBN: 1473886708 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
During the Second World War, the German Fallschirmjger (paratroopers) carried out many successful and daring operations, such as the capture of the Belgian fortress at Eben Emael in 1940 and the invasion of Crete in 1941. Hitler's Sky Warriors is a detailed examination of all the battles and campaigns of the Third Reich's airborne forces, illustrated throughout by many previously unpublished photographs. Hitler's Sky Warriors includes detailed accounts of all the ground campaigns of the parachute divisions, especially in Italy, where their epic defenses of Monte Cassino entered military legend. As well as being a comprehensive account of Fallschirmjger battles and campaigns, Hitler's Sky Warriors includes information on the specialist weapons and equipment developed for Germany's airborne forces. These include the paratrooper helmet, the FG 42 automatic rifle, the so-called 'gravity knife', the different jump smocks, parachutes and harnesses, transport aircraft and gliders. Hitler's Sky Warriors also contains biographical details on all the main parachute commanders, such as Kurt Student, Bernhard Herman Ramcke and Richard Heidrich, and includes appendices that contain information about divisional orders of battle and Knight's Cross winners. In this way Hitler's Sky Warriors builds into an extensive and exciting account of one of the elite formations of military history.
Author: Christa Kamenetsky Publisher: Ohio University Press ISBN: 082144672X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
Between 1933 and 1945, National Socialists enacted a focused effort to propagandize children’s literature by distorting existing German values and traditions with the aim of creating a homogenous “folk community.” A vast censorship committee in Berlin oversaw the publication, revision, and distribution of books and textbooks for young readers, exercising its control over library and bookstore content as well as over new manuscripts, so as to redirect the cultural consumption of the nation’s children. In particular, the Nazis emphasized Nordic myths and legends with a focus on the fighting spirit of the saga heroes, their community loyalty, and a fierce spirit of revenge—elements that were then applied to the concepts of loyalty to and sacrifice for the Führer and the fatherland. They also tolerated select popular series, even though these were meant to be replaced by modern Hitler Youth camping stories. In this important book, first published in 1984 and now back in print, Christa Kamenetsky demonstrates how Nazis used children’s literature to selectively shape a “Nordic Germanic” worldview that was intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their efforts corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic’s liberal education, while promoting an enthusiastic following for Hitler.
Author: David Yelton Publisher: Osprey Publishing ISBN: 9781846030130 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Osprey's study of Germany's Home Guard during the latter part of World War II (1939-1945). The creation of the German Home Guard or Volkssturm on 18 October 1944 was a desperate measure by the Nazi regime to utilize every available manpower resource in their last-ditch attempts to delay their inevitable defeat. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 60 who were not already members of the German Armed Forces were conscripted into one organization. The aim of the Volkssturm was to shore up the defense of the Reich, but also to restrict any possible revolt or dissent by exercising military discipline over the entire male population of fighting age. This Nazi fantasy was the creation of a new force of highly-motivated Aryans dedicated to the heroic defense of their fatherland. However, the Volkssturm failed due to poor equipment, lack of training, and low morale. Men who had no experience of combat and little or no inclination to fight, and who had little interest in the Nazi regime found themselves sent into battle against impossible odds and achieving little or nothing. The focus of the book is the section of Germany's western front where the Volkssturm fought in vain to slow the advance of Canadian forces and where the desertion rate was very high. David K. Yelton follows the experience of a Volkssturm conscript from his call-to-arms, into action and through to his capture and time as a POW, examining his personal reaction to the creation of the German Home Guard and his response to the fighting into which he was thrust.
Author: Adrian Gilbert Publisher: Da Capo Press ISBN: 0306824663 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 589
Book Description
From an award-winning and bestselling historian, the first comprehensive military history in over fifty years of Hitler's famous and infamous personal army: the Waffen-SS. The Waffen-SS was one of the most feared combat organizations of the twentieth century. Originally formed as a protection squad for Adolf Hitler it became the military wing of Heinrich Himmler's SS and a key part of the Nazi state, with nearly 900,000 men passing through its ranks. The Waffen-SS played a crucial role in furthering the aims of the Third Reich which made its soldiers Hitler's political operatives. During its short history, the elite military divisions of the Waffen-SS acquired a reputation for excellence, but their famous battlefield record of success was matched by their repeated and infamous atrocities against both soldiers and civilians. Waffen-SS is the first definitive single-volume military history of the Waffen-SS in more than fifty years. In considering the actions of its leading personalities, including Himmler, Sepp Dietrich, and Otto Skorzeny, and analyzing its specialist training and ideological outlook, eminent historian Adrian Gilbert chronicles the battles and campaigns that brought the Waffen-SS both fame and infamy.
Author: R.H.S. Stolfi Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 080617353X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
How close did Germany come to winning World War II? Did Hitler throw away victory in Europe after his troops had crushed the Soviet field armies defending Moscow by August 1941? R.H.S. Stolfi offers a dramatic new picture of Hitler’s conduct in World War II and a fundamental reinterpretation of the course of the war. Adolf Hitler generally is thought to have been driven by a blitzkrieg mentality in the years 1939 to 1941. In fact, Stolfi argues, he had no such outlook on the war. From the day Britain and France declared war, Hitler reacted with a profoundly conservative cast of mind and pursued a circumscribed strategy, pushing out siege lines set around Germany by the Allies. Interpreting Hitler as a siege Führer explain his apparent aberrations in connection with Dunkirk, his fixation on the seizure of Leningrad, and his fateful decision in the summer of 1941 to deflect Army Group Center into the Ukraine when both Moscow and victory in World War II were within its reach. Unaware of Hitler’s siege orientation, the German Army planned blitz campaigns. Through daring operational concepts and bold tactics, the army won victories over several Allied powers in World War II, and these led to the great campaign against the Soviet Union in summer of 1941. Stolfi postulates that in August 1941, German Army Group Center had the strength both to destroy the Red field armies defending the Soviet capital and to advance to Moscow and beyond. The defeat of the Soviet Union would have assured victory in World War II. Nevertheless, Hitler ordered the army group south to secure the resources of the Ukraine against a potential siege. And a virtually assured German victory slipped away. This radical reinterpretation of Hitler and the capabilities of the German Army leads to a reevaluation of World War II, in which the lesson to be learned is not how the Allies won the war, but how close the Germans came to a quick and decisive victory?long before the United States was drawn into the battle.
Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307426238 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 656
Book Description
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Author: K. Machtans Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137032383 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
The first book-length study to critically examine the recent wave of Hitler biopics in German cinema and television. A group of international experts discuss films like Downfall in the context of earlier portrayals of Hitler and draw out their implications for the changing place of the Third Reich in the national historical imagination.
Author: Yukio Mishima Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 9780231126335 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
Acclaimed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was also a prolific playwright, penning more than sixty plays, nearly all of which were produced in his lifetime. Hiroaki Sato is the first to translate these plays into English. For this collection he has selected five major plays and three essays Mishima wrote about drama. The title play is a satire that follows the breakdown of friendship between Adolf Hitler and two Nazi officials who were ultimately assassinated under orders from Hitler.
Author: Danny S. Parker
Author: Christopher Ailsby
Author: Georg Rauch
Author: Christa Kamenetsky
Author: David Yelton
Author: Adrian Gilbert
Author: R.H.S. Stolfi
Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Author: K. Machtans
Author: Yukio Mishima