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Soldaten - On Fighting, Killing and Dying
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 ...
Tapping Hitler's Generals
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
Soldiers
On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sönke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of covertly recorded, meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs during World War II that recently had been declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These discoveries, published in book form for the first time, 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 honorable behavior during the war. Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations—and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them—to create a powerful narrative of wartime experience. [Originally published as Soldaten.]
Operation Sealion
An in-depth analysis of Nazi Germany’s unused strategy to invade the UK during the Battle of Britain in World War II. It is hard to believe that in the summer of 1940, neither the Allies nor the Axis powers had any experience of large amphibious operations. German planning for Operation Sealion was concerned with pioneering new techniques and developing specialized landing craft. Remarkably, in only two months they prepared an invasion fleet of 4,000 vessels. In Operation Sealion, Peter Schenk begins by examining the vessels that were developed and deployed for the operation: converted cargo vessels and steamers, more specialized landing craft, barges and pontoons, and auxiliary vessels su...
What is Military History?
This clear, readable introduction to the popular field of military history is now available in a refreshed and updated second edition. It shows that military history encompasses not just accounts of campaigns and battles but includes a wide range of perspectives on all aspects of past military organization and activity. In concise chapters it explains the fundamental features of the field, including: The history of military history, showing how it has developed from ancient times to the present; The key ideas and concepts that shape analysis of military activity; it argues that military history is as methodologically and philosophically sophisticated as any field of history; The current cont...
The Global Chancellor
Helmut Schmidt is the neglected chancellor of modern German history, overshadowed by 'the greats' - Bismarck, Adenauer, Brandt and Kohl. This volume retrieves Schmidt's true significance as a pivotal figure who helped reshape the global order during the crisis-ridden 1970s. This major reinterpretation, based on detailed research in Schmidt's private papers and numerous archives in Europe and America, reveals him as a leader equally skilled in economics and security, and adept at personal diplomacy, who dared to act as a 'double interpreter' between the superpowers during the nadir of the Cold War. Schmidt was no mere 'crisis-manager': in fact he brought to the chancellorship a depth of refle...
Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals
Kerstin von Lingen shows how Nazi SS-General Karl Wolff avoided war crimes prosecution because of his role in "Operation Sunrise," negotiations conducted by high-ranking American, Swiss, and British officials - in violation of the Casablanca agreements with the Soviet Union - for the surrender of German forces in Italy. Von Lingen suggests that the Cold War started already with "Operation Sunrise," and helps us understand rollback operations thereafter: one was the failure of justice and selective prosecution for high ranking Nazi criminals. The Western Allies not only failed to ensure cooperation between their respective national war crimes prosecution organizations, but in certain cases even obstructed justice by withholding evidence from the prosecution.
Cultures of Intelligence in the Era of the World Wars
Cultures of Intelligence analyses the intelligence services of Germany, Britain, the USA, and France in the first half of the twentieth century. It asks whether there were national traditions in intelligence, or whether each of the sophisticated Western intelligence powers was part of a transnational intelligence culture? The book is a contribution to the cultural turn in intelligence studies. Its underlying purpose is to place intelligence in its proper historical and comparative context. As such it is also a contribution to the history of political culture and its study.
German Atrocities, 1914
Is it true that the German army, invading Belgium and France in August 1914, perpetrated brutal atrocities? Or are accounts of the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians mere fabrications constructed by fanatically anti-German Allied propagandists? Based on research in the archives of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, this pathbreaking book uncovers the truth of the events of autumn 1914 and explains how the politics of propaganda and memory have shaped radically different versions of that truth. John Horne and Alan Kramer mine military reports, official and private records, witness evidence, and war diaries to document the crimes that scholars have long denied: a campaign of b...
Empire of Destruction
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.
