Germany

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative....

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages....

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1961, this worldwide bestselling classic chronicles the most infamous era of our times.

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

The year is 1943, and the three Allied leaders - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting, and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide....

In 1991, acting on a tip from a local fisherman, two scuba divers discovered a sunken German U-boat, complete with its crew of 60 men, not too far off the New Jersey coast....

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty....

Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness....

Timothy W. Ryback tells the dramatic story of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler seized power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin....

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II....

An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period....

This classic war memoir, first published in 1920, is based on the author's extensive diaries describing hard combat experienced on the Western Front during World War I.....

The “captivating” (The New York Times), definitive biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, detailing the extraordinary rise and political brilliance of the most powerful—and elusive—woman in the world....

From New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb....

The definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries - from their rise to power to their eventual downfall....

A gripping and nuanced history of the German people from World War II to the war in Ukraine, including revealing new primary source material on Germany's transformation....

D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the 76 days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, have become the defining episode of World War II in the west - the object of books, films, television series, and documentaries....

A stunning look at World War II from the other side.... From the turret of a German tank, Colonel Hans von Luck commanded Rommel's 7th and then 21st Panzer Division....

Fall, 1944. Paris has been liberated, saved from destruction, but this diversion on the road to Berlin has given the Germans time to regroup. The American and British armies press westward, facing the enemy time and again in the Hurtgen Forest....

A ground-breaking history of one of the greatest ever sieges. Masterfully brought to life by a leading expert using original Russian and German source material, To Besiege a City is a ground-breaking history of one of the greatest ever sieges....

This is the remarkable story of a German soldier who fought throughout World War II, rising from conscript private to captain of a heavy weapons company on the Eastern Front....

How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat....

When Money Dies is the classic history of what happens when a nations currency depreciates beyond recovery....

A major new history of the Third Reich that explores the German psyche....

Germany is a relatively young nation-state. United in 1871, it's even younger than the United States. However, the territories inhabited by the Germanic people have a rich history that reaches far back in prehistory and antiquity....

"My Life in the Red Army" by Fred Virski offers a rare, firsthand account of a soldier's experiences within the Soviet military machine during a critical period of the 20th century. Through the lens of Virski's personal journey, the book sheds light on the inner workings, struggles, and day-to-day life of the Red Army from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.

There are many reasons to be fascinated by Germany: forests, architecture and fairy tales, not to mention its history and inhabitants’ penchant for very peculiar food. Our distant and often maligned cousin, this is a place in which innumerable strange characters have held power, in which a chaotic jigsaw of borders have moved about seemingly at random, and which at the dark heart of the 20th century fell into the hands of truly terrible forces. And now Simon Winder is here to tell us everything else there is to know about this mesmerizing, tortured and endlessly fascinating country.

In November 1941, Hitler ordered German forces to complete the final drive on the Soviet capital, now less than 100 kilometers away. Army Group Center was pressed into the attack for one last attempt to break Soviet resistance before the onset of winter. From the German perspective, the final drive on Moscow had all the ingredients of a dramatic final battle in the east, which, according to previous accounts, only failed at the gates of Moscow.

Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the Führer, pales in comparison to Lower’s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly in the killing fields of the expanding Reich.

In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler’s National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and the path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes.

Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors.

Have you ever wondered what was going on in Adolf Hitler's mind during his final hours in the Führerbunker? What were his thoughts as radio contact with the outside world grew faint, Soviet explosions became louder and louder, and he began to feel his unassailable power ebbing away? Did Hitler repent of his crimes against humanity or was he obsessed with thoughts of his imminent defeat and suicide?

In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, a respected German professor of Canon Law, founded a covert revolutionary group - The Illuminati - a secret society dedicated to destroying repressive regimes and shaping a world government in terms of Liberty and Equality. These ideals surfaced with violent emphasis during the French Revolution, which many saw as the work of Illuminati agitators. The Jesuit Abbé Augustin Barruel was one such.

When the heiress-apparent to the German Empire’s Iron Throne proves incapable of carrying out her royal duties, Duke Maximilian von Wallenstein hatches a plot to temporarily replace her with a lookalike: a psychic Icelandic girl named Kristín Ormsdóttir. Events quickly spin out of control as murderous international conspiracies derail these plans — forcing Kristín to walk a tightrope, weighed down by deadly secrets. One slip could land her in prison — or a grave. A steampunk world based on glittering fin-de-siècle Europe, crackling with intrigue — and hurtling willy-nilly into ...

On 17 October 2019, in Hamburg's imposing criminal justice building, a trial laden with extraordinary historical weight begins to unfold. Bruno Dey stands accused of being involved in a crime committed over seven decades ago: the murder of at least 5,230 inmates at Stutthof, the Nazi concentration camp in present-day Poland. Only seventeen at the time, Dey was a member of the SS unit responsible for administering the camp. Though he concedes to his role as a guard, he adamantly denies responsibility for the killings.

Marc E. Nonnenkamp has published five (5) books about the German-speaking navies of the world, the four (4) most recent books through CreateSpace in a first and a second edition of a two-volume series. The first edition of the series was released in 2011 and this new second edition has been published in 2015. The books have been read by more than 72,000 people from 187 countries on all 6 inhabited continents. The first edition featured 60 black & white illustrations in two volumes, whereas the second edition has 270 color illustrations (where the original illustrations were made in color). ...

Dark skies and barbed wire fences were all Bluma Plaskovsky saw as she stepped down from the train onto the main platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After surviving the Wehrmacht’s decimation of her hometown, Bluma and what remained of her family were finally put on the long, harsh train ride through inhuman conditions that seemed to last an eternity.

Most people know that Oppenheimer ran the Manhattan Project - the organization that developed the atomic bomb for the United States in World War II. Some also recognize the name Heisenberg. Not the Walter White character from Breaking Bad, but Nazi Germany’s top theoretical physicist who had the Allies so worried he would make the first atomic bombs for Hitler that they sent assassins to make sure he didn’t. In 1928 these two were friends working on co-authoring research together; by 1942 they were on opposite sides of an atomic arms race. One of them made sure Hitler was unable to win ...

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel’s tenure in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe. How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder reinvent themselves, and how much? Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of the Second World War through the Cold War and the division of East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and their struggle to find their place in the world today.