Empfehlungen basierend auf "Woeful Second World War"

An omnibus edition of Judith Kerr's internationally acclaimed trilogy, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Other Way Round and A Small Person Far Away, we see the world through Anna's eyes as she grows up -- from her much loved family to Hitler's holocaust. Anna was a German child when she had to flee from the Nazis before the War. By the time the bombs began to fall she was a stateless adolescent in London, and after it was all over she became a happily married Englishwoman who thought she had put the past behind her. This omnibus edition of the three volumes of Judith Kerr's Hitler trilogy, tells her story beginning with the rise of Hitler in 1933 through to her return to Berlin years after the war.

A classic military history, now in a fully illustrated and redesigned edition.First published in 1959, The Longest Day is one of the bestselling military history books of all time, and the inspiration for the legendary 1962 film released by 20th Century Fox. The author, war journalist Cornelius Ryan, pioneered a new style of military history writing based on interviews with more than a thousand battle participants from both sides. From these powerful stories emerges a vivid description of the crucial 24 hours that made up D-Day. This beautifully designed archive edition incorporates 25 original research documents with Ryan’s classic text, all further enhanced by the addition of 120 photographs.

At Victoria station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked 'This is your enemy'. I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train'. Spike Milligan's on the march, blitzing friend and foe alike with his uproarious recollections of army life from enlistment to the landing at Algiers in 1943. Bathos, pathos and gales of drunken laughter, and insane military goonery explode in superlative Milliganese.

'Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account' Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis'In this fascinating study of two monsters, Rees is extraordinarily perceptive and original' Antony Beevor_____________________Two tyrants. Each responsible for the death of millions.This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two leaders during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history.Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin's regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to events. But as bestselling historian Laurence Rees shows, at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt-of suffering - in Hitler's case, most infamously the Holocaust - in order to build the utopias they wanted.Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers, civilians and those who knew both men personally, Laurence Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in history. This is a master work from one of our finest historians._____________________'Coming from one of the world's experts on the Second World War, this is an important and original - and devastating - account of Hitler and Stalin as dictators. A must read' Professor Robert Service, author of Stalin: A Biography'Impressive . . . well paced and well informed with an eye for telling anecdotes and colourful character sketches . . . Rees' decision to add personal stories to his narrative adds an important layer to our understanding of both the dictators themselves and their victims' Robert Gerwarth, The Daily Telegraph

Presenting the desperate conflict of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is translated by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics. 'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.' A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger's experience of combat on the front line - leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, and simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart. One of the greatest books to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War, it illuminates like no other book not only the horrors but also the fascination of a war that made men keep fighting for four long years. Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) the son of a wealthy chemist, ran away from home to join the Foreign Legion. His father dragged him back, but he returned to military service when he joined the German army on the outbreak of the First World War. Storm of Steel (Stahlgewittern) was Jünger's first book, published in 1920. Greatly admired by the Nazis, Jünger remained at a distance from the regime, with books such as his allegorical work On the Marble Cliffs (1939) functioning as a covert criticism of Nazi ideology and methods. If you enjoyed Storm of Steel, you might like Edward Blunden's Undertones of War, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'To read this extraordinary book is to gain a unique insight into the compelling nature of organized, industrialized violence' Niall Ferguson, author of War of the World 'Hofmann's interpretation is superb' The Times 'Unique in the literature of this or any other war is its brilliantly vivid conjuration of the immediacy and intensity of battle' Telegraph 'Storm of Steel is what so many books claim to be but are not: a classic account of war' Evening Standard

Germany, 1945. Elizabeth, Karli and their mother are in Dresden when the Allied bombs begin to fall. Their home is destroyed, they must flee the ruined city through the perilous, snow-covered landscape, all the while avoiding the Russian troops who are drawing ever closer.

On June 17, 1940 William L. Shirer stood in the streets of Paris and watched the unending flow of gray German uniforms along its boulevards. In just six lovely weeks in the spring and summer of 1940 a single battle brought down in total military defeat one of the world's oldest, greatest, and most civilized powers—the second mightiest empire on earth and the possessor of one of the finest military machines ever assembled. How did it happen? After nearly a decade of research in the massive archives left from World War II and after hundreds of conversations with the Third Republic's leaders, generals, diplomats, and ordinary citizens, Shirer presents the definitive answer in his stunning re-creation of why and how France fell before Hitler's armies in 1940. His book is also a devastating examination of the confusion, corruption, and cynicism that drained the strength and toughness of a democracy which Thomas Jefferson once called "every man's second country." This book complements and completes the dramatic story of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and continues to rank as one of the most important works of history of our time.

The most eloquent and expressive statesman of his time - phrases such as 'iron curtain', 'business as usual', 'the few', and 'summit meeting' passed quickly into everyday use - Winston Churchill used language as his most powerful weapon at a time when his most frequent complaint was that the armoury was otherwise empty. In this volume, David Cannadine selects thirty-three orations ranging over fifty years, demonstrating how Churchill gradually hones his rhetoric until the day when, with spectacular effect, 'he mobilized the English language, and sent it into battle' (Edward R. Murrow).

"The leading nonfiction best seller in Germany since its publication, with translations in preparation in seventeen countries, Mr. Fest's monumental work on the most fateful historical figure of our time stands out as a towering achievement. Absorbingly readable, it tells and interprets the extraordinarily dramatic story of a man's and nation's rise from impotence and insignificance to a brief period of absolute power, as Germany and Hitler, from shared premises, entered into their covenant. Convincingly, Fest exhibits the true source of Hitler's overwhelming dynamism, the basis of his stupendous initial success in peace and war, and finally the real effects of his policies to this day ... The Germany of the times comes vividly alive with its contrasts of misery and grandiosity, with its fierce strife and the varied company of both is good and evil figures. The preliminaries of World War II are unraveled with skillful lucidity, Hitler's purposeful actions contrasted with the hesitancy or hubris of his opponents. In the last analysis, however, Fest uncovers in Hitler a constantly destructive personality who aimed at and achieved destruction on an unprecedented scale, not least because an insecure world gave him opportunities. In a final irony, he changed the world irrevocably, thoughnow as he wished or foresaw, for all of us."--Jacket.

"An exceptionally vivid memoir of a French soldier's experience of the First World War."—Max Hastings, New York Times bestselling author Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. First published in France in 1978, this excellent new translation brings Barthas' wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a "poilu," or "hairy one," as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known. Upon Barthas' return home in 1919, he painstakingly transcribed his day-to-day writings into nineteen notebooks, preserving not only his own story but also the larger story of the unnumbered soldiers who never returned. Recounting bloody battles and endless exhaustion, the deaths of comrades, the infuriating incompetence and tyranny of his own officers, Barthas also describes spontaneous acts of camaraderie between French poilus and their German foes in trenches just a few paces apart. An eloquent witness and keen observer, Barthas takes his readers directly into the heart of the Great War. "This is clearly one of the most readable and indispensable accounts of the death of the glory of war."— The Daily Beast ("Hot Reads")