Recommendations based on "Arch of Triumph"

Sydney Taylor Award-winning novel Berlin Boxing Club is loosely inspired by the true story of boxer Max Schmeling's experiences following Kristallnacht. Publishers Weekly called it "a masterful historical novel" in a starred review.Karl Stern has never thought of himself as a Jew; after all, he's never even been in a synagogue. But the bullies at his school in Nazi-era Berlin don't care that Karl's family doesn't practice religion. Demoralized by their attacks against a heritage he doesn't accept as his own, Karl longs to prove his worth.Then Max Schmeling, champion boxer and German hero, makes a deal with Karl's father to give Karl boxing lessons. A skilled cartoonist, Karl has never had an interest in boxing, but now it seems like the perfect chance to reinvent himself.But when Nazi violence against Jews escalates, Karl must take on a new role: family protector. And as Max's fame forces him to associate with Nazi elites, Karl begins to wonder where his hero's sympathies truly lie. Can Karl balance his boxing dreams with his obligation to keep his family out of harm's way?Includes an author's note and sources page detailing the factual inspirations behind the novel.

Rees, Laurence. Their Darkest People tested to the extreme during WWII New York, Ebury, 2007. 15.5 cm x 24 cm. X, 310 pages. With 15 colour illustrations. Original Hardcover with illustrated dustjacket in protective Mylar. Excellent condition with only very minor signs of external wear. Award-winning writer and filmmaker Laurence Rees has spent nearly 20 years meeting people who were tested to the extreme during World War II. He has come face-to-face with rapists, mass murderers, even cannibals, but he has also met courageous individuals who are an inspiration to us all. His quest has taken him from the Baltic States to Japan, from Poland to America, and from Germany to China. Here he presents 35 of his most electrifying encounters. Meet Estera Frenkiel, a young Jewish woman given the chance to save ten fellow Jews from deportation and death; Peter Lee, a British officer brutally treated by his Japanese captors; Zinaida Pytkina, a female member of the Soviet Union's infamous SMERSH organisation, who took pleasure in killing a German Prisoner; Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier so fanatical that he refused to surrender until 29 years after the end of the war; and Petras Zelionka, a Lithuanian who shot Jewish men, women and children for the Nazis. The devastating first-hand testimony in Their Darkest Hour is both a lasting contribution to our understanding of the war and a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in crisis. (Amazon)

Shortlisted for the 2024 Wolfson History PrizeA Telegraph and Der Spiegel Book of the YearSueddeutsche Zeitung's Number One Most Important Political Book of 2023Die Zeit, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk, taz Number One, Best Non-Fiction Books December 2023 and January 2024A Telegraph and Der Spiegel Book of the YearSueddeutsche Zeitung's Number One Most Important Political Book of 2023Die Zeit, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk, taz Number One, Best Non-Fiction Books December 2023 and January 2024A groundbreaking new history of the people at the centre of Europe, from the Second World War to todayIn 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?Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation's search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.

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.

June 1815: The Duke of Wellington, the Prince of Orange, and Napoleon will meet on the battlefield--and decide the fate of EuropeWith the emperor Napoleon at its head, an enormous French army is marching toward Brussels. The British and their allies are also converging on Brussels--in preparation for a grand society ball. It is up to Richard Sharpe to convince the Prince of Orange, the inexperienced commander of Wellington's Dutch troops, to act before it is too late. But Sharpe's warning cannot stop the tide of battle, and the British suffer heavy losses on the road to Waterloo.Wellington has few reserves of men and ammunition; the Prussian army has not arrived; and the French advance wields tremendous firepower and determination. Victory seems impossible.

"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.

Vivid, succinct, and highly accessible, Heinrich Winkler's magisterial history of modern Germany, offers the history of a nation and its people through two turbulent centuries. It is the story of a country that, while always culturally identified with the West, long resisted the political trajectories of its neighbours. This second and final volume begins at the point of the collapse of the first German democracy, and ends with the joining of East and West Germany in the reunification of 1990. Winkler offers a brilliant synthesis of complex events and illuminates them with fresh insights. He analyses the decisions that shaped the country's triumphs and catastrophes, interweaving high politics with telling vignettes about the German people and their own self-perception. The two volumes of Germany: The Long Road West, exploring the history of the German lands from the final days of the Holy Roman Empire to the very first of a reunified state in the late twentieth century, will be welcomed by scholars, students, and anyone wishing to understand a most complex and contradictory past.

Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police during Germany's horrific 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.

Great Britain's refusal to yield to Nazi Germany in the Second World War remains one of the greatest survival stories of modern times. Commemorated, evoked, and mythologized as it has been-chiseled and engraved onto countless monuments, the subject of an endless stream of books and films-its triumphant outcome was by no means predetermined. In December 1940, months after war was declared, the director of plans at the War Office in London was asked to draft a paper on how to win the war. He replied that he could only plan "for not losing." Britain's War: Into Battle, 1937-1941 is the first of two volumes in which Daniel Todman offers a brilliantly fresh retelling, an epic history to fit an epic story. "Opening with his discovery of some war medals sitting in a hearing-aid box that likely belonged to his grandfather, Todman realizes that despite it all a new generation seems unaware of what was truly at stake when Churchill invoked Britain's "finest hour." The war was far greater than any single heroic hour. For six years, Britain was at the dark heart of history, finding its way forward hour by hour, day by day, year by year. This volume spans the beginning and the end of the beginning, from the massive changes required to get the country onto a war footing, through the failure of appeasement, the invasion of Poland, the "phony war," the fall of France, the "miracle" of Dunkirk, the Battles of Britain, and the Blitz, ending with America's course-changing entrance into the conflict in late 1941. Todman's colossal project seamlessly merges economic, strategic, social, cultural, and military history in one compelling narrative. Rapid industrialization, social disruption, food rationing, Westminster politics, class snobbery, and the mobilization of a global empire are woven together with the major opening battles. Here, also, are key individuals-the politicians, industrialists, pub owners, housewives, the pilots of the RAF, and the sailors at Dunkirk-caught in the maelstrom that threatened to engulf not just a small island nation but the world itself.

"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")