Download or read book Hitler s Second Army written by Alfred Vagts and published by . This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hitler s Second Army written by Edmund L. Blandford and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of the Waffen-SS, and describes the training and combat experiences of its soldiers
Download or read book Hitler s Army written by Omer Bartov and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-11-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But in this compelling account Omer Bartov reveals a very different history, as he probes the experience of the average soldier to show just how thoroughly Nazi ideology permeated the army. In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months--often depicted as a time of easy victories--undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Facing scarce supplies and enormous casualties, the average soldier sank to ta a primitive level of existence, re-experiencing the trench warfare of World War I under the most extreme weather conditions imaginable; the fighting itself was savage, and massacres of prisoners were common. Troops looted food and supplies from civilians with wild abandon; they mercilessly wiped out villages suspected of aiding partisans. Incredible losses led to recruits being thrown together in units that once had been filled with men from the same communities, making Nazi ideology even more important as a binding force. And they were further brutalized by a military justice system that executed almost 15,000 German soldiers during the war. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men--men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army. In six years of warfare, the vast majority of German men passed through the Wehrmacht and almost every family had a relative who fought in the East. Bartov's powerful new account of how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the army sheds new light on how deeply it penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today.
Download or read book Hitler s Soldiers written by Ben H. Shepherd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people’s army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army’s early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler’s mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings—moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational—of the army’s own leadership.
Download or read book Hitler s Panzer Armies on the Eastern Front written by Robert Kirchubel and published by Grub Street Publishers. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the role armored formations played in the struggle between the Nazis and the Soviets. Hitler’s panzer armies spearheaded the blitzkrieg on the Eastern Front. They played a key role in every major campaign, not simply as tactical tools but also as operational weapons that shaped strategy. Their extraordinary triumphs—and their eventual defeat—mirrors the fate of German forces in the East. And yet no previous study has concentrated on the history of these elite formations in the bitter struggle against the Soviet Union. Robert Kirchubel’s absorbing and meticulously researched account of the operational history of the panzer armies fills this gap, using German sources including many firsthand accounts never before seen in English. And it gives a graphic insight into the organization, tactics, fighting methods, and morale of the Wehrmacht at the height of its powers and as it struggled to defend the Reich.
Download or read book The German Campaign in Russia written by George E. Blau and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Waffen SS written by Adrian Gilbert and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 50 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.
Download or read book Waffen SS written by Edmund L. Blandford and published by Airlife Publishing. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It would be difficult to find any military force in history as unique and perhaps as controversial as Hitler's Waffen SS. In this work its origins are traced via the recollections of men intimately involved. How this small band of tough men became transformed into a nationwide political protection force is fairly well known, but how some of these men were taken and transformed into a fully militarized force has always been obscure. This books covers the combat experiences of Waffen-SS soldiers on the battlefronts from 1939-1945, infantrymen, artillerymen, tankmen and even the more unusual trades of recruiters and interpreters.
Download or read book The German Campaigns in the Balkans spring 1941 written by and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book At the Heart of the Reich written by Gerhard Engel and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing account of Hitler’s thoughts and actions throughout World War II from one of his closest aides. Major Gerhard Engel was Hitler's army adjutant from 1938 to 1943. During his years with Hitler, Engel kept a diary. After the war, he added material to shed further light on certain events, military and political decisions, and Hitler's attitude to particular problems. His diary covers the decision-making process behind crucial military actions, including the annexation of Austria, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the war against Russia. He also addresses intrigue within Hitler's inner circle and his casual conversations with other key Nazi figures. At the Heart of the Reich sheds important light on the Fuhrer's core beliefs. It includes the statement made by Hitler in 1941, “I am now as before a Catholic.” It also details his views on German Jews and dwells on the extent to which they served in the Wehrmacht. Engel also addresses the deportation of Jews from Salonika and Hitler's order to Himmler to select a destination, the details of which Hitler was apparently unconcerned with. The final part of the diary is mostly devoted to the war against Russia. Engel's reports confirm that the master plan was to take Leningrad and Rostov, then close pincers behind Moscow. The plan was frustrated by senior army commanders'’ lack of enthusiasm and Hitler's failure to exert firm leadership. Engel depicts Hitler as a vacillating, contrary man. It is not unlikely that this encouraged his generals to impose themselves and argue their plan to rush Moscow, which ultimately contributed to the defeat of the Third Reich. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Download or read book Heroes or Traitors written by Walter S. Dunn Jr. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-05-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a German victory became impossible, the July 1944 conspirators plotted to bring a quick end to the war, hoping to negotiate a peace with the Western allies and possibly to join them in a war against Russia. Because the Allies would not negotiate with Hitler, the plotters planned to assassinate him and seize control of the government, using the Replacement Army to overcome the S.S. and the Nazi Party. This army would also maintain order within Germany, a task that would require more than half-a-million trained men. The conspirators convinced key Replacement Army officers to withhold men from the Field Army in the spring of 1944 in preparation for taking over the country. The result was a German army that lacked enough reserve divisions to counter the invasion of France and the Red Army attack in Russia. Although the plotters failed to kill Hitler, they hastened the war's end by weakening the German army. Dunn examines the 1944 July Plot from a manpower and logistics perspective to demonstrate that the conspirators did, in fact, achieve their goal of hastening the war's end.
Download or read book Hitler s Second Book written by Adolf Hitler and published by Enigma Books. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unpublished followup to Hitler's autobiography never published during the dictator's lifetime includes details of his vision for a foreign policy based on continual aggression that would inevitably result in a confrontation with the United States, which he saw as a major stumbling block to his plans.
Download or read book Hitler s Soldiers written by Ben H. Shepherd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating study of the German army's military campaigns, relations with the Nazi regime, and complicity in Nazi crimes across occupied Europe For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people's army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army's early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler's mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings--moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational--of the army's own leadership.
Download or read book Manstein written by Mungo Melvin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the preeminent British military strategist comes this riveting biography of Manstein, Hitler's most controversial general. Among students of military history, the genius of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) is respected perhaps more than that of any other World War II soldier. He displayed his strategic brilliance in such campaigns as the invasion of Poland, the Blitzkrieg of France, the sieges of Sevastopol, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, and the battles of Kharkov and Kursk. Manstein also stands as one of the war's most enigmatic and controversial figures. To some, he was a leading proponent of the Nazi regime and a symbol of the moral corruption of the Wehrmacht. Yet he also disobeyed Hitler, who dismissed his leading Field Marshal over this incident, and has been suspected by some of conspiring against the Führer. Sentenced to eighteen years by a British war tribunal at Hamburg in 1949, Manstein was released in 1953 and went on to advise the West German government in founding its new army within NATO. Military historian and strategist Mungo Melvin combines his research in German military archives and battlefield records with unprecedented access to family archives to get to the truth of Manstein's life and deliver this definitive biography of the man and his career.
Download or read book Hitler s Jewish Soldiers written by Bryan Mark Rigg and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.
Download or read book When Titans Clashed written by David M. Glantz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On first publication, this uncommonly concise and readable account of Soviet Russia's clash with Nazi Germany utterly changed our understanding of World War II on Germany’s Eastern Front, immediately earning its place among top-shelf histories of the world war. Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, much of it the authors' own work, this new edition maintains the 1995 original's distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time. In 1941, when Pearl Harbor shattered America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the Germany Army and put an end to Hitler's imperial designs. In swift and stirring prose, When Titans Clash provides the clearest, most complete account of this epic struggle, especially from the Soviet perspective. Drawing on the massive and unprecedented release of Soviet archival documents in recent decades, David Glantz, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Soviet military, and noted military historian Jonathan House expand and elaborate our picture of the Soviet war effort—a picture sharply different from accounts that emphasize Hitler's failed leadership over Soviet strategy and might. Rafts of newly available official directives, orders, and reports reveal the true nature and extraordinary scale of Soviet military operations as they swept across the one thousand miles from Moscow to Berlin, featuring stubborn defenses and monumental offensives and counteroffensives and ultimately costing the two sides combined a staggering twenty million casualties. Placing the war within its wider context, the authors also make use of recent revelations to clarify further the political, economic, and social issues that influenced and reflected what happened on the battlefield. Their work gives us new insight into Stalin's political motivation and Adolf Hitler’s role as warlord, as well as a better understanding of the human and economic costs of the war—for both the Soviet Union and Germany. While incorporating a wealth of new information, When Titans Clashed remains remarkably compact, a tribute to the authors' determination to make this critical chapter in world history as accessible as it is essential.
Download or read book Hitler s Army written by Omer Bartov and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-11-26 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But in this compelling account Omer Bartov reveals a very different history, as he probes the experience of the average soldier to show just how thoroughly Nazi ideology permeated the army. In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months--often depicted as a time of easy victories--undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Facing scarce supplies and enormous casualties, the average soldier sank to ta a primitive level of existence, re-experiencing the trench warfare of World War I under the most extreme weather conditions imaginable; the fighting itself was savage, and massacres of prisoners were common. Troops looted food and supplies from civilians with wild abandon; they mercilessly wiped out villages suspected of aiding partisans. Incredible losses led to recruits being thrown together in units that once had been filled with men from the same communities, making Nazi ideology even more important as a binding force. And they were further brutalized by a military justice system that executed almost 15,000 German soldiers during the war. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men--men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army. In six years of warfare, the vast majority of German men passed through the Wehrmacht and almost every family had a relative who fought in the East. Bartov's powerful new account of how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the army sheds new light on how deeply it penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today.
