Download or read book Hitler Stalin and the Destruction of Poland written by Nick Shepley and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hitler Stalin and the Destruction of Poland written by Nick Shepley and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1939 a stunned international community absorbed the news that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, hated and implacable enemies, had signed a non-agression pact. The treaty between them contained a hidden clause, one which divided Poland between the two murderous regimes. This ebook explores the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland and the fate of the Poles and Poland's Jews. It also explores the Soviet Union's disasterous war against Finland, and Hitler's plans in the run up to the invasion of the USSR itself. Explaining History is a series of ebook titles dedicated to making 20th Century history accessible for all readers, ideal for enthusiasts, students and readers who want to know more.
Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
Download or read book The Devils Alliance written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History remembers the Soviets and the Nazis as bitter enemies and ideological rivals, the two mammoth and opposing totalitarian regimes of World War II whose conflict would be the defining and deciding clash of the war. Yet for nearly a third of the conflict's entire timespan, Hitler and Stalin stood side by side as partners. The Pact that they agreed had a profound -- and bloody -- impact on Europe, and is fundamental to understanding the development and denouement of the war. In The Devils' Alliance, acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse explores the causes and implications of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, an unholy covenant whose creation and dissolution were crucial turning points in World War II. Forged by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, the nonaggression treaty briefly united the two powers in a brutally efficient collaboration. Together, the Germans and Soviets quickly conquered and divided central and eastern Europe -- Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia -- and the human cost was staggering: during the two years of the pact hundreds of thousands of people in central and eastern Europe caught between Hitler and Stalin were expropriated, deported, or killed. Fortunately for the Allies, the partnership ultimately soured, resulting in the surprise June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. Ironically, however, the powers' exchange of materiel, blueprints, and technological expertise during the period of the Pact made possible a far more bloody and protracted war than would have otherwise been conceivable. Combining comprehensive research with a gripping narrative, The Devils' Alliance is the authoritative history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact -- and a portrait of the people whose lives were irrevocably altered by Hitler and Stalin's nefarious collaboration.
Download or read book Poland 1939 written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.
Download or read book Warsaw 1944 written by Alexandra Richie and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History.
Download or read book Lenin Stalin and Hitler written by Robert Gellately and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-11-11 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new accounting of the great social and political upheavals that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1945—from the Russian Revolution through the Second World War. In Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, acclaimed historian Robert Gellately focuses on the dominant powers of the time, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but also analyzes the catastrophe of those years in an effort to uncover its political and ideological nature. Arguing that the tragedies endured by Europe were inextricably linked through the dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, Gellately explains how the pursuit of their “utopian” ideals turned into dystopian nightmares. Dismantling the myth of Lenin as a relatively benevolent precursor to Hitler and Stalin and contrasting the divergent ways that Hitler and Stalin achieved their calamitous goals, Gellately creates in Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler a vital analysis of a critical period in modern history.
Download or read book The War Hitler Won September 1939 written by Nicholas Bethell and published by Lane, Allen. This book was released on 1972 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalin written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 1249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.
Download or read book Night Voices written by Heather Laskey and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2003-11-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the story of Poland in the years leading up to the war, the horrors Polish Jews faced during the Nazi occupation, the brief period of hope when they believed they were building a better society, and their gradual disillusionment as state sponsored corruption, brutality, Stalinist paranoia, and anti-Semitism developed. The story is told through the memories of four people, Stasia Alapin Rubilowicz, her husband Mietek Rubilowicz, her son Peter Alapin, and her friend Alina. Life in Poland before and during the war is seen primarily through Stasia's eyes, who evokes her youth in an affluent family, largely assimilated into Polish society. This life was shattered forever in her early adulthood when the Nazis invaded, bringing death and destruction to Poland and to Polish Jews in particular. She recounts the anguish of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, her escape from it, her survival on the run, her betrayal to the Gestapo by a woman who had known her at school, and her rescue from prison by Christian Polish friends at the risk of their lives. In the second half of the book we are introduced to Mietek and her friend Alina, who describe their experiences in Poland during and after the war and their hopes that communism would rid the country of bigotry injustice, and want. But as old hatreds, now supported by a perverted catechism of socialist dogma, reawakened anti-Semitism they became increasingly disillusioned, ultimately deciding they had no recourse but to leave Poland and start a new life elsewhere. By 1968 the Polish communist leadership, through a campaign of intimidation and harassment, had succeeded in ridding Poland of virtually all its surviving Jews.Night Voices is a testimony both to the strength of the human spirit and to our capacity for self-delusion.
Download or read book Hitler and Stalin written by Laurence Rees and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning historian plumbs the depths of Hitler and Stalin's vicious regimes, and shows the extent to which they brutalized the world around them. Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed. Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.
Download or read book The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 written by Włodzimierz Borodziej and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Download or read book Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler written by Igor Lukes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A diplomatic history of events leading up to the Munich crisis in 1938 in which Great Britain and France decided to appease Hitler's demands to annex the Sudentenland. The book aims to integrate a full understanding of the Czech role with wider events.
Download or read book The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 written by Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the uprising from both sides *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "When we crush the uprising, Warsaw will get what it deserves: total annihilation." - Adolf Hitler "I kneel before the heroes who fought in Warsaw, however I think that the uprising was the biggest and most reckless catastrophe of Poland." - General Wladyslaw Anders After a brief revival following World War I, during which it successfully defeated a Soviet attempt to invade in an effort to carry "international revolution" into Germany and Central Europe, Poland once again fell victim to its neighbors in 1939. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and Josef Stalin's USSR collaborated in the conquest, and then split Poland between them. The Germans carried out most of the fighting and gained the choicest parts of the nation. As a penetratingly bitter New York Times editorial stated on September 18th, 1939, "Germany having killed the prey, Soviet Russia will seize that part of the carcass that Germany cannot use. It will play the noble role of hyena to the German lion. This gross betrayal of the professions that Soviet Russia has been making for years is being defended in the manner with which the world has now grown sickeningly familiar. Because Poland has 'virtually ceased to exist, ' Russia is free to break every treaty with it (Sword, 1991, 292). The Germans instituted oppressive rule in their portion of Poland, executing some 7,000 people on political grounds and imprisoning thousands of others. 1.5 million Poles became forced laborers in Germany, and though seldom noted, the Soviets applied equally brutal methods in their sector, executing 22,000 Polish officers at the Katyn Forest Massacre. NKVD death squads murdered 40,000 civilians and deported 1.4 million people to Siberia and other remote areas, from which a sizable percentage never returned alive. As the Soviets began to push the Germans back west, the Red Army plunged headlong into Poland in late June 1944 on the heels of German Army Group Center's retreating forces. The British urged the AK to cooperate with the Soviets, but the Russians wanted Poland and treated the Resistance as enemy partisans. The NKVD arrested AK members by the thousands, executing their leaders out of hand. By late July, the Polish government in exile thought it was time to order the AK to lead an uprising in Warsaw. The sight of German units retreating, and Soviet tanks seen on July 31st very close to the city, prompted the order to openly retake Poland's capital for the nation. Unfortunately, it was a decision also predicated on a naively optimistic faith in Anglo-American support. As a result, the Poles fought bravely but futilely in August and September against the Nazis, and the Nazis, as they so often did, mercilessly destroyed the city causing the trouble. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the notorious SS, told his men, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." In fact, the Germans had intended to destroy Warsaw from the beginning of the war, and they were terribly successful. One Allied pilot recalled, "There was no difficulty in finding Warsaw. It was visible from 100 kilometers away. The city was in flames but with so many huge fires burning, it was almost impossible to pick up the target marker flares." It's estimated that up to 200,000 Poles were killed in the process, and to top it all off, the Soviets arrested and executed countless more after the Nazis were finally gone. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944: The History of the Polish Resistance's Failed Attempt to Liberate Poland's Capital from Nazi Germany looks at the events that led to the uprising and the Nazi destruction of the city.
Download or read book Hitler Strikes Poland written by Alexander B. Rossino and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping examination of the systematic and murderous ways that Germans first put into place their criminal ideology in their invasion of Poland, during which tens of thousands of civilians were killed to make ``living space'' for Germans in the east.
Download or read book Poland 1939 written by Steven J. Zaloga and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-10 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 began World War II in Europe, pitting the newly modernized army of Europe's great industrial power against the much smaller Polish army and introducing the world to a new style of warfare – Blitzkrieg. Panzer divisions spearheaded the German assault with Stuka dive-bombers prowling ahead spreading terror and mayhem. This book demonstrates how the Polish army was not as backward as it is often portrayed and fielded a tank force larger than that of the contemporary US Army. Its stubborn defence did give the Germans some surprises and German casualties were relatively heavy for such a short campaign.
