Download or read book The Traitor of Colditz written by Robert Verkaik and published by Headline Welbeck Non-Fiction. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A vastly entertaining tale, bursting with astonishing stories and extraordinary characters ... A fascinating read' Sunday Telegraph 'Brilliant ... An amazing story, one I hadn't heard too much about' Dan Snow IT IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. The Germans like to boast that there is 'no escape' from the infamous fortress that is Colditz. The elite British officers imprisoned there are determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war. As the war heats up and the stakes are raised, the Gestapo plant a double-agent inside the prison in a bid to uncover the secrets of the British prisoners. Captain Julius Green of the Army Dental Corps and Sergeant John 'Busty' Brown must risk their lives in a bid to save the lives of hundreds of Allied servicemen and protect the secrets of MI9. Drawn from unseen records, The Traitor of Colditz brings to light an extraordinary, never-before-told story from the Second World War, an epic tale of how MI9 took on the Nazis and exposed the traitors in their midst.

Download or read book The Traitor of Colditz written by Robert Verkaik and published by . This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A vastly entertaining tale, bursting with astonishing stories and extraordinary characters ... A fascinating read' Sunday Telegraph 'Brilliant ... An amazing story, one I hadn't heard too much about' Dan Snow IT IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. The Germans like to boast that there is 'no escape' from the infamous fortress that is Colditz. The elite British officers imprisoned there are determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war. As the war heats up and the stakes are raised, the Gestapo plant a double-agent inside the prison in a bid to uncover the secrets of the British prisoners. Captain Julius Green of the Army Dental Corps and Sergeant John 'Busty' Brown must risk their lives in a bid to save the lives of hundreds of Allied servicemen and protect the secrets of MI9. Drawn from unseen records, The Traitor of Colditz brings to light an extraordinary, never-before-told story from the Second World War, an epic tale of how MI9 took on the Nazis and exposed the traitors in their midst.

Download or read book The Traitor of Colditz written by Robert Verkaik and published by Headline Welbeck Non-Fiction. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a tale which pits the serial escapers of Colditz against the traitor in their own ranks and the Gestapo against the double agents of MI9. Britain's hopes are pinned on two of the war's unlikeliest heroes - a Jewish Glaswegian dentist and an East End black-marketeer in a story which ranges from Auschwitz to the Cabarets of Berlin. Colditz is an iconic part of the British WW2 story, up there with Spitfires and D-Day and the subject of many books, films and TV programs. This strangely neglected facet of the WW2 story, but with a bigger story which for all sorts of reasons (not least of which were live security issues) has never been told and which Robert Verkaik has uncovered for the first time.

Download or read book Posh Boys written by Robert Verkaik and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘The latest in the series of powerful books on the divisions in modern Britain, and will take its place on many bookshelves beside Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Owen Jones’s Chavs.’ –Andrew Marr, Sunday Times ‘In his fascinating, enraging polemic, Verkaik touches on one of the strangest aspects of the elite schools and their product’s domination of public life for two and a half centuries: the acquiescence of everyone else.’ –Observer In Britain today, the government, judiciary and military are all led by an elite who attended private school. Under their watch, our society has become increasingly divided and the gap between rich and poor is now greater than ever before. Is this the country we want to live in? If we care about inequality, we have to talk about public schools. Robert Verkaik issues a searing indictment of the system originally intended to educate the most underprivileged Britons, and outlines how, through meaningful reform, we can finally make society fairer for all.

Download or read book The Traitor written by Guy Walters and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was something powerful about it, something magnetic. He had witnessed the effect of such uniforms in the newsreels; now he was about to wear one. But this SS uniform -- the uniform proudly worn by so many maniacs and murderers -- bore a Union Jack...It was an insult to King and Country. In November 1943 the Nazis capture British secret agent John Lockhart while he is on a Resistance mission to German-occupied Crete. They give him a stark choice: betray his country or die. In a decision some might consider treason and moral folly, Lockhart acts out of love and strikes a bargain with his captors: in return for his wife, who is interned in a concentration camp, he will change sides. But he is stunned to learn that his mission is to lead the British Free Corps, a clandestine unit of the SS composed of British fascists and renegades culled from POW camps. Aware that he, like them, will be branded a traitor, Lockhart seeks to redeem himself by destroying a terrifying secret weapon that threatens to change the course of history.

Download or read book Colditz written by P. R. Reid and published by Zenith Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis thought escape was impossible. Colditz is the true story of the Allied prisoners held there and their (sometimes successful) efforts to escape, written by one of the POWs.

Download or read book Prisoners of the Castle written by Ben Macintyre and published by Crown. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “entertaining [and] often-moving account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the remarkable POWs whose relentlessly creative attempts to escape a notorious Nazi prison embodied the spirit of resistance against fascism, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor “Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history.”—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.

Download or read book Colditz written by Henry Chancellor and published by Coronet. This book was released on 2002-04-04 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colditz high security camp contained every persistent escaper, trouble maker and valuable hostage captured by the Germans in World War II. It was considered escape proof but the very opposite proved to be true. The prisoners pooled their collected talents to create the greatest escape academy of the war.

Download or read book The Traitor of Arnhem written by Robert Verkaik and published by Headline Welbeck Non-Fiction. This book was released on 2024-05-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sunday Times Bestselling author of The Traitor of Colditz Robert Verkaik reveals the incredible never-before-told story of the role played by the Cambridge Spies in the British defeat at Arnhem "Original, thought-provoking and exceedingly well written." Robert Kershaw The end of the Second World War is in sight. Following the overwhelming victory on D-Day, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin all seek to shape the global future to their own ends and win the race to Berlin. The British launch Operation Market Garden, the greatest airborne operation the world has ever seen. It is a bold roll of the dice, which, if successful, will end the war in weeks. But behind the scenes, spies are working, and plans are betrayed, the operation fails and thousands of Allied soldiers die. The Traitor of Arnhem tells a never-before-told story of this iconic operation, and of the very different figures working in secret to cause the catastrophic defeat. One traitor a terrifying giant of a man, a supposed hero of the resistance who sent hundreds of fellow freedom fighters to torture and death, the other an aristocrat and an English gentleman, working from inside the heart of the Allied war effort in London. Both of them working for the Russians. Drawn from unseen records and shedding fresh light on the operation and the spies responsible for its failure, this is an incredible account of the battle that would go on to shape the twentieth century.

Download or read book Jihadi John written by Robert Verkaik and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a defining moment, the first time ‘Jihadi John’ appeared. Suddenly Islamic State had a face and the whole world knew the extent of their savagery. Weeks later, when his identity was revealed, Robert Verkaik was shocked to realise that this was a man he’d interviewed years earlier. Back in 2010, Mohammed Emwazi was a twenty-one-year-old IT graduate who claimed the security services were ruining his life. They had repeatedly approached him, his family and his fiancée. Had they been tracking an already dangerous extremist or did they push him over the edge? In the aftermath of the US air strike that killed Emwazi in November 2015, Verkaik’s investigation leads him to deeply troubling questions. What led Emwazi to come to him for help in the first place? And why do hundreds of Britons want to join Islamic State? In an investigation both frightening and urgent, Verkaik goes beyond the making of one terrorist to examine the radicalisation of our youth and to ask what we can do to stop it happening in future.

Download or read book The Spy and the Traitor written by Ben Macintyre and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

Download or read book Why You Won t Get Rich written by Robert Verkaik and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bottom to the top of our economy, capitalism is too blunt an instrument to tackle Britain's epidemic of inequality. Soaring rents, unfair taxation and a growing gig economy have brought about unprecedented economic shame: Amazon warehouse workers living in tents, nurses turning to foodbanks, London firemen commuting hundreds of miles to work. Even those higher up the ladder are losing their grip on the life they were promised. Barristers take home less than the minimum wage and doctors are starting out with £100,000 student debts on salaries lower than the national average. We’re all facing a new economic phenomenon – in-work poverty. At the same time a generation of young professionals is coming to terms with never being able to own even the cheapest home in their area. From the bottom to the top of our economy, capitalism is too blunt an instrument to tackle Britain's epidemic of inequality. Soaring rents, unfair taxation and a growing gig economy have brought about unprecedented economic shame: Amazon warehouse workers living in tents, nurses turning to foodbanks, London firemen commuting hundreds of miles to work. Even those higher up the ladder are losing their grip on the life they were promised. Barristers take home less than the minimum wage and doctors are starting out with £100,000 student debts on salaries lower than the national average. We’re all facing a new economic phenomenon – in-work poverty. At the same time a generation of young professionals is coming to terms with never being able to own even the cheapest home in their area. Hard work no longer pays off. But there is hope for a better, fairer future.

Download or read book Defiant written by Robert Verkaik and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ''Robert Verkaik makes a revisionist case for an unsung aircraft, the Boulton Paul Defiant. This two-seat gun-turret fighter is, argues Verkaik, the forgotten fighter of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain; the effectiveness as well as the courage of its crews is overlooked in standard accounts. To advance his case, he notes that a Defiant squadron still holds the record for the number of enemy aircraft shot down in a single day, with a claimed figure of 38'' Times ''Robert Verkaik tells the story of the Battle of Britain''s unlikeliest hero with verve and phenomenal grasp of detail. He brings the Defiant fighter back into focus as an important part of the victorious RAF in the hour of its greatest trial'' Mark Urban ''Meticulously researched and rich in human and social as well as military interest, Defiant fills a crucial gap in our understanding of that most perilous time'' David Kynaston, author of Austerity Britain ''Firmly establishes the aircraft''s role in those crucial aerial battles of 1940 and elevates the brave aircrews who fought and died in their forgotten Defiants, to rank alongside their comrades in the better remembered Hurricanes and Spitfires.'' David Fairhead, director of Spitfire ''Verkaik is an excellent guide, making his case with a restrained passion, taking us through the inter-war rearmament before cataloguing the muddled thinking, the political infighting, the inter-service and personality rivalries. His research was clearly a labour of love, leaving no Whitehall paper or airman''s letter unturned in his search for the truth, and he never forgets the human dimension behind the losses'' Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday, five stars ''Defiant is both a stirring testament to the courage of the men who flew them and a welcome new examination of one of the Second World War''s most famous conflicts'' Alexander Larman, Observer Praise for Jihadi John: ''An exemplary account . . . The book''s most important contribution is to highlight the difficulties faced by the intelligence services . . . a first-class primer on Muslim extremism in Britain.'' Max Hastings, Sunday Times Praise for Posh Boys: ''The latest in the series of powerful books on the divisions in modern Britain, and will take its place on many bookshelves beside Reni Eddo-Lodge''s Why I''m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Owen Jones''s Chavs.'' Andrew Marr, Sunday Times ''Inspired, committed, careful and kind.'' Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1% In this startling new perspective on the Battle of Britain, Robert Verkaik reveals the surprising truth about the battle''s forgotten fighter, the Boulton Paul Defiant. The crucial role played by the Spitfire and the Hurricane has been exhaustively recorded, but, to date, next to nothing has been written about the third British fighter which took part in the battle. By writing from the unique perspective of the pilots who flew the Defiant and their air-gunners, Verkaik helps to set the record straight. The Air Staff regarded the Defiant as a state-of-the-art bomber destroyer and wanted to equip a third of all Fighter Command squadrons with this new plane. But the head of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, had other ideas and went to war with Whitehall over its plan to saddle him with hundreds of ''obsolete'' turret fighters. Then at Dunkirk, a Defiant squadron scored a huge success against the Luftwaffe by shooting down more German planes in one day than any other RAF unit before or since. Fighter Command, enthusiastically urged on by the Air Ministry, now committed its third fighter to the coming air battle over southern England. In the desperate dogfights of the battle, Defiants shot down both German bombers and fighters but suffered heavy losses too - one squadron was almost wiped out when it was ambushed by a superior force of Messerschmitt 109s. On 30 August 1940 all Defiant squadrons were withdrawn from the front line. The families of the Defiant air crews believed that their husbands, brothers and sons had died in vain, but the truth is that their vital contribution to the battle over Dunkirk and their role in the Battle of Britain has been all but erased from the official history. The story of the Defiant has not been allowed to mar the glorious victory won by the Spitfire and the Hurricane. But Verkaik has uncovered new records, including top-secret memos written by Hugh Dowding and his deputy Keith Park as well as correspondence with the Air Staff, combat and squadron reports, pilot logs and recordings of the last interviews with Defiant crews. He has also succeeded in tracing relatives of Defiant pilots and gunners to tell the story of the Battle of Britain as it has never been told before. He reveals how the myths which have grown up around the Defiant mask some inconvenient truths.

Download or read book Agent Zigzag written by Ben Macintyre and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ben Macintyre’s rollicking, spellbinding Agent Zigzag blends the spy-versus-spy machinations of John le Carré with the high farce of Evelyn Waugh.”—William Grimes, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “Wildly improbable but entirely true . . . [a] compellingly cinematic spy thriller with verve.”—Entertainment Weekly ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. In 1941, after training as German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted M15, the British Secret service, and for the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. Based on recently declassified files, Agent Zigzag tells Chapman’s full story for the first time. It’s a gripping tale of loyalty, love, treachery, espionage, and the thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal.

Download or read book Colditz the German Story written by Reinhold Eggers and published by Pen & Sword Military. This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reinhold Eggers one of the German staff who was Security Officer during the last years at Colditz. It is a compilation of the most spectacular escape attempts written by the escapers themselves. Eggers supports the stories with extracts from his Colditz diary which ran to 26 copybooks, with stories about the German staff and their characters, and a short account of the end of his war when he became a prisoner himself. It has some memorably funny moments (especially the tale of Max and Moritz, who filled in on parades), some very sad moments, and some descriptions of escapes that are truly astonishing"--Publisher's description.

Download or read book The Colditz Legacy written by Guy Walters and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany 1941. Two British officers, Hugh Hartley and Malcolm Royce, achieved what many believed to be impossible. They escaped from Oflag IVC, better known as Colditz Castle. But as they are about to cross the border into Switzerland, and within yards of reaching freedom, Royce is shot. He begs Hartley to go on and save himself. Wracked with guilt, Hartley leaves his friend behind. London, 1973. Thirty years later and Hartley is now a senior MI6 officer. When a shadowy contact tips him off that Royce may still be alive, and still being held in Colditz - now a lunatic asylum - Hartley is desperate to discover what really happened to his friend. He plans a perilous mission to break back into Colditz, but the truth he will find there will be more shocking than he could possibly have imagined.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History written by Allen Boyer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development and application of the law of treason in England across more than a thousand years, placing this legal history within a broader historical context. Describing many high-profile prosecutions and trials, the book focuses on the statutes, ordinances and customs that have at various times governed, limited and shaped this worst of crimes. It explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book. This book also considers why treason as both a word and a concept remains so potent in wider modern culture, investigating prevalent current misconceptions about what is and what is not treason. It concludes by suggesting that the abolition or 'death' of treason in the near future, while a logical next step, is by no means a foregone conclusion. The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History is a thorough academic introduction for scholars and history students, as well as general readers with an interest in British political and legal history.