Download or read book Army Group South written by Werner Haupt and published by Schiffer Military History. This book was released on 1998 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After long years of studying sources and literature, Werner Haupt presents the military history of one of the larger theaters of World War II. The completion of the history of "Army Group South" is the result of the author's utilization of all available German and Russian literature, as well as those combat diaries and documents of the committed troop units that are available in German archives. In addition, the author was assisted in clearing up several questions by the advice of former members of the army group - from commanders to drivers. This third and final volume of a three volume set by Werner Haupt includes a volume each on Army Group North, Army Group Center, and now Army Group South. The author served in the German Army as a soldier and officer in the northern sector of the Eastern Front during the Second World War. He is also the author of Assault on Moscow 1941 (available from Schiffer Publishing Ltd.).
Download or read book Beyond Stalingrad written by Dana V. Sadarananda and published by Stackpole Military History Series. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - Covers a pivotal but largely neglected period on the Eastern Front - Focuses on German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, one of the best commanders of World War II After the Soviets trapped German forces in Stalingrad, the Germans regrouped under Erich von Manstein, who orchestrated a dramatic reversal of fortune during the winter of 1942-43, enabling Germany to continue fighting for two more years.
Download or read book The German Defense Of Berlin written by Oberst a.D. Wilhem Willemar and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often written during imprisonment in Allied War camps by former German officers, with their memories of the World War fresh in their minds, The Foreign Military Studies series offers rare glimpses into the Third Reich. In this study Oberst a.D. Wilhem Willemar discusses his recollections of the climatic battle for Berlin from within the Wehrmacht. “No cohesive, over-all plan for the defense of Berlin was ever actually prepared. All that existed was the stubborn determination of Hitler to defend the capital of the Reich. Circumstances were such that he gave no thought to defending the city until it was much too late for any kind of advance planning. Thus the city’s defense was characterized only by a mass of improvisations. These reveal a state of total confusion in which the pressure of the enemy, the organizational chaos on the German side, and the catastrophic shortage of human and material resources for the defense combined with disastrous effect. “The author describes these conditions in a clear, accurate report which I rate very highly. He goes beyond the more narrow concept of planning and offers the first German account of the defense of Berlin to be based upon thorough research. I attach great importance to this study from the standpoint of military history and concur with the military opinions expressed by the author.”-Foreword by Generaloberst a.D. Franz Halder.
Download or read book Army Group North written by Werner Haupt and published by Schiffer Military History. This book was released on 1997 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After long years of studying sources and literature, Werner Haupt presents the military history of one of the larger theaters of World War II. The completion of the history of "Army Group North" is the result of the author's utilization of all German and Russian literature, as well as those combat diaries and documents of the committed troop units that are available in German archives. In addition, the author was assisted in clearing up several questions by the advice of former members of the army group - from commanders to drivers. This series by Werner Haupt will continue with a volume each on Army Group Center and Army Group South. The author served in the German Army as a soldier and officer in the northern sector of the Eastern Front during the Second World War. He is also the author of Assault on Moscow - 1941 (available from Schiffer Publishing Ltd.).
Download or read book Hitler s Panzers East written by R.H.S. Stolfi and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How close did Germany come to winning World War II? Did Hitler throw away victory in Europe after his troops had crushed the Soviet field armies defending Moscow by August 1941? R.H.S. Stolfi offers a dramatic new picture of Hitler’s conduct in World War II and a fundamental reinterpretation of the course of the war. Adolf Hitler generally is thought to have been driven by a blitzkrieg mentality in the years 1939 to 1941. In fact, Stolfi argues, he had no such outlook on the war. From the day Britain and France declared war, Hitler reacted with a profoundly conservative cast of mind and pursued a circumscribed strategy, pushing out siege lines set around Germany by the Allies. Interpreting Hitler as a siege Führer explain his apparent aberrations in connection with Dunkirk, his fixation on the seizure of Leningrad, and his fateful decision in the summer of 1941 to deflect Army Group Center into the Ukraine when both Moscow and victory in World War II were within its reach. Unaware of Hitler’s siege orientation, the German Army planned blitz campaigns. Through daring operational concepts and bold tactics, the army won victories over several Allied powers in World War II, and these led to the great campaign against the Soviet Union in summer of 1941. Stolfi postulates that in August 1941, German Army Group Center had the strength both to destroy the Red field armies defending the Soviet capital and to advance to Moscow and beyond. The defeat of the Soviet Union would have assured victory in World War II. Nevertheless, Hitler ordered the army group south to secure the resources of the Ukraine against a potential siege. And a virtually assured German victory slipped away. This radical reinterpretation of Hitler and the capabilities of the German Army leads to a reevaluation of World War II, in which the lesson to be learned is not how the Allies won the war, but how close the Germans came to a quick and decisive victory?long before the United States was drawn into the battle.
Download or read book Panzer Operations written by Hermann Hoth and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German commander’s “very readable and thought-provoking” study of Operation Barbarossa (Military Review). This book unveils a wealth of experiences and analysis about Operation Barbarossa, perhaps the most important military campaign of the twentieth century, from a perspective rarely encountered. Hermann Hoth led Germany’s 3rd Panzer Group in Army Group Center—in tandem with Guderian’s 2nd Group—during the invasion of the Soviet Union, and together, these two daring panzer commanders achieved a series of astounding victories, encircling entire Russian armies at Minsk, Smolensk, and Vyazma, all the way up to the very gates of Moscow. This work begins with Hoth discussing the use of nuclear weapons in future conflicts. This cool-headed postwar reflection, from one of Nazi Germany’s top panzer commanders, is rare enough. But then Hoth dives into his exact command decisions during Barbarossa—still the largest continental offensive ever undertaken—to reveal new insights into how Germany could, and in his view should, have succeeded in the campaign. Hoth critically analyses the origin, development, and objective of the plan against Russia, and presents the situations confronted, the decisions taken, and the mistakes made by the army’s leadership, as the new form of mobile warfare startled not only the Soviets on the receiving end but the German leadership itself, which failed to provide support infrastructure for their panzer arm’s breakthroughs. Hoth sheds light on the decisive and ever-escalating struggle between Hitler and his military advisers on the question of whether, after the Dnieper and the Dvina had been reached, to adhere to the original idea of capturing Moscow. Hitler’s momentous decision to divert forces to Kiev and the south only came in late August 1941. He then finally considers in detail whether the Germans, after obliterating the remaining Russian armies facing Army Group Center in Operation Typhoon, could still hope for the occupation of the Russian capital that fall. Hoth concludes his study with several lessons for the offensive use of armored formations in the future. His firsthand analysis, here published for the first time in English, will be vital reading for every student of World War II.
Download or read book The Ardennes written by Hugh Marshall Cole and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Battle of Korsun Cherkassy written by Nikolaus von Vormann and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primary source account of the WWII Battle of Korsun-Cherkassy written by a Nazi commander who survived the Soviet victory. In 1943, the tide began to turn against Germany on the Eastern Front. Their summer offensive, Operation Citadel, was a failure. The Red Army’s Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive was pushing back on Germany’s Army Group South in a war of attrition. By October, Kiev was liberated, and the Soviets had reached the Dnieper River in Ukraine. After sudden attacks by the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, the Russians achieved a major encirclement of six German divisions, a total of 60,000 soldiers, in a pocket near the Dnieper River. A dramatic weeks-long battle ensued. After a failed attempt led by Erich von Manstein to break into the pocket from the outside, the trapped German forces focused their efforts on escape. Abandoning equipment and wounded soldiers, the survivors rejoined the surrounding panzer divisions. Beginning with the German retreat to the Dnieper in 1943, Generalleutnant von Vormann chronicles the battle and describes the psychological effects of the brutal combat. As one of the few primary source materials that exists on the subject, this volume is of significant historical interest.
Download or read book Hitler s Generals on Trial written by Valerie Geneviève Hébert and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By prosecuting war crimes, the Nuremberg trials sought to educate West Germans about their criminal past, provoke their total rejection of Nazism, and convert them to democracy. More than all of the other Nuremberg proceedings, the High Command Case against fourteen of Hitler's generals embraced these goals, since the charges-the murder of POWs, the terrorizing of civilians, the extermination of Jews-also implicated the 20 million ordinary Germans who had served in the military. This trial was the true test of Nuremberg's potential to inspire national reflection on Nazi crime. Its importance notwithstanding, the High Command Case has been largely neglected by historians. Valerie Hébert's study—the only book in English on the subject—draws extensively on the voluminous trial records to reconstruct these proceedings in full: prosecution and defense strategies; evidence for and against the defendants and the military in general; the intricacies of the judgment; and the complex legal issues raised, such as the defense of superior orders, military necessity, and command responsibility. Crucially, she also examines the West German reaction to the trial and the intense debate over its fairness and legitimacy, ignited by the sentencing of soldiers who were seen by the public as having honorably defended their country. Hébert argues that the High Command Trial was itself a success, producing eleven guilty verdicts along with an incontrovertible record of the German military's crimes. But, viewing the trial from beyond the courtroom, she also contends that it made no lasting imprint on the German public's consciousness. And because the United States was eager to secure West Germany as an ally in the Cold War, American officials eventually consented to parole and clemency programs for all of the convicted officers, so that by the late 1950s not one remained imprisoned. Superbly researched and impeccably told, Hitler's Generals on Trial addresses fundamental questions concerning the meaning of justice after atrocity and genocide, the moral imperative of punishment for these crimes, the link between justice and memory, and the relevance of the Nuremberg trials for transitional justice processes today. Inasmuch as these trials coined the vocabulary of modern international criminal law and set an agenda for transitional justice that remains in place today, Hébert's book marks a major contribution to military and legal history.
Download or read book Standing Fast written by Timothy A. Wray and published by . This book was released on 2011-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stalingrad To Berlin The German Defeat In The East Illustrated Edition written by Earl F. Ziemke and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 1185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains 72 illustrations and 42 maps of the Russian Campaign. After the disasters of the Stalingrad Campaign in the Russian winters of 1942-3, the German Wehrmacht was on the defensive under increasing Soviet pressure; this volume sets out to show how did the Russians manage to push the formerly all-conquering German soldiers back from Russian soil to the ruins of Berlin. Save for the introduction of nuclear weapons, the Soviet victory over Germany was the most fateful development of World War II. Both wrought changes and raised problems that have constantly preoccupied the world in the more than twenty years since the war ended. The purpose of this volume is to investigate one aspect of the Soviet victory-how the war was won on the battlefield. The author sought, in following the march of the Soviet and German armies from Stalingrad to Berlin, to depict the war as it was and to describe the manner in which the Soviet Union emerged as the predominant military power in Europe.
Download or read book War in the Wild East written by Ben Shepherd and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army's eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime's annihilation policies. Ben Shepherd enters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. He investigates how anti-partisan warfare was conducted, not by the generals, but by the far more numerous, average Germans serving as officers in the field. What shaped their behavior was more complex than Nazi ideology alone. The influence of German society, as well as of party and army, together with officers' grueling yet diverse experience of their environment and enemy, made them perceive the anti-partisan war in varied ways. Reactions ranged from extreme brutality to relative restraint; some sought less to terrorize the native population than to try to win it over. The emerging picture does not dilute the suffering the Wehrmacht's eastern war inflicted. It shows, however, that properly judging ordinary Germans' role in that war is more complicated than is indicated by either wholesale condemnation or wholesale exoneration. This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.
Download or read book Fighting the Russians in Winter Three Case Studies written by A. F. Chew and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1981 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Marne 15 July 6 August 1918 written by Stephen C. McGeorge and Mason W. Watson and published by . This book was released on with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Battleground Prussia written by Prit Buttar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing history of the last year of the Second World War, charting the battles fought between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazis across German soil. The terrible months between the arrival of the Red Army on German soil and the final collapse of Hitler's regime were like no other in the Second World War. The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which millions perished. From the great battles that marked the Soviet conquest of East and West Prussia to the final surrender in the Vistula estuary, this book recounts in chilling detail the desperate struggle of soldiers and civilians alike. These brutal campaigns are brought vividly to life by a combination of previously untold testimony and astute strategic analysis recognising a conflict of unprecedented horror and suffering.
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 Marching into Darkness written by Waitman Wade Beorn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.
