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 Berlin at War written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berlin was the nerve-centre of Hitler's Germany - the backdrop for the most lavish ceremonies, it was also the venue for Albert Speer's plans to forge a new 'world metropolis' and the scene of the final climactic bid to defeat Nazism. Yet while our understanding of the Holocaust is well developed, we know little about everyday life in Nazi Germany. In this vivid and important study Roger Moorhouse portrays the German experience of the Second World War, not through an examination of grand politics, but from the viewpoint of the capital's streets and homes.He gives a flavour of life in the capital, raises issues of consent and dissent, morality and authority and, above all, charts the violent humbling of a once-proud metropolis. Shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman History Prize.
Download or read book The Jersey Devil written by James F. McCloy and published by B B& A Publishers. This book was released on 1976 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the course of its extraordinary history, the Jersey Devil has been exorcised, shot, electrocuted, declared officially dead, and scoffed as foolishness--none of which has had any effect on it or the people who persist in seeing it!This mysterious creature is said to prowl the lonely sand trails and mist-shrouded marshes of the Pine Barrens, and emerge perioducally to rampage through the towns and cities of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, leaving many communities in near-hysteria.The authors show that while a few appearances have been out-right fraud and others have likely been the result of mass hysteria, this creature has been seen by enough sane, sober, and responsible citizens to keep the possiblity of its existence alive and tantalizing.Over 50,000 in print
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 All The Devils Are Here written by David Seabrook and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, in a series of mysterious, incandescent writings, David Seabrook told of the places he knew best: the declining resort towns of the Kent coast. The pieces were no advert for the local tourist board. Here, the ghosts of murderers and mad artists crawl the streets. Septuagenarian rent boys recall the good old days and Carry On stars go to seed. Clandestine fascist networks emerge. And all the time, there is Seabrook himself - desperate perhaps, and in danger. Dark, strange and immediate, this is a classic work of sui generis British literature. There are devils here, and the reader will remember them.
Download or read book Black Mass written by Dick Lehr and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the FBI turned an Irish mobster into an informant, they corrupted the entire judicial system and sanctioned the worst crime spree Boston has ever seen. This is the true story behind the major motion picture. James "Whitey" Bulger became one of the most ruthless gangsters in US history, and all because of an unholy deal he made with a childhood friend. John Connolly a rising star in the Boston FBI office, offered Bulger protection in return for helping the Feds eliminate Boston's Italian mafia. But no one offered Boston protection from Whitey Bulger, who, in a blizzard of gangland killings, took over the city's drug trade. Whitey's deal with Connolly's FBI spiraled out of control to become the biggest informant scandal in FBI history. Black Mass is a New York Times and Boston Globe bestseller, written by two former reporters who were on the case from the beginning. It is an epic story of violence, double-cross, and corruption at the center of which are the black hearts of two old friends whose lives unfolded in the darkness of permanent midnight.
Download or read book The Walls Have Ears written by Helen Fry and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the elaborate and brilliantly sustained World War II intelligence operation by which Hitler’s generals were tricked into giving away vital Nazi secretsAt the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners’ cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites—and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis.In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation. On arrival at stately-homes-turned-prisons like Trent Park, high-ranking German generals and commanders were given a "phony" interrogation, then treated as "guests," wined and dined at exclusive clubs, and encouraged to talk. And so it was that the Allies got access to some of Hitler’s most closely guarded secrets—and from those most entrusted to protect them.
Download or read book The Devil s Agent written by Peter McFarren; Fadrique Iglesias and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil’s Agent: The Life and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie is a captivating and unique book that reveals the dark secrets and mindset of the Butcher of Lyon, his work as a U.S. and West German spy, his network of escaped Nazis in South America, and his nefarious connections with mercenaries, cocaine traffickers and military dictators. During 1942-1944, Klaus Barbie was a mid-level Nazi officer in charge of the Gestapo HQ in Lyon, France. His treatment of prisoners ranged from banal indifference to pleasure as he sadistically tortured and murdered his victims. After the war, what set him apart was the public role he played as an unscrupulous businessman and adviser to military rulers, and Western intelligence agencies, in close alliance with other escaped Nazis, while living in Bolivia. The unrepentant war criminal was the most important Nazi to continue operating as a public figure after World War II. The Devil’s Agent describes co-author Peter McFarren’s personal encounters with Klaus Barbie in 1981, when McFarren and his colleague Maribel Schumacher were arrested in front of the Nazi’s Bolivian home after trying to interview him for a story for The New York Times. McFarren obtained hundreds of Barbie’s personal photographs and letters from prison that have never been made public before. Beyond their historical significance, these shine a light into Barbie’s compartmentalized inner life: devoted husband, torturer, loving father, spy, adaptive businessman, anti-Semite, opportunist. Combined with extensive use of the wealth of historical materials released in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the authors connect the inner Barbie with his times to provide insight into how collective evil occurs. From crimes against humanity to Holocausts, it happens step by banal step. McFarren also worked on the documentaries Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie and My Enemy’s Enemy and wrote numerous articles about Barbie and the military regimes he supported. After an extensive, decades-long search by Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Barbie was identified, captured and extradited to France. He was one of the few escaped Nazis tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity in occupied France. His expulsion from Bolivia to France in 1983 and his unprecedented trial and conviction generated tremendous publicity and deep soul-searching for a country that had still not faced up to its mixed record of supporting the Nazi regime while also resisting its occupation. The book also details Barbie’s family history, the role he played as a Gestapo officer in Germanoccupied France, his responsibility for the murders of more than 14,000 Jews and French Resistance fi ghters during the Nazi Holocaust, his fl ight from Europe after the war with the backing of the U.S. Government, the Vatican and the International Red Cross, and his settlement in Bolivia with his wife Regine and two children. In Bolivia, Barbie traffi cked in tanks and weapons and supported the hunt for the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader “Che” Guevara. He collaborated with cocaine traffi cking kingpin Roberto Suárez Gómez, authoritarian rightwing military governments and a network of escaped Nazis, paramilitaries and mercenaries from Europe and South America to overthrow a Bolivian civilian government in 1980. Klaus Barbie came to symbolize greed, inhumanity, hatred, abuse of power and collective and personal evil during the half century he operated in Europe and Latin America. His most sadistic and monstrous acts were committed during World War II, but it was in Bolivia that Barbie established a reputation as a cunning, ruthless and violent operative who acted without a moral compass. The Devil’s Agent serves not only as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust; it takes us inside the inhuman and merciless mindsets that were behind these crimes and continue to plague our world today.
Download or read book Faustian Bargain written by Ian Ona Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-publication subtitle: Soviet-German military cooperation in the interwar period.
Download or read book Sleeping with the Devil written by Robert Baer and published by Crown. This book was released on 2003-07-15 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Saudi Arabia is more and more an irrational state—a place that spawns global terrorism even as it succumbs to an ancient and deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a royal family that can’t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we want the global economy to balance on?” In his explosive New York Times bestseller, See No Evil, former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed how Washington politics drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight global terrorism. Now in his powerful new book, Sleeping with the Devil, Baer turns his attention to Saudi Arabia, revealing how our government’s cynical relationship with our Middle Eastern ally and America’ s dependence on Saudi oil make us increasingly vulnerable to economic disaster and put us at risk for further acts of terrorism. For decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a “harmony of interests.” America counted on the Saudis for cheap oil, political stability in the Middle East, and lucrative business relationships for the United States, while providing a voracious market for the kingdom’ s vast oil reserves. With money and oil flowing freely between Washington and Riyadh, the United States has felt secure in its relationship with the Saudis and the ruling Al Sa’ud family. But the rot at the core of our “friendship” with the Saudis was dramatically revealed when it became apparent that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers proved to be Saudi citizens. In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa’ud’s culture of bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to international acts of terror, including those against the United States. Drawing on his experience as a field operative who was on the ground in the Middle East for much of his twenty years with the agency, as well as the large network of sources he has cultivated in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community, Baer vividly portrays our decades-old relationship with the increasingly dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa’ud family, the fierce anti-Western sentiment that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link between the two. In hopes of saving its own neck, the royal family has been shoveling money as fast as it can to mosque schools that preach hatred of America and to militant fundamentalist groups—an end game just waiting to play out. Baer not only reveals the outrageous excesses of a Saudi royal family completely out of touch with the people of its kingdom, he also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to Saudi Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules the Saudi street; to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi Arabia helped to underwrite; and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most active and effective terrorist groups in existence, which the Al Sa’ud have sheltered and funded. The money and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame. So long as we continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state to bank our oil under its sand—and so long as we continue to grab at the Al Sa’ud’s money—we are laying the groundwork for a potential global economic catastrophe.
Download or read book The Hidden Nazi written by Dean Reuter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He’s the worst Nazi war criminal you’ve never heard of Sidekick to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and supervisor of Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, General Hans Kammler was responsible for the construction of Hitler’s slave labor sites and concentration camps. He personally altered the design of Auschwitz to increase crowding, ensuring that epidemic diseases would complement the work of the gas chambers. Why has the world forgotten this monster? Kammler was declared dead after the war. But the aide who testified to Kammler’s supposed “suicide” never produced the general’s dog tags or any other proof of death. Dean Reuter, Colm Lowery, and Keith Chester have spent decades on the trail of the elusive Kammler, uncovering documents unseen since the 1940s and visiting the purported site of Kammler’s death, now in the Czech Republic. Their astonishing discovery: US government documents prove that Hans Kammler was in American custody for months after the war—well after his officially declared suicide. And what happened to him after that? Kammler was kept out of public view, never indicted or tried, but to what end? Did he cooperate with Nuremberg prosecutors investigating Nazi war crimes? Was he protected so the United States could benefit from his intimate knowledge of the Nazi rocket program and Germany’s secret weapons? The Hidden Nazi is true history more harrowing—and shocking—than the most thrilling fiction.
Download or read book The Deadly Embrace written by Anthony Read and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1989-10-01 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies two powerful dictators maneuvering for advantage as they prepared for their fight to the death
Download or read book The Devil s Diary written by Robert K. Wittman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking World War II narrative wrapped in a riveting detective story, The Devil’s Diary investigates the disappearance of a private diary penned by one of Adolf Hitler’s top aides—Alfred Rosenberg, his “chief philosopher”—and mines its long-hidden pages to deliver a fresh, eye-opening account of the Nazi rise to power and the genesis of the Holocaust An influential figure in Adolf Hitler’s early inner circle from the start, Alfred Rosenberg made his name spreading toxic ideas about the Jews throughout Germany. By the dawn of the Third Reich, he had published a bestselling masterwork that was a touchstone of Nazi thinking. His diary was discovered hidden in a Bavarian castle at war’s end—five hundred pages providing a harrowing glimpse into the mind of a man whose ideas set the stage for the Holocaust. Prosecutors examined it during the Nuremberg war crimes trial, but after Rosenberg was convicted, sentenced, and executed, it mysteriously vanished. New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Wittman, who as an FBI agent and then a private consultant specialized in recovering artifacts of historic significance, first learned of the diary in 2001, when the chief archivist for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum contacted him to say that someone was trying to sell it for upwards of a million dollars. The phone call sparked a decade-long hunt that took them on a twisting path involving a pair of octogenarian secretaries, an eccentric professor, and an opportunistic trash-picker. From the crusading Nuremberg prosecutor who smuggled the diary out of Germany to the man who finally turned it over, everyone had reasons for hiding the truth. Drawing on Rosenberg’s entries about his role in the seizure of priceless artwork and the brutal occupation of the Soviet Union, his conversations with Hitler and his endless rivalries with Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler, The Devil’s Diary offers vital historical insight of unprecedented scope and intimacy into the innermost workings of the Nazi regime—and into the psyche of the man whose radical vision mutated into the Final Solution.
Download or read book The Devils Due written by Steve Berry and published by MIRA. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heart-pumping short story from the New York Times–bestselling author featuring one of operative Cotton Malone’s earliest missions . . . In this alternate-history-with-a-twist Thriller Short, Steve Berry explores one of Cotton Malone’s early missions, from a time when Malone was still employed as one of the Magellan Billet’s twelve agents. Malone is sent on a mission to a small central Asian country run by an enigmatic dictator, Yossef Sharma, whose alliance with the United States must be kept under wraps. It’s not a mission Malone enjoys, since Sharma has a penchant for burning books. Things get even more interesting when Sharma connects Malone with the world’s most infamous criminal, a man who wants to surrender. Things are not always what they seem, and Malone will need Sharma’s help if he plans to set things right and give the devil his due. This story was originally published in the “outstanding anthology” Thriller (Publishers Weekly), edited by #1 New York Times–bestselling author James Patterson. Many other Thriller Shorts are available from such blockbuster authors as Lee Child, David Morrell, Brad Thor, Katherine Neville, Heather Graham, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Praise for Steve Berry “Berry pumps the veins of history with action-packed adrenaline.” —Chicago Tribune “A fast-moving, globe-hopping tale of long-lost treasure and shadowy bad guys.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book The Devil s Dictionary written by Ambrose Bierce and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2021-03-16T22:46:04Z with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.” Bierce’s groundbreaking Devil’s Dictionary had a complex publication history. Started in the mid-1800s as an irregular column in Californian newspapers under various titles, he gradually refined the new-at-the-time idea of an irreverent set of glossary-like definitions. The final name, as we see it titled in this work, did not appear until an 1881 column published in the periodical The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp. There were no publications of the complete glossary in the 1800s. Not until 1906 did a portion of Bierce’s collection get published by Doubleday, under the name The Cynic’s Word Book—the publisher not wanting to use the word “Devil” in the title, to the great disappointment of the author. The 1906 word book only went from A to L, however, and the remainder was never released under the compromised title. In 1911 the Devil’s Dictionary as we know it was published in complete form as part of Bierce’s collected works (volume 7 of 12), including the remainder of the definitions from M to Z. It has been republished a number of times, including more recent efforts where older definitions from his columns that never made it into the original book were included. Due to the complex nature of copyright, some of those found definitions have unclear public domain status and were not included. This edition of the book includes, however, a set of definitions attributed to his one-and-only “Demon’s Dictionary” column, including Bierce’s classic definition of A: “the first letter in every properly constructed alphabet.” Bierce enjoyed “quoting” his pseudonyms in his work. Most of the poetry, dramatic scenes and stories in this book attributed to others were self-authored and do not exist outside of this work. This includes the prolific Father Gassalasca Jape, whom he thanks in the preface—“jape” of course having the definition: “a practical joke.” This book is a product of its time and must be approached as such. Many of the definitions hold up well today, but some might be considered less palatable by modern readers. Regardless, the book’s humorous style is a valuable snapshot of American culture from past centuries. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Download or read book The Devil s Eye written by Jack McDevitt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-11-04 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interstellar antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his assistant Chase Kolpath travel to the most remote of human worlds and uncover a secret connected to a decades-old political upheaval-a secret that somebody desperately wants hidden.
