Empfehlungen basierend auf "An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Publications of the German Historical Institute)"

The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination?In 'The Sleepwalkers', Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe.

"A monumental new volume.... Revelatory, even revolutionary.... Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable." — Boston GlobeOne of The New York Times Book Review 's 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)Historian Christopher Clark's riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict.Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe's descent into a war that tore the world apart.

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 'The most brilliant and fascinating book I have read in my entire life' Dan Snow 'Blitzed is making me rethink everything I've ever seen and read about WWII... terrific!' Douglas Coupland 'A huge contribution... remarkable' Antony Beevor, BBC RADIO 4 'Extremely interesting ... a serious piece of scholarship, very well researched' Ian Kershaw The sensational German bestseller on the overwhelming role of drug-taking in the Third Reich, from Hitler to housewives. The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops' resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940. The promiscuous use of drugs at the very highest levels also impaired and confused decision-making, with Hitler and his entourage taking refuge in potentially lethal cocktails of stimulants administered by the physician Dr Morell as the war turned against Germany. While drugs cannot on their own explain the events of the Second World War or its outcome, Ohler shows, they change our understanding of it. Blitzed forms a crucial missing piece of the story.

The thrilling wartime novel that inspired Wolfgang Petersen's Academy Award-nominated, blockbuster film! Written by an actual survivor of Germany's U-boat fleet, Das Boot is one of the most exciting stories of naval warfare ever published, a tale filled with almost unbearable tension and suspense. In autumn 1941, a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they brave the ocean's stormy waters and seek out British supply ships to destroy. But their targets travel in well-guarded convoys. When contact finally occurs, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted, and a cat-and-mouse game begins as the U-boat hides deep beneath the surface of the sea. Soon, claustrophobia becomes an enemy almost as frightening as the depth charges exploding around them. The release of this supremely gripping, merciless intense story commemorates the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.

‘Lucid and damning … an absorbing – and infuriating – tale of complicity, coverup and denial’ PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of EMPIRE OF PAINA groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II – and how the world allowed them to get away with it.In 1946, Günther Quandt – patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW – was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz and still control Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight – until now.In this landmark work, investigative journalist David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave labourers and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burnt around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how the wider world’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.

The most eloquent and expressive statesman of his time - phrases such as 'iron curtain', 'business as usual', 'the few', and 'summit meeting' passed quickly into everyday use - Winston Churchill used language as his most powerful weapon at a time when his most frequent complaint was that the armoury was otherwise empty. In this volume, David Cannadine selects thirty-three orations ranging over fifty years, demonstrating how Churchill gradually hones his rhetoric until the day when, with spectacular effect, 'he mobilized the English language, and sent it into battle' (Edward R. Murrow).

Winner of the Pritzker Prize for Military HistoryA New York Times Notable BookFrom one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.  For thirty-five years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire conflict. Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people—of soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad—Hastings provides a singularly intimate portrait of the world at war. Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is both elegantly written and cogently argued. Above all, it is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the twentieth century.

One of Germany's leading historians presents an ambitious and masterful account of the years encompassing the two world wars Characterized by global war, political revolution and national crises, the period between 1914 and 1945 was one of the most horrifying eras in the history of the West. A noted scholar of modern German history, Heinrich August Winkler examines how and why Germany so radically broke with the normative project of the West and unleashed devastation across the world. In this total history of the thirty years between the start of World War One and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Winkler blends historical narrative with political analysis and encompasses military strategy, national identity, class conflict, economic development and cultural change. The book includes astutely observed chapters on the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain, and the other European powers, and Winkler's distinctly European perspective offers insights beyond the accounts written by his British and American counterparts. As Germany takes its place at the helm of a unified Europe, Winkler's fascinating account will be widely read and debated for years to come.

How could the Nazis have committed the crimes they did? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly - often enthusiastically - oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In THE NAZI MIND, bestselling author Laurence Rees combines history and the latest research in psychology to help answer some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crime in the history of the world. Rees traces the rise and eventual fall of the Nazis through the lens of 'twelve warnings' - from talk about 'them' and 'us' to the escalation of racism - whilst also highlighting signs to look out for in present day leaders. Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth psychological insights including cutting edge work on obedience, authority and the brain. THE NAZI MIND is a revelatory new way of understanding how so many people committed the most appalling crime of the 20th century.

"The leading nonfiction best seller in Germany since its publication, with translations in preparation in seventeen countries, Mr. Fest's monumental work on the most fateful historical figure of our time stands out as a towering achievement. Absorbingly readable, it tells and interprets the extraordinarily dramatic story of a man's and nation's rise from impotence and insignificance to a brief period of absolute power, as Germany and Hitler, from shared premises, entered into their covenant. Convincingly, Fest exhibits the true source of Hitler's overwhelming dynamism, the basis of his stupendous initial success in peace and war, and finally the real effects of his policies to this day ... The Germany of the times comes vividly alive with its contrasts of misery and grandiosity, with its fierce strife and the varied company of both is good and evil figures. The preliminaries of World War II are unraveled with skillful lucidity, Hitler's purposeful actions contrasted with the hesitancy or hubris of his opponents. In the last analysis, however, Fest uncovers in Hitler a constantly destructive personality who aimed at and achieved destruction on an unprecedented scale, not least because an insecure world gave him opportunities. In a final irony, he changed the world irrevocably, thoughnow as he wished or foresaw, for all of us."--Jacket.