Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Penguin Book of First World War Stories"

Richard Evans' brilliant book unfolds perhaps the single most important story of the 20th century: how a stable and modern country in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair. A terrible story not least because there were so many other ways in which Germany's history could have been played out. With authority, skill and compassion, Evans recreates a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: the First World War, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression. One by one these blows ruined or pushed aside almost everything admirable about Germany, leaving the way clear for a truly horrifying ideology to take command.

An omnibus edition of Judith Kerr's internationally acclaimed trilogy, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Other Way Round and A Small Person Far Away, we see the world through Anna's eyes as she grows up -- from her much loved family to Hitler's holocaust. Anna was a German child when she had to flee from the Nazis before the War. By the time the bombs began to fall she was a stateless adolescent in London, and after it was all over she became a happily married Englishwoman who thought she had put the past behind her. This omnibus edition of the three volumes of Judith Kerr's Hitler trilogy, tells her story beginning with the rise of Hitler in 1933 through to her return to Berlin years after the war.

The Nazi siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1943, during which time the city was cut off from the rest of the world, was one of the most gruesome episodes of World War II. In scale, the tragedy of Leningrad dwarfs even the Warsaw ghetto or Hiroshima. Nearly three million people endured it; just under half of them died, starving or freezing to death, most in the six months from October 1941 to April 1942 when the temperature often stayed at 30 degrees below zero. For twenty-five years the distinguished journalist and historian Harrison Salisbury has assembled material for this story. He has interviewed survivors, sifted through the Russian archives, and drawn on his vast experience as a correspondent in the Soviet Union. What he has discovered and imparted in The 900 Days is an epic narrative of villainy and survival, in which the city had as much to fear from Stalin as from Hitler. He concludes his story with the culminating disaster of the Leningrad Affair, a plot hatched by Stalin three years after the war had ended. Almost every official who had been instrumental in the city's survival was implicated, convicted, and executed. Harrison Salisbury has told this overwhelming story boldly, unforgettably, and definitively.

'you Wanted To See Some Action - Well You're Going To Get It Now. You're Going To Get It Now All Right.' Friday 24th May, 1940 Private Johnny Hawke, Aged Sixteen, Awakens To Artillery Fire. Hours Later, Stukas Scream Down From The Sky. Messerschmit Fighters Roar Towards His Regiment. Trucks Burst Into Flames. Now Men And Mules Lay Dead And Dying, Severed Limbs Twisted Grotesquely As Blood Soaks The Cobbled Streets. Young Private Hawke Just Wants To Do His Duty And Serve His Country. But As He - And His Fellow Soldiers - Prepare To Stop The German Advance, There's Only One Question On Everyone's Lips. How Will They Survive?

Following in the footsteps of seminal works that tell the stories of this terrible time - from The Diary of a Young Girl to The Silver Sword and more recently When the Sky Falls - this is sure to be a future classic. The text will be accompanied by effective and sensitive illustrations by David Ziggy Greene.

Partly autobiographical, this is the second title in Judith Kerr’s internationally acclaimed trilogy of books following the life of Anna through war-torn Germany, to London during the Blitz and her return to Berlin to discover the past…It is hard enough being a teenager in London during the Blitz, finding yourself in love and wondering every night whether you will survive the bombs. But it is even harder for Anna, who is still officially classified as an “enemy alien”. Those bombs are coming from Germany – the country that was once her own. If Hitler invades, can she and her beloved refugee family possibly survive?This was previously published as The Other Way Round.

In this powerful and revelatory new work, historian Mary Fulbrook takes on one of the most fraught issues in modern times: the role of ordinary Germans in enabling the rise of Nazism and with it the exclusion, persecution, and then extermination of millions of people across Europe. The question often asked of the Nazi era―what and when did ordinary Germans know about the crimes being committed in their name?―is, Fulbrook argues, the wrong one. The real question is how they interpreted and acted―or failed to act―upon what they knew; and how, in the process, became complicit.To address these issues, Fulbrook examines German society before and during the Nazi regime, exploring the social conditions that eventually facilitated mass murder. She explores the creation of a "bystander society," one in which the majority of Germans were either unable to act or developed growing indifference to the fate of those deemed "non-Aryan"―mainly Jews― and therefore outside the Volksgemeinschaft, or national community. Over the course of the 1930s, from Hitler's assumption of the German chancellorship, through the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, to the devastation of Kristallnacht, this "bystander society" became more entrenched. Ordinary Germans became passive about the fate of "non-Aryans" and, by turning away, contributed to their isolation from mainstream society. For many citizens of the Reich, conformity led progressively through growing complicity in everyday racism to more active involvement in genocide during World War Two. In other words, social changes under Nazi rule shaped the perceptions and responses of German citizens, creating the conditions that made the Holocaust possible.Based on an extraordinary archive of personal accounts, Bystander Society moves between the individual and the wider context, highlighting the significance of changing social and political circumstances over the course of the Nazi period by offering first-hand testimony both from those who were its primary victims, and those who initially sought to stay on the side lines but could not avoid being caught up in the violence of the times. These accounts illuminate how interpersonal relations in everyday life shifted, such that some fellow citizens could first be viewed as outcasts and then, in wartime, deported―most often to their deaths―in full view of those who would later often claim ignorance of their fates.Chilling and illuminating, Bystander Society reconceives the whole notion of "bystanding" within Nazi Germany, offering an interpretation of the conditions for inaction, one with wide and enduring relevance.

'of The Great Powers That Dominated Europe From The Eighteenth To The Twentieth Centuries, Prussia Is The Only One To Have Vanished ... Iron Kingdom Is Not Just Good: It Is Everything A History Book Ought To Be ... The Nemesis Of Prussia Has Cast Such A Long Shadow That German Historians Have Tiptoed Around The Subject. Thus It Was Left To An Englishman To Write What Is Surely The Best History Of Prussia In Any Language' Sunday Telegraph

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.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest sieges in history and it inflicted some of the worst civilian casualties of World War Two. When Hitler declared his intention to obliterate the key city of Leningrad on 22 September 1941, he could not have foreseen the grim determination of its citizens. Over the course of 900 days, the city resisted the Germans pounding at its gates. Its survival contributed to the defeat of Nazism. But the price was heavy – over 1 million died in Leningrad from German bombs and artillery, or from disease, the cold or starvation. In its suffering Leningrad became a source of symbolic national pride, of good conquering evil. The story of the siege is one of heroic resistance and stoical survival but it also one of unimaginable suffering and extreme deprivation. THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD: HISTORY IN AN HOUR is essential reading for all history lovers. Know your stuff: read about the Siege of Leningrad in just one hour.