Author: Malcolm Atkin
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473872839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
“Everyone knows about the Home Guard but what about the other Secret Intelligence Services (SIS and M16)? You can read about them in [this book].” —This England When Winston Churchill made his “we shall never surrender” speech in 1940, he was speaking in the knowledge that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service was planning a civilian British resistance movement to mobilize after the country had been occupied. Britain’s planning for clandestine warfare developed out of a fierce battle between the Secret Intelligence Service and the War Office for the control of guerrilla warfare and conflicting ideas over the legitimacy of armed civilians. A multi-layered system of secret organizations was the result. The Auxiliary Units are the best known of these “ungentlemanly” forces, but in this perceptive new study based on painstaking original research, Malcolm Atkin clearly demonstrates that they were never intended as a resistance organization. Instead, they were designed as a short-term guerrilla force, whilst their Special Duties Branch was designed to spy on the British public as much as any Nazi invader. Meanwhile, deep in the shadows, was the real resistance organization—Section VII of SIS. Malcolm Atkin’s conclusions will cause controversy among military historians and will change our understanding of the preparations made in Britain to resist Nazi occupation in the Second World War. “[A] detailed yet accessible historical study.” —ProtoView
Author: Peter Fritzsche
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Get Book Here
Book Description
A vivid account of German-occupied Europe during World War II that reveals civilians' struggle to understand the terrifying chaos of war In An Iron Wind, prize-winning historian Peter Fritzsche draws diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe tried to make sense of World War II. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. What were Hitler's aims? Did Germany's rapid early victories mark the start of an enduring new era? Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where was God? People desperately tried to understand the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbors' fates. Piecing together the broken words of the war's witnesses and victims, Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.
Author: Mark Sullivan
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
ISBN: 9781503902374
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
A teenage boy in 1940s Italy becomes part of an underground railroad that helps Jews escape through the Alps, but when he is recruited to be the personal driver for a powerful Third Reich commander, he begins to spy for the Allies.
Author: Simon Kitson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226438953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004461841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1496
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection of primary sources for the first time gives a pan-European insight into the experiences of ordinary people living under German occupation during World War II, their everyday life, their search for supplies and their strategies to fight scarcity.
Author: Phillip Hoose
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374300224
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Get Book Here
Book Description
"The true story of a group of boy resistance fighters in Denmark after the Nazi invasion"--
Author: Matthew Cobb
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847377599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 550
Get Book Here
Book Description
The French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II was a struggle in which ordinary people fought for their liberty, despite terrible odds and horrifying repression. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and women carried out an armed struggle against the Nazis, producing underground anti-fascist publications and supplying the Allies with vital intelligence. Based on hundreds of French eye-witness accounts and including recently-released archival material, The Resistanceuses dramatic personal stories to take the reader on one of the great adventures of the 20thcentury. The tale begins with the catastrophic Fall of France in 1940, and shatters the myth of a unified Resistance created by General de Gaulle. In fact, De Gaulle never understood the Resistance, and sought to use, dominate and channel it to his own ends. Brave men and women set up organisations, only to be betrayed or hunted down by the Nazis, and to die in front of the firing squad or in the concentration camps. Over time, the true story of the Resistance got blurred and distorted, its heroes and conflicts were forgotten as the movement became a myth. By turns exciting, tragic and insightful, The Resistancereveals how one of the most powerful modern myths came to be forged and provides a gripping account of one of the most striking events in the 20thcentury.
Author: Victor Failmezger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472841298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the street fighting that heralded the German occupation to the Gestapo repression that followed, this is the gripping story of the German occupation of Rome from the Italian armistice in September 1943 until the Allied liberation of the city on June 5, 1944. In September 1943, following wave upon wave of Allied bombing, Italy announced an armistice with the Allies. Shortly afterwards, the German army disarmed Italian forces and, despite military and partisan resistance, quickly overran Rome. Rome – City in Terror is a comprehensive history of the nine-month-long German occupation of the city that followed. The Gestapo wasted no time enforcing an iron grip on the city once the occupation was in place. They swiftly eliminated the Carabinieri, the Italian paramilitary force, rounded up thousands of Italians to build extensive defensive lines across Italy, and, at 5am one morning, arrested more than 1,000 Roman Jews and sent them to Auschwitz. Resistance, however, remained strong. To aid the thousands of Allied POWs who escaped after the dissolution of the Italian army, priests, diplomats, and escaped ex-POWs operating out of the Vatican formed a nationwide organization called the 'Escape Line'. More than 4,000 Allied POWs scattered all over Italy were sheltered, clothed, and fed by these courageous Italians, whose lives were forfeit if their activities were discovered. Meanwhile, as food became scarce and the Gestapo began to raid on homes and institutions, Italian partisan fighters launched attack after attack on German military units in the city, with the threat of execution never far away. This is the compelling story of an Eternal City brought low, of the terror and hardship of occupation, and of the disparate army of partisan fighters, displaced aristocrats, Vatican priests, Allied POWs, and ordinary citizens who battled for the liberation of Rome.
Author: Stefan Korbonski
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786258730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 757
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fighting Warsaw is a human story. Stefan Korbonski, the leader of the Polish Underground State, portrays the years of the German occupation during the Second World War and the beginning of anti-Soviet underground activities thereafter. His story presents the entire organization, strategy, and tactics of the Polish underground, which included armed resistance, civil disobedience, sabotage, and boycotts. “...The Polish Underground was perhaps the best organized and most active of all wartime undergrounds; and Stefan Korbonski is well qualified to tell its story....He was, almost immediately after the fighting had stopped, arrested by the Russians...he managed to regain his freedom, and it is to this happy release that we owe this book, an absorbing account of Poland’s fight for freedom These are the highly personal memoirs of an active conspirator and, in their vivid detail and exciting anecdotes, they are probably more successful in conveying a sense of what the resistance was actually like than a more comprehensive treatment would be...Few people who read the author’s chapters on this one aspect of the resistance will fail to be moved by them or to come away from them with an increased understanding of the prerequisites of successful opposition to an occupying power that is both efficient and ruthless.”—GORDON CRAIG, New York Herald Tribune “...Fighting Warsaw...is one of the most absorbing, inspiring and ultimately disheartening documents to come out of the last war....The book, which is detailed and written with humor, modesty, and a surprising lack of rancor, makes it quite plain that there is an indomitable quality in the Poles that will prevent them from ever giving up their great dream....”—The New Yorker
Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465095410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
