Author: Richard Bessel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1849832013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648
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Book Description
In 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen. Germany 1945 examines the country's emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; survivors had lost their families; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses. Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on a transition to relative peace. Germany's return to humanity and prosperity is the hinge on which Europe's twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.
Author: Magdalena Grzebalkowska
Publisher: Russian and East European Stud
ISBN: 9780822945994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
The official end of World War II did not mean the end of the torments inflicted on civilians. This book brings us vivid personal accounts of ordinary people in Poland--Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and others--caught up in the most violent war in history and its aftermath. No place experienced more intense suffering for a longer period of time than Poland--the first country to be invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the last to be "liberated". This is the story of how people survived the flames of war, and began to clear the rubble and try to rebuild their lives, from January to December 1945.
Author: Malcolm L. Fleming
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253019613
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
As an Official Army Photographer, "Mac" Fleming’s assignment was to take motion pictures of significant wartime events for the US Army. In the pouch intended to carry his first-aid kit on his belt, he instead carried a small personal camera, which he used to take pictures of the people and places that interested him, capturing in his field notes details of the life he observed. From these records, Fleming has assembled this absorbing private chronicle of war and peace. Assigned to the European Theater in February 1945, he filmed the action from the battle for the Remagen Bridge across the Rhine, to the fighting in the Hartz Mountains, on to the linkup with the Russian forces at the Elbe River. After the armistice, Fleming helped document how the Allied Expeditionary Force established a military government in Germany to cope with masses of POWs, establish control of the country, deal with the atrocities committed by the German army, and help thousands of newly released slave laborers return home to Poland, France, and Russia. He also recorded how the army provided rest, recreation, and rehabilitation to the remaining US soldiers and sent them home by truck, train, and ship. Awaiting shipment home, Fleming explored postwar German town and country life and toured some famous castles and historic spots. The foreword by historian James H. Madison describes the important role of photography in war and the special contribution of Fleming’s photographic diary.
Author: Jessica Reinisch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199660794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
An archive-based study examining how the four Allies - Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union - prepared for and conducted their occupation of Germany after its defeat in 1945. Uses the case of public health to shed light on the complexities of the immediate post-war period.
Author: Alice Holmes Cooper
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472106240
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Thoughtfully examines the paradox of peace activism in postwar Germany
Author: Mark Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317318048
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.
Author: Bernard P. Bellon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231068574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Bernard Bellon combines a detailed study of the daily lives of factory workers at Daimler-Benz with a broader discussion of the role of the automobile industry in the economic and political development of Germany from 1903 through the end of World War II.
Author: Nigel Hamilton
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 178590485X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 568
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Book Description
In the much-anticipated conclusion to his masterful trilogy chronicling the wartime career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, renowned military and political biographer Nigel Hamilton aligns triumph with tragedy to show how FDR was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness. Providing the definitive account of the events in Normandy on 6 June 1944, Hamilton also reveals the fraught nature of the relationship between the greatest wartime leaders of the Allied forces. Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews to counter the famous narrative of World War II strategy given by Winston Churchill in his memoirs, Hamilton highlights the true significance of FDR's leadership. Seventy-five years after the D-Day landings, we finally see, close up and in dramatic detail, who was responsible for rescuing – and insisting upon – the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and exactly why that invasion was orchestrated by Eisenhower. War and Peace is the rousing final installment in one of the most important historical biographies of the twenty-first century, which demonstrates how FDR's failing health only spurred him on in his efforts to build a US-backed post-war world order. In this stirring account of the life of one of the most celebrated political leaders of our time, Hamilton hails the President as the sole person capable of anticipating the requirements of peace in order to bring an end to the war.
Author: Hugo Service
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107671485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
This book examines the ways Poland dealt with the territories and peoples it gained from Germany after the Second World War.
Author: Keith Lowe
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250015049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
