Hitler's Last Levy

Hitler's Last Levy PDF Author: Hans Kissel
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1804516317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A companion volume to our very successful In a Raging Inferno - Combat Units of the Hitler Youth, Hans Kissel's study offers a highly detailed account of the German Volkssturm, or Home Guard. Formed from men unfit for military service, the young, and the old, this ad-hoc formation saw extensive combat during the desperate defense of the Reich, 1944–45. The author describes the Volkssturm’s training, leadership, organization, armament and equipment, in addition to its active service on both the Eastern and Western fronts. The text is supported by an extensive selection of appendices, including translations of documents and many fascinating eyewitness combat reports. This edition also includes over 150 previously unpublished b/w photos, and 4 pages of specially commissioned color uniform plates by Stephen Andrew.

Hitler's Last Levy

Hitler's Last Levy PDF Author: Hans Kissel
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1804516317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
A companion volume to our very successful In a Raging Inferno - Combat Units of the Hitler Youth, Hans Kissel's study offers a highly detailed account of the German Volkssturm, or Home Guard. Formed from men unfit for military service, the young, and the old, this ad-hoc formation saw extensive combat during the desperate defense of the Reich, 1944–45. The author describes the Volkssturm’s training, leadership, organization, armament and equipment, in addition to its active service on both the Eastern and Western fronts. The text is supported by an extensive selection of appendices, including translations of documents and many fascinating eyewitness combat reports. This edition also includes over 150 previously unpublished b/w photos, and 4 pages of specially commissioned color uniform plates by Stephen Andrew.

Hitler's Last Levy in East Prussia

Hitler's Last Levy in East Prussia PDF Author: Bruno Just
Publisher: Helion
ISBN: 9781909982727
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
On 16 October, 1944, the 3rd White Russian Front launched its massive offensive against Heeresgruppe Mitte. The German 4th Armee, whose line of defense stretched from Nowograd on the Narew to Memel, was quickly broken through. This is the very personal war-diary of the adjutant of Volkssturm Einsatz Bataillon Goldap (25/235), which was activated, with a strength of 400 men, on 17 October, 1944. Inadequately armed with Russian infantry rifles lacking slings, light machine guns and Panzerfäuste, with no uniforms, entrenching tools, identity discs, blankets or medical packets, the battalion was hastily thrown into action three days later, on October 20, in the Goldap sector of the 4th Armee front, losing 76 killed and wounded in its first action. Withdrawn on 23 October for urgently needed training and better armament, the battalion went back into action on 18 January in the Eichwald northeast of Insterburg, near Stobingen, and fought on, with hardly a break, falling back to the city of Königsberg and taking a valiant part in the bitter defense that enabled the escape of refugees and most of the surviving military units by sea. The 70 survivors of the battalion owed their personal survival to an order forged by their last battalion commander that led to their relief by a Wehrmacht division and enshipment for Denmark. The author chronicles daily life dominated by desperate military action, interspersed with brief glimpses of his family, as he crosses paths with his wife and daughter, caught up in the mass of refugees fleeing before the advancing Russians. There are very few personal accounts of Hitler's last levy, the Volkssturm. For years, the handwritten diary and a copy typed by the author, remained in the files of the Bundesarchiv (L) in Bayreuth. The author's granddaughter approved publication for distribution, in photocopied form, to survivors and family members of the battalion. Such copies, in German, are hard to find. Now at last, this precious document from the closing days of World War II in East Prussia has become available in English translation, with careful footnotes filling in details regarding the Volkssturm, a unique force called into being by the Nazi Party in the closing months of the war, conceived as a party-led alternative to the Wehrmacht. Ill-equipped, pitifully armed (when armed at all) and poorly led, nevertheless on the Eastern Front - where the youngsters and older men comprising its battalions were highly motivated in a desperate attempt to delay the onrushing Russian hordes so that their wives and children could escape rape, torture, mutilation and murder at Russian hands - the Volkssturm sometimes achieved their goal.

Hitler's Last Days

Hitler's Last Days PDF Author: Bill O'Reilly
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
ISBN: 1627793976
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
By early 1945, the destruction of the German Nazi State seems certain. The Allied forces, led by American generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, are gaining control of Europe, leaving German leaders scrambling. Facing defeat, Adolf Hitler flees to a secret bunker with his new wife, Eva Braun, and his beloved dog, Blondi. It is there that all three would meet their end, thus ending the Third Reich and one of the darkest chapters of history. Hitler's Last Days is a gripping account of the death of one of the most reviled villains of the 20th century—a man whose regime of murder and terror haunts the world even today. Adapted from Bill O'Reilly's historical thriller Killing Patton, this book will have young readers—and grown-ups too—hooked on history. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.

Ardennes 1944

Ardennes 1944 PDF Author: Antony Beevor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698411498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
The prizewinning historian and bestselling author of D-Day, Stalingrad, and The Battle of Arnhem reconstructs the Battle of the Bulge in this riveting new account On December 16, 1944, Hitler launched his ‘last gamble’ in the snow-covered forests and gorges of the Ardennes in Belgium, believing he could split the Allies by driving all the way to Antwerp and forcing the Canadians and the British out of the war. Although his generals were doubtful of success, younger officers and NCOs were desperate to believe that their homes and families could be saved from the vengeful Red Army approaching from the east. Many were exultant at the prospect of striking back. The allies, taken by surprise, found themselves fighting two panzer armies. Belgian civilians abandoned their homes, justifiably afraid of German revenge. Panic spread even to Paris. While some American soldiers, overwhelmed by the German onslaught, fled or surrendered, others held on heroically, creating breakwaters which slowed the German advance. The harsh winter conditions and the savagery of the battle became comparable to the Eastern Front. In fact the Ardennes became the Western Front’s counterpart to Stalingrad. There was terrible ferocity on both sides, driven by desperation and revenge, in which the normal rules of combat were breached. The Ardennes—involving more than a million men—would prove to be the battle which finally broke the back of the Wehrmacht. In this deeply researched work, with striking insights into the major players on both sides, Antony Beevor gives us the definitive account of the Ardennes offensive which was to become the greatest battle of World War II.

Blitzed

Blitzed PDF Author: Norman Ohler
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328664090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich” (Washington Post). The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor. Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows. “Delightfully nuts.”—The New Yorker

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners PDF Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Desperate Measures

Desperate Measures PDF Author: W. Darrin Weaver
Publisher: Collector Grade Publications
ISBN: 9780889353725
Category : Military weapons
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description


Hitler's First War

Hitler's First War PDF Author: Thomas Weber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199233209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
The story of Hitler's formative experiences as a soldier on the Western Front - now told in full for the first time, presenting a radical revision of Hitler's own account of this time in Mein Kampf.

Stalin

Stalin PDF Author: Stephen Kotkin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 073522448X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1249

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Book Description
“Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture. While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.

In a Raging Inferno

In a Raging Inferno PDF Author: Hans Holzträger
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1804516325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
In a Raging Inferno is the first English-language book ever to recount the story of the Hitler Youth and its combat role at the end of World War II. During the desperate final months of the Third Reich boys (and girls) as young as ten were thrown into action against the advancing British, American and Soviet armies, frequently fighting with a fanatical and suicidal fury. The author spent many years collecting material and interviewing veterans of the Hitler Youth combat units. The result is a fascinating - and sometimes disturbing - account, packed with eyewitness accounts and rare photographs. In addition, well-known military artist Stephen Andrew has produced 4 superb pages of color uniform plates.