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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 This edition also includes over 150 previously unpublished b/w photos, and 4 pages of specially commissioned color uniform plates by Stephen Andrew.
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 This edition also includes over 150 previously unpublished b/w photos, and 4 pages of specially commissioned color uniform plates by Stephen Andrew.
Author: David K. Yelton
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700611924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
Pressed by advancing enemy armies on both fronts, Adolf Hitler played his final card in World War II by mobilizing all German civilian males between sixteen and sixty and indoctrinating them for a final apocalyptic defense of the Reich. The Volkssturm, created as much to boost national morale as to bolster sagging defenses, has been viewed as a negligible factor in the war. David Yelton counters that view with new insights into why the German high command sought this means to prolong an unwinnable war-and why so many civilians chose to fight to the bitter end. Hitler's Volkssturm is the only book in English-and the most comprehensive in any language-on the German militia, illuminating its role and contributions to the Nazi war effort and shedding new light on the last days of the Third Reich. It examines the militia's strategic purpose, organization, training, and combat performance on both war fronts and explores factors contributing to its sporadic tactical successes and its overall failure. Yelton reveals why the Nazi leadership chose to assemble such last-ditch units rather than negotiating for peace and also why civilians in these units were more than willing to serve. The Volkssturm was, in fact, part of a broader, ideologically based strategy intended to turn the tide of the war. Yelton tracks the impact of this ideology on Nazi decision-making throughout the war's final year and illustrates how ideological assumptions were often a major reason for the failure of Nazi policies and strategies. In an unprecedented examination of the Volkssturm at the local level, Yelton also shows the negative impact of national power struggles and demonstrates how the Wehrmacht, industry, and public opinion exerted influence on the militia in ways often contrary to its official objectives. His extensive and insightful analysis illuminates German mobilization priorities, reveals that a substantial number of its commanders had experience in both the military and the Nazi Party, and clarifies the impact of Volkssturm mobilizations on the overall German war economy. Pathbreaking in both scope and depth, Hitler's Volkssturm stresses the factional lines and conflicting centers of power within the Nazi bureaucracy, clarifies policy formulation and implementation in the late Third Reich, and assesses the shifting power relationships among various groups and individuals. Ultimately, it gives us a more complete portrait of the Third Reich during the final phase of a devastating war and conveys important lessons about the use of militia forces in modern warfare.
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.
Author: Armin Dieter Lehmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
Author: Ben H. Shepherd
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300219520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 681
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Book Description
For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people’s army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army’s early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler’s mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings—moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational—of the army’s own leadership.
Author: Jill Stephenson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852854423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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Book Description
This is a groundbreaking new study of an overlooked area of Second World War History.
Author: Alastair Noble
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1836240996
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
An examination of the final period of Nazi rule in Germany's eastern provinces at the end of the Second World War. It outlines the wartime role of this region and assesses the impact of Nazi 'popular mobilisation' initiatives during the closing months of the conflict.
Author: W. Darrin Weaver
Publisher: Collector Grade Publications
ISBN: 9780889353725
Category : Military weapons
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
Author: Chris McNab
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849089167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
The illustrated history of Hitler's land forces – from the Panzer crewman on the Eastern Front to the infantryman in Normandy and the last ditch defence units of Waffen-SS and Hitler Youth. Hitler's Armies is the definitive work on Hitler's war machine charting its evolution from the formidable force which won stunning victories during the Blitzkrieg in 1940, to the hard campaigns it fought in the deserts of North Africa and the frozen wastelands of the Soviet Union to the eventual retreat to the Fatherland itself. Drawing upon Osprey Publishing's unique archive, this volume expertly weaves together the story of the development and deployment of Hitler's armies displayed alongside a stunning collection of original artwork and photographs to show the kit and equipment of the various land forces.
Author: Jean-Denis G.G. Lepage
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476620881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
The story of Hitler's Wehrmachtsgefolge (armed forces auxiliaries) is less well known than that of Germany's other armed forces in World War II, such as the panzer divisions, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The Organization Todt (construction company), Reichsarbeitsdienst (labor service), Nationalsozialistische Kraftfahrer Korps (driver's corp) and Volkssturm (people's militia) were given the status of armed forces auxiliaries to protect their members under the Geneva Conventions should they be taken prisoner. By 1944, the Wehrmachtsgefolge comprised 40 percent of the German armed forces, and their contribution to the war effort was far from negligible. This illustrated history documents the development, structure and organization, uniforms, regalia and technical data of these units and discusses their role in the war and during the prewar period.
