Naval Officers Under Hitler

Naval Officers Under Hitler PDF Author: Eric C Rust
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682472329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a collective biography of the 318 men who joined the German Navy in 1934 to become officers. It traces their lives from their upbringing in the Weimar Republic through their post-war careers. Unique in its subject matter and methodology in both German and international military historiography, Naval Officers under Hitler is a professional, political, and psychological group portrait based on personal interviews and correspondence as well as archival research. It stresses the drama of recent German history that these officers experienced closely as observers, participants, victims, and sometimes, beneficiaries. The author argues that the vast majority of junior naval officers under Hitler, while well trained and prepared to defend their fatherland as good patriots, felt no profound or lasting attachment to Nazi ideology. Instead, their ideological preferences remained with patriotic, conservative groups such as the German National People's Party and its successor organizations after World War II. Otherwise love of the sea and of the naval profession lay at the center of their overall worldview and priorities.

Naval Officers Under Hitler

Naval Officers Under Hitler PDF Author: Eric C Rust
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682472329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a collective biography of the 318 men who joined the German Navy in 1934 to become officers. It traces their lives from their upbringing in the Weimar Republic through their post-war careers. Unique in its subject matter and methodology in both German and international military historiography, Naval Officers under Hitler is a professional, political, and psychological group portrait based on personal interviews and correspondence as well as archival research. It stresses the drama of recent German history that these officers experienced closely as observers, participants, victims, and sometimes, beneficiaries. The author argues that the vast majority of junior naval officers under Hitler, while well trained and prepared to defend their fatherland as good patriots, felt no profound or lasting attachment to Nazi ideology. Instead, their ideological preferences remained with patriotic, conservative groups such as the German National People's Party and its successor organizations after World War II. Otherwise love of the sea and of the naval profession lay at the center of their overall worldview and priorities.

The German Defense Of Berlin

The German Defense Of Berlin PDF Author: Oberst a.D. Wilhem Willemar
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786251469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book Here

Book Description
Often written during imprisonment in Allied War camps by former German officers, with their memories of the World War fresh in their minds, The Foreign Military Studies series offers rare glimpses into the Third Reich. In this study Oberst a.D. Wilhem Willemar discusses his recollections of the climatic battle for Berlin from within the Wehrmacht. “No cohesive, over-all plan for the defense of Berlin was ever actually prepared. All that existed was the stubborn determination of Hitler to defend the capital of the Reich. Circumstances were such that he gave no thought to defending the city until it was much too late for any kind of advance planning. Thus the city’s defense was characterized only by a mass of improvisations. These reveal a state of total confusion in which the pressure of the enemy, the organizational chaos on the German side, and the catastrophic shortage of human and material resources for the defense combined with disastrous effect. “The author describes these conditions in a clear, accurate report which I rate very highly. He goes beyond the more narrow concept of planning and offers the first German account of the defense of Berlin to be based upon thorough research. I attach great importance to this study from the standpoint of military history and concur with the military opinions expressed by the author.”-Foreword by Generaloberst a.D. Franz Halder.

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers PDF Author: Bryan Mark Rigg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

The End

The End PDF Author: Ian Kershaw
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of To Hell and Back, a fascinating and original exploration of how the Third Reich was willing and able to fight to the bitter end of World War II Countless books have been written about why Nazi Germany lost the Second World War, yet remarkably little attention has been paid to the equally vital questions of how and why the Third Reich did not surrender until Germany had been left in ruins and almost completely occupied. Drawing on prodigious new research, Ian Kershaw, an award-winning historian and the author of Fateful Choices, explores these fascinating questions in a gripping and focused narrative that begins with the failed bomb plot in July 1944 and ends with the death of Adolf Hitler and the German capitulation in 1945. The End paints a harrowing yet enthralling portrait of the Third Reich in its last desperate gasps.

Hitler's Commanders

Hitler's Commanders PDF Author: Samuel W. Mitcham (Jr.)
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442211520
Category : Admirals
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now in an expanded edition that includes biographies of the generals of Stalingrad and a new chapter on the panzer commanders, this book offers rare insight into the men who ran Nazi Germany's war machine. Going beyond common stereotypes, Samuel W. Mitcham and Gene Mueller recount the compelling lives of a varied group of army, navy, Luftwaffe, and SS men. Weaving in dramatic stories of tank commanders, fighter pilots in aerial combat, and U-Boat aces, the authors bring the battlefields of World War II to life.

U-Boat Commander Oskar Kusch

U-Boat Commander Oskar Kusch PDF Author: Eric C Rust
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682475158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
To his enlisted men on U-154, Lieutenant Oskar Kusch was the ideal skipper--bright, experienced, successful, caring, tolerably eccentric--and a popular captain who always brought his boat home safely when so many others vanished without a trace. To most of his officers Kusch came across as someone very different--a Nazi-hating intellectual with an artistic bent given to lengthy criticisms of the regime, its leaders and its propaganda, a suspected coward and potential traitor unfit for command. Early in 1944, after his second patrol under Kusch, his executive officer, a reservist with a doctorate in law and member of the Nazi party, denounced him on charges of sedition and cowardice. A hastily arranged court-martial cleared Kusch of the cowardice accusation but sentenced him to death on purely ideological grounds for "undermining the fighting spirit" of his boat, even though the prosecutor had only recommended a ten-year jail sentence. Abandoned by all but his closest friends and relatives, coldly sacrificed by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, unwilling to plead for mercy, and to the end tormented by a naval legal bureaucracy acting in collusion with the brown regime, Oskar Kusch was executed in May 1944. This study, the first scholarly work on Kusch in English, traces his career and ordeal from his upbringing in Berlin to his tragic death and beyond, including the fifty-year struggle to rehabilitate his name and restore his honor in a postwar Germany long loath to confront the darker dimensions of its past. The passing of the wartime generation and the emergence of a new school of historians dedicated to critical research and inspired historiography have finally combined to rectify our picture of the Kriegsmarine and to appreciate the sacrifice of men like Oskar Kusch.

The Admirals

The Admirals PDF Author: Walter R. Borneman
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316202525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439

Get Book Here

Book Description
How history's only five-star admirals triumphed in World War II and made the United States the world's dominant sea power. Only four men in American history have been promoted to the five-star rank of Admiral of the Fleet: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey. These four men were the best and the brightest the navy produced, and together they led the U.S. navy to victory in World War II, establishing the United States as the world's greatest fleet. In The Admirals, award-winning historian Walter R. Borneman tells their story in full detail for the first time. Drawing upon journals, ship logs, and other primary sources, he brings an incredible historical moment to life, showing us how the four admirals revolutionized naval warfare forever with submarines and aircraft carriers, and how these men -- who were both friends and rivals -- worked together to ensure that the Axis fleets lay destroyed on the ocean floor at the end of World War II.

Hunt and Kill

Hunt and Kill PDF Author: Theodore P. Savas
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611210011
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of WWII's pivotal events was the capture of U-505 on June 4, 1944. The top secret seizure of this massive Type IX submarine provided the Allies with priceless information on German technology and innovation. After the war U-505 was transported to Chicago, where today 1,000,000 visitors a year pass through her at the Museum of Science and Industry. Hunt and Kill offers the first definitive study of U-505. The chapters cover her construction, crew and commanders, combat history, general Type IX operations, naval intelligence, the eight fatal German mistakes that doomed the boat, and her capture, transportation, and restoration for posterity. The contributors to this fascinating volume--a Who's Who of U-boat historians--include: Erich Topp (U-Boat Ace, commander of U-552); Eric Rust (Naval Officers Under Hitler); Timothy Mulligan (Neither Sharks Nor Wolves); Jak Mallman Showell (Hitler's U-boat Bases); Jordan Vause (Wolf); Lawrence Patterson (First U-boat Flotilla); Mark Wise (Enigma and the Battle of the Atlantic); Keith Gill (Curator, Museum of Science and Industry), and Theodore Savas (Silent Hunters; Nazi Millionaries).

Erich Raeder

Erich Raeder PDF Author: Keith BIRD
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781612006635
Category : Admirals
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Erich Raeder led the German navy from 1928 to 1943, a period that included the last turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, and World War II. Yet until now, no full-length biography has been written about this extraordinary naval figure. While most historians have viewed Raeder as a product of the Wilhelmian era and heir to Admiral von Tirpitz's sea power ideology, this work clearly demonstrates Raeder's affinity with Hitler's fascism. Keith Bird refutes Admiral Raeder's own argument that his navy was nonpolitical and independent; Bird shows him to be a political activist and the architect of German naval policy. Drawing on archival resources and the rich scholarship of German naval history over the past five decades, Bird examines the evolution of Raeder's concept of naval strategy and his attempts to achieve the political and military means necessary to attain the navy's global naval ambitions. He describes the admiral as ultimately being defeated by the contradictions in his own policies as well as Hitler's and by the realities of Germany's resources and military necessities. Here for the first time, Raeder's strict leadership of the navy after 1928 and his relationship to Hitler and the National Socialist state are placed in the context of Raeder's formative years as an Imperial naval officer, his World War I combat experience, and his critical role in the survival and development of the postwar Reichsmarine. The impact of Hitler's influence on both the pace and the nature of naval rearmament and the conduct of the Kriegsmarine in war are also examined here, as are Raeder's furtive attempts to influence Germany's strategic thinking in favour of a maritime strategy. 42 b/w photographs

First U-Boat Flotilla

First U-Boat Flotilla PDF Author: Lawrence Paterson
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 085052816X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Formed in 1935, First U-Boat Flotilla operated against Hitler's enemies from the very earliest stage of the war through to September 1944 when disbanded amid the flames of Brest during the US siege. Over seventy-five per cent of operational U-boats were lost as the Allies' counter-measures and code-breaking successes took ever greater effect. This fascinating work records the Flotilla's successes and disasters in detail.