Author: Douglas Botting
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1780574274
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
In 1945, as Allied bombers continued their final pounding of Berlin, the panicking Nazis began moving the assets of the Reichsbank south for safekeeping. Vast trainloads of gold and currency were evacuated from the doomed capital of Hitler's 'Thousand-year Reich'. Nazi Gold is the real-life story of the theft of that fabulous treasure - worth some 2,500,000,000 at the time of the original investigation. It is also the story of a mystery and attempted whitewash in an American scandal that pre-dated Watergate by nearly 30 years. Investigators were impeded at every step as they struggled to uncover the truth and were left fearing for their lives. The authors' quest led them to a murky, dangerous post-war world of racketeering, corruption and gang warfare. Their brilliant reporting, matching eyewitness testimony with declassified Top Secret documents from the US Archives, lays bare this monumental crime in a narrative which throngs with SS desperadoes, a red-headed queen of crime and American military governors living like Kings. Also revealed is the authors' discovery of some of the missing treasure in the Bank of England.
Author: Isabel Vincent
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307366456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Award-winning journalist Isabel Vincent unravels the labyrinthine story behind the headlines by taking us through the life of survivor Renée Appel, who found refuge in Canada. With her, we come to understand what it means to wait for justice: how, on the eve of war, desperate men and women entrusted their life savings to Swiss banks; how Nazis laundered gold looted from Jewish families; how the demands of international business, Swiss bank secrecy, and greed kept the truth hidden for over half a century and still prevent restitution from being made. Hitler's Silent Partners is a rigorous and often heartbreaking look at statistics seldom given a human face.
Author: Arthur Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Nazi Germany utilized every available resource to fight the Second World War, and one significant weapon in Hitler's economic arsenal was gold - gold looted from the central banks of those European countries which were occupied by the Nazi regime between 1939 and 1942. Calculated at pre-1939 prices, the Germans gained access to about $625 million (US) in monetary gold, only about half of which was recovered by American Forces in April 1945 from a mine in central Germany. The 'Gold War' did not end then, however; it just assumed a different shape. Instead of fuelling Hitler's war effort, the recovered gold soon became a pawn in the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and has remained a controversial issue in international politics for years, one not completely resolved to this day.Although this is an important aspect of the Second World War and its aftermath, it has been largely neglected in historical research because of the lack of adequate source materials. The author succeeded in gaining access to hitherto unavailable but crucial records from archives in West Germany, Britain and the United States and is thus in a position to piece together, for the first time, the story of the Nazi gold loot and the long, complicated restitution of part of this gold by the Western Allies. Hitler's Gold represents an essential contribution to the economic history of the Second World War.
Author: Eric Kurlander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300190379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
“A dense and scholarly book about . . . the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult . . . reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.”—Daily Telegraph The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. “[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—The Washington Post “Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish.”—The Spectator “A trustworthy [book] on an extraordinary subject.”—The Times “A fascinating look at a little-understood aspect of fascism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review
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
Author: Adam LeBor
Publisher: Apollo
ISBN: 9781035903399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Arthur Mitchell
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786424583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
"This work examines the political events that took place in Obersalzberg from the 1920s until the U.S. Army returned control of the area to the German government in 1995. Concentrating primarily on the years when Hitler was in residence, it discusses hisoriginal acquaintance with Berchtesgaden and focuses on the symbolism of self-identity and public perception"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Edgar Feuchtwanger
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590518659
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
An eminent historian recounts the Nazi rise to power from his unique perspective as a young Jewish boy in Munich, living with Adolf Hitler as his neighbor. Edgar Feuchtwanger came from a prominent German-Jewish family--the only son of a respected editor and the nephew of a best-selling author, Lion Feuchtwanger. He was a carefree five-year-old, pampered by his parents and his nanny, when Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, moved into the building opposite theirs in Munich. In 1933 the joy of this untroubled life was shattered. Hitler had been named Chancellor. Edgar's parents, stripped of their rights as citizens, tried to protect him from increasingly degrading realities. In class, his teacher had him draw swastikas, and his schoolmates joined the Hitler Youth. Watching events unfold from his window, Edgar bore witness to the Night of the Long Knives, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht. Jews were arrested; his father was imprisoned at Dachau. In 1939 Edgar was sent on his own to England, where he would make a new life, a career, have a family, and strive to forget the nightmare of his past--a past that came rushing back when he decided, at the age of eighty-eight, to tell the story of his buried childhood and his infamous neighbor.
Author: George M Taber
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1605987115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
For the entire history of human civilization, gold has enraptured people around the globe. The Nazis was no less enthralled by it, and felt that gold was the solution to funding Hitler's war machine. Gold was also on the mind of FDR across the Atlantic, as he worked with Europe's other leaders to bring the United States and the rest of the world out of a severe depression. FDF was hardly the first head of state to turn to gold in difficult times. Throughout history, it has been the refuge of both nations and people in trouble, working at times when nothing else does. Desperate people can buy a loaf of bread or bribe a border guard. Gold can get desperate nations oil to keep tanks running or munitions to fight a war. If the price is right, there is always someone somewhere willing to buy or sell gold. And it was to become the Nazi's most important medium of exchange during the war. Chasing Gold is the story of how the Nazis attempted to grab Europe’s gold to finance history’s bloodiest war. It is filled with high drama and close escapes, laying bare the palate of human emotions. Walking through the tale are giants of world history, as well as ordinary people called upon to undertake heroic action in an extraordinary time.
Author: Terry Frei
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publications
ISBN: 1589796993
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Though not a member of the National Socialist Party, Leni Riefenstahl was the filmmaker darling of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. First a successful dancer and actress in Germany, she became more notorious when she produced and directed Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will, the chilling documentaries about Nazi Party Congresses at Nuremberg. Glenn Morris was an All-American farm boy from tiny Simla, Colorado, as well as a former college football star and student body president at the school now known as Colorado State University. At the 1936 Olympics, he won the decathlon, earning him the label “the world’s greatest athlete.” Among the American heroes at the Berlin Games, he was considered second only to Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals. Riefenstahl and Morris: An unlikely couple? Perhaps, but in her 1987 memoirs, the German filmmaker belatedly confirmed she had an affair with the American athlete during the filming of Olympia, Riefenstahl’s documentary about the Berlin Games. In fact, she portrayed it as much more than a dalliance, saying that she had dreamed of marrying Morris and that he broke her heart. Morris, who went on to Hollywood, the National Football League, and military service, spoke sparingly of the relationship, but mused late in life that he “should have stayed in Germany with Leni.” In Olympic Affair, author Terry Frei turns to historical fiction in a novel researched in much the same fashion as his widely praised works of nonfiction, including Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming and Third Down and a War to Go. Using deduction, imagination and narrative skill to augment documented fact (as well as debunk myths parroted for many years), Frei tells the story of their ill-fated affair . . . and beyond. Read the first chapter of Olympic Affair here.
