The German and the Austrian Navies - Volume 2: Second Edition

Die Deutsche und die Oesterreichische Marine - Band Zwei: Zweite Ausgabe

By: Marc Nonnenkamp

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Marc E. Nonnenkamp has published five (5) books about the German-speaking navies of the world, the four (4) most recent books through CreateSpace in a first and a second edition of a two-volume series. The first edition of the series was released in 2011 and this new second edition has been published in 2015. The books have been read by more than 72,000 people from 187 countries on all 6 inhabited continents. The first edition featured 60 black & white illustrations in two volumes, whereas the second edition has 270 color illustrations (where the original illustrations were made in color). German-speaking navies have come from Germany, Austria and from former political entities such as West Germany (1949-1990), East Germany (1949-1990), Austria-Hungary (1867-1918), Austria-Venice, the North German Federation (1867-1871), Brandenburg-Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (800-1806) and from the Cities of the Hanseatic League. These countries built no fewer than 64,837 vessels from the Middle Ages until today. The expansive work written by Marc E. Nonnenkamp is primarily about the more important vessels to have been commissioned with names, and not merely with call or pennant numbers. The ship indices following Volumes One and Two of the Second Edition include the names of 1,877 such vessels - 911 in Volume Number One and 966 in Volume Number Two. All major and minor ship classes are found here, ranging from battleships and planned aircraft carriers to cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, torpedo boats, fast attack craft, patrol boats, tugboats, landing craft, tenders, sloops, brigs, depot ships, hospital ships and submarines. Volume Two also features an interesting section about the brilliant (but not implemented) Mediterranean strategy of the German Navy during World War Two - a strategy designed by both Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (Commander in Chief of the German Navy from 1928 until Hitler fired him in 1943) and General Field Marshall Erwin Rommel - the gifted commander of armored and mechanized troops who led many of Germany's early World War Two triumphs in France and in North Africa, where he led the famed "Afrika Korps" of German and Italian soldiers. Erwin Rommel was part of the failed attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944 and was coerced into committing suicide by members of the Gestapo (State Secret Police) later in 1944. Instead of following the advice of both Raeder and Rommel, Hitler chose to make the greatest blunder of his political and military career - the June 22, 1941 invasion of Russia ("Operation Barbarossa") which would cost Germany the Second World War in the ruins of the Prussian-German Capital City of Berlin by May of 1945. Marc E. Nonnenkamp's paternal grandfather Wilhelm Johannes Nonnenkamp served in the Reichsmarine of the Weimar Republic from 1924 until 1936 aboard ships including the Pre-Dreadnought Battleship "Braunschweig," the Training Ship "Bremen" and the original Pocket Battleship "Deutschland." His late cousin Gerd Nonnenkamp served in the postwar West German Bundemarine aboard the Destroyer "Hamburg." His grand uncle Erich Rudolph served aboard a German submarine during World War Two, being among the 25 percent of German submariners who made it back home to Germany after the war.