Showing titles in Germany

On 17 October 2019, in Hamburg's imposing criminal justice building, a trial laden with extraordinary historical weight begins to unfold. Bruno Dey stands accused of being involved in a crime committed over seven decades ago: the murder of at least 5,230 inmates at Stutthof, the Nazi concentration camp in present-day Poland. Only seventeen at the time, Dey was a member of the SS unit responsible for administering the camp. Though he concedes to his role as a guard, he adamantly denies responsibility for the killings.

"Wer sich in die Geschichte der deutschen Nation vertieft, der hat leicht den Eindruck eines unruhigen Lebens in Extremen." (Golo Mann)

Germany's Nazi Party was remarkably implacable in the hostility it showed to the outside world, staunchly opposing both Communism and liberal democracy from the moment of its inception to that of its violent dissolution.

Have you ever wondered how a man like Adolf Hitler could have come into power? How he legally became a dictator by using a democratic process? Or what events led up to his reign of terror? The answers lie in the Weimar Republic. Amid the devastation of World War I, Germany’s monarchy provided no answers. A democratic government seemed the only way to appease Allied nations and solve the many disasters that were already at the country’s doorstep.

History has focused on Hitler's use of charisma and terror, asserting that the dictator made few concessions to maintain power. Nathan Stoltzfus, the award-winning author of Resistance of Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Germany, challenges this notion, assessing the surprisingly frequent tactical compromises Hitler made in order to preempt hostility and win the German people's complete fealty.

Despite all the accomplishments and widespread victories and conquests throughout the long history of Republican and Imperial Rome, general perception still deems the Romans to have failed in one crucial conquest: the subjugation of Germany. Indeed, historians have singled out this one failure as central to the ultimate downfall of the entire empire, as the constant wars against the Germanic tribes and the need to defend the frontier on the Rhine at great expense against those tribes, helped bring the empire to its knees.

When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just 25 years old. It was a time he would later call the “most stupendous experience of my life.” That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world he eventually opened his newly healed eyes to was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled. Was Hitler’s rise to power an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue - a politician who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

Warum kämpften die Deutschen im Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zum bitteren Ende? Warum funktionierte ein untergehendes System bis zum Schluss? Ian Kershaw erklärt in seinem neuen Werk, wie Hitlers Regime bis zum Ende durchhalten konnte, und analysiert die letzten Monate zwischen dem Stauffenberg-Attentat im Juli 1944 und dem Kriegsende im Mai 1945. In diesem außergewöhnlichen Feature werden Auszüge aus dem Buch mit O-Tönen aus der Epoche angereichert.

Die deutsche Geschichte ist komplex und zersplittert, doch viele Erinnerungen und Werte werden weltweit geteilt. Neil MacGregor wählt hier exemplarische Objekte, Ideen, Menschen und Orte, und nimmt uns mit auf eine akustische Reise durch diese Geschichte. Von Gutenbergs Druckerei, Dresdner Porzellan, Bauhaus-Design über Bratwurst, die Krone Karls des Großen bis zu den Toren von Buchenwald - eine britische Perspektive zeigt uns einen neuen Blick auf Deutschland.

After the successful amphibious invasion on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies began racing east toward Germany and liberating France along the way. The Allies had landed along a 50 mile stretch of French coast, and despite suffering 8,000 casualties on D-Day, over 100,000 still began the march across the western portion of the continent. By the end of August 1944, the German army in France was shattered, with 200,000 killed or wounded and a further 200,000 captured.

A powerful work by the heralded writer, this collection is a touchstone event in German literature of the post-war era. On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than 200 bombers was diverted to nearby Halberstadt.

Most people know that Oppenheimer ran the Manhattan Project - the organization that developed the atomic bomb for the United States in World War II. Some also recognize the name Heisenberg. Not the Walter White character from Breaking Bad, but Nazi Germany’s top theoretical physicist who had the Allies so worried he would make the first atomic bombs for Hitler that they sent assassins to make sure he didn’t. In 1928 these two were friends working on co-authoring research together; by 1942 they were on opposite sides of an atomic arms race. One of them made sure Hitler was unable to win ...

The Battle of Berlin was a monumental battle between two adversaries who despised one another. For the Russians who had endured the horrific suffering and loss of lives in defending their nation against the Nazi invasion, the opportunity for vengeance seemed as if fate was on their side.

Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely in history have scientific secrets been as vital as they were during World War II. In the midst of planning the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services created a secret offshoot - the Alsos Mission - meant to gather intelligence on and sabotage if necessary, scientific research by the Axis powers. What resulted was a plot worthy of the finest thriller, full of spies, sabotage and murder.

In 2013, the German government confiscated roughly 1,300 works by Henri Matisse, George Grosz, Claude Monet, and other masters from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Hitler's primary art dealers. For two years, the government kept the discovery a secret. In Hitler's Last Hostages, Mary M. Lane reveals the fate of those works and tells the definitive story of art in the Third Reich and Germany's ongoing struggle to right the wrongs of the past.

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?

Victor Capesius custodiaba la reserva nazi de gas Zyklon B y proporcionaba fármacos que eran empleados por médicos para llevar a cabo experimentos espantosos y mortales en mujeres embarazadas y niños. Hurgaba en los cadáveres de los judíos en busca de empastes de oro, y llevado por la codicia, arrastraba pesadas maletas llenas de ese metal extraído a miles de víctimas. El farmacéutico de Auschwitz cuenta su historia. Tras una exhaustiva investigación, Patricia Posner recrea la historia de Victor Capesius.

By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany's most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was to become Hitler's chief advisor on physics, had an impact far exceeding what the scientific community felt at the time.

Mission Beyond Darkness is about the final phase of the Battle of the Philippine Sea which occurred on June 19, 1944. Late that afternoon, United States Navy planes from Task Force 58 attacked a Japanese fleet. The fliers were sent out late in the day, which necessitated a return in the dark. The book takes a detailed look at the heroic fliers who made the effort although many did not make it back to their carriers.

Martin Luther is famous for the moment he nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, yet the scope of his influence on the modern world is hardly limited to that one act. He emerged as a leader of the Reformation, coming onto the European scene at a time when modes of thought were changing, adapting from the medieval norm of reliance on authoritative sources such as Aristotle to modern ideas of discovering knowledge through textual interpretation, experience, and experimentation.