Eastern Germans

Dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941 saw the opening onslaughts of Operation Barbarossa as German forces stormed forward into the Soviet Union. Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle. A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler's ambition and the German military machine.

Gunter K. Koschorrek was a machine-gunner on the Russian front in WWII. He wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on. As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some 40 years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow.

Wounded five times and awarded numerous decorations for valor, Gottlob Herbert Bidermann saw action in the Crimea and siege of Sebastopol, participated in the vicious battles in the forests south of Leningrad, and ended the war in the Courland Pocket. In his memoir, he shares his impressions of countless Russian POWs seen at the outset of his service, of peasants struggling to survive the hostilities while caught between two ruthless antagonists, and of corpses littering the landscape.

The author could be described as a veteran in every sense of the word, even though he was only age 21 when the war ended. Armin Scheiderbauer served as an infantry officer with the 252nd Infantry Division, German army, and saw four years of bitter combat on the Eastern Front, being wounded six times. This is an outstanding personal memoir, written with great thoughtfulness and honesty.

The terrible months between the arrival of the Red Army on German soil and the final collapse of Hitler's regime were like no other in the Second World War. The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which millions perished. From the great battles that marked the Soviet conquest of East and West Prussia to the final surrender in the Vistula estuary, this book recounts in chilling detail the desperate struggle of soldiers and civilians alike.

The battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II. The German capture of the city, their encirclement by Soviet forces shortly afterwards, and the hard-fought but futile attempts to relieve them, saw bitter attritional fighting and extremes of human misery inflicted on both sides. In this title, a renowned expert on warfare on the Eastern Front reveals the often-overlooked German counteroffensive post-Stalingrad, and how it prevented the whole Axis front line from collapsing.

The histories of the first three SS corps are well known - the actions of I, II, and III (Germanic) SS-Panzerkorps and their subordinate divisions, including the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Hitlerjugend, Hohenstaufen, Frundsberg, and Nordland divisions, have been thoroughly documented and publicized. Overlooked in this pantheon is another SS corps that never fought in the west or in Berlin but one that participated in many of the key battles fought on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war - the IV SS-Panzerkorps.

Erhard Steiniger joined his Wehrmacht unit on October 12, 1940, as a radio operator, a role which required his constant presence with troops at the Front, right in the midst of combat. On June 22, 1941, he accompanied his division to Lithuania where he experienced the catastrophic first day of Operation Barbarossa. He later witnessed intense clashes during the conquest of the Baltic islands and the battles leading up to Leningrad on the Volkhov and Lake Ladoga.

By 1943, after the catastrophic German defeat at Stalingrad, the Wehmacht's panzer armies gradually lost the initiative on the Eastern Front. The tide of the war had turned. Their combined arms technique, which had swept Soviet forces before it during 1941 and 1942, had lost its edge. Thereafter the war on the Eastern Front was dominated by tank-led offensives and, as Robert Forczyk shows, the Red Army's mechanized forces gained the upper hand, delivering a sequence of powerful blows that shattered one German defensive line after another.

Before the first light of dawn on the morning of June twenty-second, 1941 Oskar Scheja stood on the western shore of the Bug River, looking to the east. The Russian army was camped on the other side. When the signal came to begin Operation Barbarossa he and his comrades from the German Wehrmacht stormed over the River and began an assault that took millions of Germans deep into Russian territory. For some the journey was brief. For others, like Oskar, it would last for years, and the struggle did not end when the fighting was over. This is the story of one German soldier’s experience in ...

This book is an new English translation of the German book Tao Te King: Das Buch vom Sinn und Leben by Richard Wilhelm. That book is, of course, a translation of the Chinese book Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching is an ancient Chinese classic of philosophy and spirituality. Copies have been found dating back to 250 BCE. Yet the thoughts in it are still relevant today Lao Tzu is a legendary Chinese philosopher thought to have lived about 500 BCE. .Richard Wilhelm (1878-1930) was a highly regarded scholar of ancient Chinese literature. His translation of I Ching is still considered one of...

In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator, and the difficulty of life after war.

Written as part of a US Army program instigated after World War II by Colonel S. L. A. Marshall of the Army Historical Division, who was convinced that no record of the war could be complete without the input of the German commanding officers and their main staff officers, these reports offer an invaluable record of German operations for historians and general audiences.

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.

To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II were sacrosanct. The foundation of the Soviets’ hard-won victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the Volga River. To Russians, it is a pivotal landmark of their nation’s losses, with more than two million civilians and combatants either killed, wounded, or captured during the bitter fighting from September 1942 to February 1943. Both sides endured terrible conditions in brutal, relentless house-to-house fighting.

"Bloodlands" ist eines jener seltenen Bücher, die mit einem Schlag den Blick auf die Geschichte verändern. Weltweit in mehr als vierzig Sprachen übersetzt, hat sein Titel sogar Eingang in die Alltagssprache gefunden. Timothy Snyder führt darin zusammen, was bis dahin getrennt betrachtet worden war und wenig miteinander zu tun zu haben schien: die Ermordung von 14 Millionen Menschen, die im Namen unterschiedlicher Ideologien sterben mussten, deren gewaltsamer Tod aber eine auffallende Gemeinsamkeit hatte.

Mitmachhörbuch für das Osternest Der Osterhase hat in diesem Jahr furchtbar viel zu tun. Er kann ein bisschen Hilfe sehr gut gebrauchen. Wer gackert laut ...

Mit seinen "Gesprächen" gründete Konfuzius die Denkschule des Konfuzianismus. Im Jahr 479 vor Christus erschien dies Werk, das noch heute die Grundlage für diese fernöstliche Philosophie bildet (Track 1 - 49). "Tao Te King" von Laotse aus dem Jahr 399 vor Christus ist eine Sammlung von Sinnsprüchen, die eine philosophische Weltsicht darlegen (Track 50 - 130). "Die Kunst des Krieges" von Sun Tzu ist noch heute Standardliteratur für Studierende der BWL. Wie schaffe ich es, dem Krieg aus dem Weg zu gehen. Und wenn ich ihn führen muss - wie gewinne ich? (Track 131 - 143).

Coming of Age eines jungen Basketballstars, der sich plötzlich auf der Verliererseite findet: die Mutter geht weg, er muss den todkranken Vater pflegen. Als ihn auch noch die Freundin stehen lässt, bricht er mit seinem Freund nach Australien auf - eine Reise mit turbulenten Wendungen und einem überraschenden Ende.

Möchten Sie im Chaos des Lebens inneren Frieden finden? In dem von Deepack Chopra empfohlenen Hörbuch "Weisheit des ungesicherten Lebens" zeigt Alan Watts, ein weltberühmter Religionsphilosoph, auf, wie unsere moderne Gesellschaft aufgrund ihrer Betonung von materiellem Erfolg, Sicherheit und Kontrolle oft keine Freude in den Menschen hervorbringt. Er argumentiert, dass das Leben tiefgründig und unvorhersehbar ist und es letztlich an uns liegt, ihm einen Sinn zu geben, wobei Erfüllung nur aus der Akzeptanz der Vergänglichkeit dieses Lebens resultiert.