#Hitler S Enforcers PDF

Here the author selects fifteen leading players in Hitler's war effort; he describes their role and function in the German military hierarchy and their input at strategic or battlefield level. The selected characters, Lucas suggests, had an extra dimension, an additional quality - administrative skill, the ability to motivate, great tactical awareness, originality of thought - which set them apart from others of equal rank. By learning more about those who directed the German war effort we came to a greater knowledge of what made World War II such an awesome conflict.

“‘A must read’ for Eastern Front fans, as well as anyone seeking to find out more about the titanic struggle between Hitler and Stalin.” —Armchair General This book not only tells the story of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but describes the expertise, skills, and decision-making powers of the men who directed it, including new insights into the invasion’s many tactical successes, as well as its ultimate failure. This objective is massive in scope, because Operation Barbarossa was massive in scale, arguably the largest military operation of all time. The campaign also changed the world forever. Before Barbarossa, Hitler’s Wehrmacht seemed invincible, like an unstoppable force of nature. No one, it seemed, could check the Führer’s ambitions, much less defeat him. Barbarossa changed all of that. By the end of 1941, Allied victory seemed to be a very real possibility. Few would have bet on it sixteen or seventeen months earlier. Pitting Germany in total war against the Soviet Union on a 1,000-mile front, Operation Barbarossa was truly staggering in its magnitude. Wars, however, are not fought by numbers, they are fought by men. In this book we learn of the villains and heroes, famous commanders and unsung leaders, and about those who were willing to stand up to the Führer and those who subordinated themselves to his will. The result is a book that casts a fresh perspective on one of history’s most crucial military campaigns.

Americans are familiar with prisoner of war narratives that detail Allied soldiers' treatment at the hands of Germans in World War II: popular books and movies like The Great Escape and Stalag 17 have offered graphic and award-winning depictions of the American POW experience in Nazi camps. Less is known, however, about the Germans captured and held in captivity on U.S. soil during the war. In Hitler's Generals in America, Derek R. Mallett examines the evolution of the relationship between American officials and the Wehrmacht general officers they held as prisoners of war in the United States between 1943 and 1946. During the early years of the war, British officers spied on the German officers in their custody, housing them in elegant estates separate from enlisted soldiers, providing them with servants and cooks, and sometimes becoming their confidants in order to obtain intelligence. The Americans, on the other hand, lacked the class awareness shared by British and German officers. They ignored their German general officer prisoners, refusing them any special treatment. By the end of the war, however, the United States had begun to envision itself as a world power rather than one of several allies providing aid during wartime. Mallett demonstrates how a growing admiration for the German officers' prowess and military traditions, coupled with postwar anxiety about Soviet intentions, drove Washington to collaborate with many Wehrmacht general officers. Drawing on newly available sources, this intriguing book vividly demonstrates how Americans undertook the complex process of reconceptualizing Germans -- even Nazi generals -- as allies against what they perceived as their new enemy, the Soviet Union.

State prisons played an indispensable part in the terror of the Third Reich, incarcerating many hundreds of thousands of men and women during the Nazi era. This important book illuminates the previously unknown world of Nazi prisons, their victims, and the judicial and penal officials who built and operated this system of brutal legal terror. Nikolaus Wachsmann describes the operation and function of legal terror in the Third Reich and brings Nazi prisons to life through the harrowing stories of individual inmates. Drawing on a vast array of archival materials, he traces the series of changes in prison policies and practice that led eventually to racial terror, brutal violence, slave labor, starvation, and mass killings. Wachsmann demonstrates that "ordinary" legal officials were ready collaborators who helped to turn courts and prisons into key components in the Nazi web of terror. And he concludes with a discussion of the whitewash of the Nazi legal system in postwar West Germany.

Hitler and Nazi Germany provides a concise introduction to Hitler’s rise to power and Nazi domestic and foreign policies through to the end of the Second World War. Combining narrative, the views of different historians, interpretation and a selection of sources, this book provides a concise introduction and study aid for students. This second edition has been extensively revised and expanded and includes new chapters on the Nazi regime, the SS and Gestapo, and the Second World War. Expanded background narratives provide a solid understanding of the period and the analyses and sources have been updated throughout to help students engage with recent historiography and form their own interpretation of events.

In Securing the Communist State, Liesbeth van de Grift provides a new understanding of these organizations using recently disclosed material from the communist archives in Berlin and Bucharest. She reveals how these communist parties gained control over the security apparatus after 1945 in East Central Europe from a transitional justice perspective, focusing on purges and personnel policies. This book shows that the personal break after 1945 was not as radical as is often thought.

The powerful, disturbing history of Nazi Europe by Mark Mazower, one of Britain's leading historians and bestselling author of Dark Continent and Governing the World Hitler's Empire charts the landscape of the Nazi imperial imagination - from those economists who dreamed of turning Europe into a huge market for German business, to Hitler's own plans for new transcontinental motorways passing over the ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, and earnest internal SS discussions of political theory, dictatorship and the rule of law. Above all, this chilling account shows what happened as these ideas met reality. After their early battlefield triumphs, the bankruptcy of the Nazis' political vision for Europe became all too clear: their allies bailed out, their New Order collapsed in military failure, and they left behind a continent corrupted by collaboration, impoverished by looting and exploitation, and grieving the victims of war and genocide. About the author: Mark Mazower is Ira D.Wallach Professor of World Order Studies and Professor of History Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, The Balkans: A Short History (which won the Wolfson Prize for History), Salonica: City of Ghosts (which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Runciman Award) and Governing the World: The History of an Idea. He has also taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, Sussex University and Princeton. He lives in New York.

Hitler and Nazism is an essential introduction to a notorious figure and crucial theme in modern European history. Focusing on the key themes of Nazi domestic policy, this book draws together the results of recent research into a concise analysis of the nature of Nazi rule and its impact on German society. This book continues to explore how Nazism took hold in Germany; the issues of Hitler's beliefs and their role in the Third Reich; the factors that brought the party to power, and the structure and nature of both government and society in the Third Reich. It also develops further its analysis of the important issues of modernisation, gender, racial hygiene and the origins and implementation of the Holocaust.

In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald M. McKale contends that the persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was Hitler's primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered on the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this "shadow war" even when Germany was losing the battles of the war's closing years.

Books about Holocaust: Hitler, Nazism and the "racial state"

Lisa Pine's Hitler's 'National Community' explores German culture and society during the Nazi era and analyses how this impacted upon the Germany that followed this fateful regime. Drawing on a range of significant scholarly works on the subject, Pine informs us as to the major historiographical debates surrounding the subject whilst establishing her own original, interpretative arc. The book is divided into four parts. The first section explores the attempts of the Nazi regime to create a Volksgemeinschaft ('national community'). The second part examines men, women, the family, the churches and religion. The third section analyses the fate of those groups that were excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft. The final section of the book considers the impact of the Nazi government upon German culture, in particular focusing on the radio and press, cinema and theatre, art and architecture, music and literature. This new edition includes historiographical updates throughout, an additional chapter on the early Nazi movement and brand new primary source excerpt boxes and illustrations. There is also expanded material on key topics like resistance, women and family, men and masculinity and religion. A crucial text for all students of Nazi Germany, this book provides a sophisticated window into the social and cultural aspects of life under Hitler's rule.

Reveals for the first time Heinrich Himmler's master plan for Europe: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of 'Germanic' peoples to build an 'SS Europa'. Himmler fervently believed that over many centuries, 'Germanic' blood had been 'seeded' in every corner of Europe and even parts of Asia. This book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret: that nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich - to fight a crusade against 'Jewish-Bolshevism'. No other historian has examined the connections between these SS 'foreign legions' (both police and Waffen-SS) and the Holocaust. Even today, some apologists claim that the foreign volunteers were merely soldiers 'like any other' and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. And as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler's monstrous scheme would lead to bitter confrontations with Hitler - and the downfall of the man once known as 'loyal Heinrich'.