German Military History

After World War II, 50 percent of Americans polled said they didn’t believe Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in 1945, as captured Nazi officials claimed. Instead, they believed the dictator faked his death and escaped, perhaps to Argentina. This wasn’t a crazy opinion: Joseph Stalin told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler’s body and that he personally believed the Nazi leader had escaped justice. At least two German submarines crossed the Atlantic and landed on the coast of Argentina in July 1945.

For almost four desperate years between 1939 and 1943, British and American navies fought a savage, losing battle against German submarine wolf packs. The Allies might never have turned the tide of that historic battle without an intelligence coup. The race to break the German U-boat codes is one of the last great untold stories of World War II.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

May 1945. Hitler is dead, and the Third Reich is little more than smoking rubble. No GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Nazis. But for cigar-chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-charging Captain Jack Lee and his men, there is one more mission: rescue 14 prominent French prisoners held in an SS-guarded castle high in the Austrian Alps. It's a dangerous mission, but Lee has help from a decorated German Wehrmacht officer and his men, who voluntarily join the fight.

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Brought to you by Penguin. In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long...

From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. World War One brought with it the world’s first experience of Total War, involving all of the world’s great powers, polarized between the Triple Entente, lead by Britain, France and Russia, and the Central Powers, dominated by Germany...

For most of its existence, German-speaking Europe has been splintered into innumerable states—some substantial and some consisting of just a few Alpine meadows. Its military experience has also been extraordinarily varied: threatened and threatening; a mere buffer-zone, and a global threat. Iron and Blood is a startlingly ambitious and absorbing book. It encompasses five centuries of political, military, technological and economic change to tell the story of the German-speaking lands, from the Rhine to the Balkan frontier, from Switzerland to the North Sea.

An international bestseller, this is a German soldier's first-hand account of life on Russian front during the second half of the Second World War. When Guy Sajer joins the infantry full of ideals in the summer of 1942, the German army is enjoying unparalleled success in Russia. However, he...

The German Army lost two consecutive wars and the conclusion is often drawn that it simply wasn't able to cope with its opponents. This image is constantly reinforced in literature and in the media, where seemingly brainless operating German units led by fanatical officers predominate. Nothing...

Kenneth Macksey's highly regarded biography of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian gives clear insight into the mind and motives of the father of modern tank warfare. Panzer General shows Guderian as a man of ideas equipped with the ability to turn inspiration into reality. A master of strategy and tactics, he was the officer most responsible for creating blitzkrieg in World War II.

Liverpool, 1940. “Where’s George?” Ruth didn’t realise that she had grabbed hold of the other woman’s arms. “Where’s my son?” Journalist Ruth Holt is struggling in the terror of the Blitz when her young son is suddenly snatched away in broad daylight. Soon after, the...

Brought to you by Penguin. ***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2021*** Germany, 1945: a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos?...

By 1943, the war was lost, and most German officers knew it. What kept the German army going in an increasingly hopeless situation? Where some historians have found explanations in the power of Hitler or the role of ideology, Robert M. Citino, the world's leading scholar on the subject, posits a more straightforward solution: Bewegungskrieg, the way of war cultivated by the Germans over the course of history. In this book, Citino charts the path by which Bewegungskrieg, or a "war of movement," inexorably led to Nazi Germany's defeat.

In the wake of World War I, the German army lay in ruins - defeated in the war, sundered by domestic upheaval, and punished by the Treaty of Versailles. A mere 20 years later, Germany possessed one of the finest military machines in the world, capable of launching a stunning blitzkrieg attack against Poland in 1939. Well-known military historian Robert M. Citino shows how Germany accomplished this astonishing reversal and developed the doctrine, tactics, and technologies that its military would use to devastating effect in World War II.

En el año 2015 se conmemora el 70º aniversario del final de la segunda guerra mundial, la guerra total de la que todos conocemos los grandes hitos: los turbios inicios del nazismo, la invasión de Polonia, la derrota de Francia, el bombardeo de Pearl Harbor, el Afrika Korps, el holocausto judío, la batalla de Stalingrado, el desembarco de Normandía, la batalla final en Berlín, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

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. 

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Arnhem by Antony Beevor, read by Sean Barrett. On 17 September 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany's parachute forces, heard the growing roar of aero engines. He went out on to his balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland...

The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown. “In the pantheon of American history, it’s very hard to...