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Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America
By Michael Dobbs. 2004
Shortly after America's entry into World War II, Adolf Hitler ordered an extensive sabotage campaign against the United States to…
disrupt the production of tanks and airplanes and blow up bridges and railroads. Eight German saboteurs were dispatched across the Atlantic by U-boat, one team landing in Amagansett, Long Island, the other near Jacksonville, Florida. They brought with them enough money and explosives for a two-year operation and traveled inland to explore potential targets. The full story of this audacious endeavor is a remarkable account of a terrorist threat against America. Michael Dobbs describes the saboteurs' training in Nazi Germany, their claustrophobic three-week voyage in submarines, and their infiltration into American life. He explores the reasons each volunteered, and their links to a network of Nazi sympathizers in the United States. He paints a portrait of the group's leaders:George Dasch, a onetime waiter who dreamed of leaving his personal mark on history, and Edward Kerling, a fanatic Nazi caught between his love for his mistress and his love for his wife. And he shows how the FBI might never have captured the saboteurs had one of them not helped J. Edgar Hoover transform a hapless manhunt into one of his proudest accomplishments. A military tribunal, a historic Supreme Court session, and one of the largest mass executions in American history provide a stunning climax to a dangerous but failed mission.Landru’s Secret: The Deadly Seductions of France’s Lonely Hearts Serial Killer
By Richard Tomlinson. 2019
On 12 April 1919, the Paris police arrested a bald, short, 50-year-old swindler at his apartment near the Gare du…
Nord, acting on a lead from a humble housemaid. A century later, Henri Désiré Landru remains the most notorious and enigmatic serial killer in French criminal history, a riddle at the heart of an unsolved murder puzzle. The official version of Landru’s lethal rampage was so shocking that it almost defied belief. According to the authorities, Landru had made “romantic contact” with 283 women during the First World War, luring ten of them to his country houses outside Paris where he killed them for their money. Yet no bodies were ever found, while Landru obdurately protested his innocence. “It is for you to prove the deeds of which I am accused,” he sneered at the investigating magistrate. The true story of l’affaire Landru, buried in the Paris police archives for the past century, was altogether more disturbing. In Landru’s Secret, Richard Tomlinson draws on more than 5,000 pages of original case documents, including witness statements, police reports and private correspondence, to reveal for the first time that: Landru killed more women than the 10 victims on the charge sheet. The police failed to trace at least 72 of the women he contacted. The authorities ignored the key victim who explained why the killings began. Landru did not kill for money, but to revel in his power over what he called the “feeble sex”. Lavishly illustrated with previous unpublished photographs, Landru’s Secret is a story for our times: a female revengers’ tragedy starring the mothers and sisters of the missing fiancées, a lethal misogynist and France’s greatest defense lawyer, intent on saving his repulsive client from the guillotine.Building for Battle: U-boat Pens Of The Atlantic Battle
By Philip Kaplan. 2018
The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril - Prime Minister Winston Churchill.…
Churchill, as a former First Lord of the Admiralty, was well versed in the importance of Britain protecting itself at sea. In the opening years of the Second World War, Germanys U-boat (submarine) fleet was tasked with attacking and destroying the supply ships that Britain depended upon for its survival.The U-boats were under the command of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz who, for much of the war, effectively guided that strategy. There was a very real possibility that the British people would starve if the U-boats succeeded in their campaign. When France fell to the German forces in 1940, Hitlers Ubootwaffe gained a significant asset in five important ports along the Brittany coast - Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Palace and Bordeaux. The use of these ports put Germanys submarine force hundreds of miles closer to the action in the North Atlantic, the routes of the Allied supply convoys which were operating mainly between Halifax, Nova Scotia and various English port cities. This afforded the U-boats several more days at sea on their deadly patrols than was possible while they had been based in Germany and German-occupied Norway.In this new publication from Philip Kaplan, the massive bunkers or pens constructed in Brittany by the laborers of the German Organisation Todt are revisited. These giant structures, some of which sheltered more than a dozen submarines at a time, still exist because they were built with concrete ceilings more than three meters thick. With equally impressive supporting walls, they suffered relatively little damage in the wartime bombing raids of the Royal Air Force and the US Eighth Army Air Force. Illustrated with more than 150 rare and compelling photo images, this book is a richly rewarding journey back across time to some of the most intriguing and electrifying sites from the war years. The story of the pen shelters and their part in that war is both fascinating and enduring.The Battle for the Caucasus, 1942–1943: Rare Photogaphs from Wartime Archives (Images of War)
By Anthony Tucker-Jones. 2018
In late 1942 Hitler's forces advanced far into the Caucasus in the southern Soviet Union in one of the most…
ambitious offensives of the Second World War, but this extraordinary episode is often forgotten-it is overshadowed by the disastrous German attack on Stalingrad which took place at the same time. Using over 150 wartime photographs Anthony Tucker-Jones gives the reader a graphic, concise introduction to this remarkable but neglected campaign on the Eastern Front.Operation Edelweiss was designed to seize the oil fields of Maikop, Baku and Grozny. Seen by some as a wholly unnecessary diversion of resources from the critical confrontation at Stalingrad, the assault on the Caucasus aimed to secure oil supplies for the Germans and deny them to the Soviets.As this memorable selection of photographs shows, the Werhmacht came close to success. Their forces advanced almost as far as Grozny, famously raising the Nazi flag over Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the region, before they were compelled into a hurried withdrawal by the rapid deterioration of the German position elsewhere on the Eastern Front.U-Boats in the Mediterranean: 1941–1944
By Lawrence Paterson. 2007
Between September 1941 and May 1944, the Germans sent sixty-two U-boats into the Mediterranean. To get there, the boats had…
to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar?the British-held entry point, where nearly a third of them were sunk or forced to turn back. Of the submarines that made it into the clear, calm waters of the Mediterranean, not one of them ever made it back into the Atlantic: They were all either sunk in battle or scuttled by their own crews. In U-Boats in the Mediterranean, Lawrence Paterson puts the campaign into its strategic context, showing how it coordinated with Rommel's Afrika Korps in the Western Desert and the U-boat battle in the Atlantic. He describes the weapons and tactics the commanders used to try to overcome the difficulties of operating in the shallow waters and and how increasing Allied dominance of the air took its heavy toll. Paterson details the U-boat triumphs such as the sinking of HMS Ark Royal, and the torpedoing of the battleship HMS Barham, which provided one of the best-known images of the Second World War at sea. Making full use of firsthand accounts by veterans, official German records, and Allied archives, the book puts a spotlight on a neglected aspect of the U-boat war and shows the courage and fortitude of the men on both sides of this savage conflict.The Hungry and the Fat: A bold new satire by the author of LOOK WHO'S BACK
By Timur Vermes. 2018
By the author of Look Who's Back, a radical and bold satire in inequitable times.REFUGEE CAMPS IN AFRICA ARE SWELLINGAnd…
Europe has closed its borders. The refugees have no future, no hope, and no money to pay the vast sums now demanded by people smugglers. But what they do have is time. AND THEN AN ANGEL ARRIVES FROM REALITY T.V.When German model and star presenter Nadeche Hackenbusch comes to film at the largest of the camps, one young refugee sees a unique opportunity: to organise a march to Europe, in full view of the media. Viewers are gripped as the vast convoy moves closer, but the far right in Germany is regrouping and the government is at a loss. Which country will halt the refugees in their tracks? THE HUNGRY AND THE FATA devastating, close-to-the-knuckle satire about the haves and have-nots in our divided world by one of Europe's finest and most perceptive writers, in which an outlandish conceit follows a kind of impeccable logic to a devastating conclusion.Translated from the German by Jamie BullochParis After the Liberation 1944-1949: Revised Edition
By Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper. 1994
In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling…
portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists? including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picasso?contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.Dresde: 1945. Fuego y oscuridad
By Sinclair McKay. 1945
La historia de uno de los bombardeos más famosos de la historia, contada a partir de las voces de quienes…
los sufrieron, en su 75 aniversario. En los últimos días de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, los aliados destruyeron la llamada «Florencia del Elba»: en una sola noche sobrevolaron Dresde 796 bombarderos, murieron veinticinco mil personas, muchas más quedarían profundamente traumatizadas y una magnífica ciudad quedó en ruinas. Sinclair McKay ofrece el relato minuto a minuto de aquella noche fatídica desde la perspectiva de sus habitantes. Nos muestra desde qué se proyectaba en las salas de cine hasta la porcelana que había en las repisas, y nos cuenta las muchas historias personales, nunca antes contadas, de habitantes, refugiados, trabajadores, niños, pilotos y prisioneros. McKay da vida a la ciudad antes y después de la tragedia, al tiempo que explora el rico contexto cultural. Impecablemente investigado y profundamente conmovedor, Dresde se basa en nuevas fuentes y transmite la textura de la vida en una población diezmada. El bombardeo suele invocarse como paradigma de las crueldades ilimitadas de la guerra, y la distancia que otorga el paso del tiempo permite hoy abordar este tema con una mirada mucho más clara y desprejuiciada, poniendo el foco en las vidas que perdió o trató de reconstruir la gente de a pie. Nunca antes se había retratado el alcance de este ataque aéreo sobre la población civil de un modo tan emotivo, polifónico y profundamente humano como en esta obra maestra de la historia narrativa. La crítica ha dicho...«La línea de sombra está en el punto de vista: el de quienes vivieron la catástrofe en tierra y los que lo hicieron en el aire, ese abismo que separa a quienes tomaron decisiones de los que no tuvieron elección.»Karina Sainz Borgo, VozpópuliLived Religion and Everyday Life in Early Modern Hagiographic Material (Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience)
By Jenni Kuuliala, Rose-Marie Peake, Päivi Räisänen-Schröder. 2019
This book discusses the ways in which early modern hagiographic sources can be used to study lived religion and everyday…
life from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. For several decades, saints’ lives, other spiritual biographies, miracle narratives, canonisation processes, iconography, and dramas, have been widely utilised in studies on medieval religious practices and social history. This fruitful material has however been overlooked in studies of the early modern period, despite the fact that it witnessed an unprecedented growth in the volume of hagiographic material. The contributors to this volume address this, and illuminate how early modern hagiographic material can be used for the study of topics such as religious life, the social history of medicine, survival strategies, domestic violence, and the religious experience of slaves.Beardmore: The Viking Hoax that Rewrote History (Carleton Library Series #246)
By Douglas Hunter. 2018
In 1936, long before the discovery of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, the Royal Ontario Museum made a…
sensational acquisition: the contents of a Viking grave that prospector Eddy Dodd said he had found on his mining claim east of Lake Nipigon. The relics remained on display for two decades, challenging understandings of when and where Europeans first reached the Americas. In 1956 the discovery was exposed as an unquestionable hoax, tarnishing the reputation of the museum director, Charles Trick Currelly, who had acquired the relics and insisted on their authenticity. Drawing on an array of archival sources, Douglas Hunter reconstructs the notorious hoax and its many players. Beardmore unfolds like a detective story as the author sifts through the voluminous evidence and follows the efforts of two unlikely debunkers, high-school teacher Teddy Elliott and government geologist T.L. Tanton, who find themselves up against Currelly and his scholarly allies. Along the way, the controversy draws in a who?s who of international figures in archaeology, Scandinavian studies, and the museum world, including anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, whose mid-1950s crusade against the find?s authenticity finally convinced scholars and curators that the grave was a fraud. Shedding light on museum practices and the state of the historical and archaeological professions in the mid-twentieth century, Beardmore offers an unparalleled view inside a major museum scandal to show how power can be exercised across professional networks and hamper efforts to arrive at the truth.Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide
By Vicken Cheterian. 2015
The assassination of the author Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007, a high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate…
in Turkey on the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks soon re-awakened to their Armenian heritage, reflecting on how their grandparents were forcibly Islamised and Turkified, and the suffering their families endured to keep their stories secret. There was public debate around Armenian property confiscated by the Turkish state and the extermination of the minorities. At last the silence had been broken. Open Wounds explains how, after the First World War, the new Turkish Republic forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities, and traces of Armenians, from their historic lands -- a process to which the international community turned a blind eye. The price for this amnesia was, Vicken Cheterian argues, "a century of genocide." Turkish intellectuals acknowledge the price society must pay collectively to forget such traumatic events, and that Turkey cannot solve its recurrent conflicts with its minorities -- like the Kurds today -- nor have an open and democratic society without addressing the original sin on which the state was founded: the Armenian Genocide.And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War
By Elisabeth Åsbrink. 2020
Winner of the August Prize, the story of the complicated long-distance relationship between a Jewish child and his forlorn Viennese…
parents after he was sent to Sweden in 1939, and the unexpected friendship the boy developed with the future founder of IKEA, a Nazi activist. Otto Ullmann, a Jewish boy, was sent from Austria to Sweden right before the outbreak of World War II. Despite the huge Swedish resistance to Jewish refugees, thirteen-year-old Otto was granted permission to enter the country—all in accordance with the Swedish archbishop&’s secret plan to save Jews on condition that they convert to Christianity. Otto found work at the Kamprad family&’s farm in the province of Småland and there became close friends with Ingvar Kamprad, who would grow up to be the founder of IKEA. At the same time, however, Ingvar was actively engaged in Nazi organizations and a great supporter of the fascist Per Engdahl. Meanwhile, Otto&’s parents remained trapped in Vienna, and the last letters he received were sent from Theresienstadt. With thorough research, including personal files initiated by the predecessor to today&’s Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) and more than 500 letters, Elisabeth Åsbrink illustrates how Swedish society was infused with anti-Semitism, and how families are shattered by war and asylum politics.A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism (The resistance Quartet Ser. #4)
By Caroline Moorehead. 2019
The extraordinary story of four courageous women who helped form the Italian Resistance against the Nazis and the Fascists during…
the Second World War.In the late summer of 1943, when Italy changed sides in WWII and the Germans, now their enemies, occupied the north of the country, an Italian Resistance was born. Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca were four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance, living secretively in the mountains surrounding Turin. They were not alone. Between 1943 and 1945, as the Allies battled their way north, thousands of men and women throughout occupied Italy rose up and fought to liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made the partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women in its ranks. The bloody civil war that ensued across the country pitted neighbour against neighbour, and brought out the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together as a coherent fighting force. And the women's contribution was invaluable--they fought, carried messages and weapons, provided safe houses, laid mines and took prisoners. Ada's house deep in the mountains became a meeting place and refuge for many of them. The death rattle of Mussolini's two decades of Fascist rule--with its corruption, greed and anti-Semitism--was unrelentingly violent and brutal, but for the partisan women it was also a time of camaraderie and equality, pride and optimism. They would prove, to themselves and to the world, what resolve, tenacity and above all exceptional courage could achieve.Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe
By Larry Wolff. 2020
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the…
aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of borders was profound. But it was his impact on the modern political structuring of Eastern Europe that would be perhaps his most enduring international legacy: neither Czechoslovakia nor Yugoslavia exist today, but their geopolitical presence persisted across the twentieth century from the end of World War I to the end of the Cold War. They were created in large part thanks to Wilson's advocacy, and in particular, his Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, which hinged in large part on the concept of national self-determination. But despite his deep involvement in the region's geopolitical transformation, President Wilson never set eyes on Eastern Europe, and never traveled to a single one of the eastern lands whose political destiny he so decisively influenced. Eastern Europe, invented in the age of Enlightenment by the travelers and philosophies of Western Europe, was reinvented on the map of the early twentieth century with the crucial intervention of an American president who deeply invested his political and emotional energies in lands that he would never visit. This book traces how Wilson's emerging definition of national self-determination and his practical application of the principle changed over time as negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference unfolded. Larry Wolff exposes the contradictions between Wilson's principles and their implementation in the peace settlement for Eastern Europe, and sheds light on how his decisions were influenced by both personal relationships and his growing awareness of the history of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.This book investigates the legal evolution of the “free soil principle” in England, France and the Low Countries during the…
Early Modern period (ca. 1500–1800), which essentially stated that, as soon as slaves entered a certain country, they would immediately gain their freedom. This book synthesizes the existing literature on the origins and evolution of the principle, adds new insights by drawing on previously undiscussed primary sources on the development of free soil in the Low Countries and employs a pan-Western, European and comparative approach to identify and explain the differences and similarities in the application of this principle in France, England and the Low Countries. Divided into four sections, the book begins with a brief introduction to the subject matter, putting it in its historical context. Slavery is legally defined, using the established international law definition, and both the status of slavery in Europe before the Early Modern Period and the Atlantic slave trade are discussed. Secondly, the book assesses the legal origins of the free soil principle in England, France and the Low Countries during the period 1500–1650 and discusses the legal repercussions of slaves coming to England, France and the Low Countries from other countries, where the institution was legally recognized. Thirdly, it addresses the further development of the free soil principle during the period 1650–1800. In the fourth and last section, the book uses the insights gained to provide a pan-Western, European and comparative perspective on the origins and application of the free soil principle in Western Europe. In this regard, it compares the origins of free soil for the respective countries discussed, as well as its application during the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. This perspective makes it possible to explain some of the divergences in approaches between the countries examined and represents the first-ever full-scale country comparison on this subject in a book.Soldiers of Salamis
By Javier Cercas. 2003
A novel of the Spanish Civil War—a modern classic, an international bestseller, and a searing exploration of the unknowability of…
history. In the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, an unknown militiaman discovered a Nationalist prisoner who had fled a firing squad and taken refuge in the forest. But instead of killing him, the soldier simply turned and walked away. The prisoner, Rafael Sánchez Mazas—writer, fascist, and founder of the Spanish Falange—went on to become a national hero and ultimately a minister in Franco's first government. The soldier disappeared into history. Sixty years later, Javier Cercas—or at least, a character who shares his name--sifts through the evidence to establish what really happened that day. Who was the soldier? Why didn't he shoot? And who was the true hero in the story? Every answer yields another question in this powerful and elegantly constructed novel about truth, memory, and war.Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies
By Christopher Hill. 2020
A classic study of popular resistance to the momentous changes of 17th century EnglandIn 17th Century England, the law was…
not an instrument of justice - it was an instrument of oppression. The enclosures of common land, loss of many traditional rights and draconian punishments for minor transgressions changed the lives of the peasantry and created a landless class of wage labourers. In this, the last book published during his lifetime, renowned historian of the English Revolution Christopher Hill explores the immense social changes that occurred and the expressions of liberty against the law through the literary culture of the times and the hero-worship of the outlaw. As well as chapters on gypsies and vagabonds, Hill analyses class, religion and the shift away from the importance of the church after the Reformation. Liberty Against the Law is a late classic of Hill's work, and essential reading for anyone interested in the history and politics of the 17th Century.Milton and the English Revolution
By Christopher Hill. 1979
Remarkable reinterpretation of Milton and his poetry by one of the most famous historians of the 17th CenturyIn this remarkable…
book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime's study of seventeenth-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet, and religious thinker. The result is a Milton very different from most popular imagination: instead of a gloomy, sexless 'Puritan', we have a dashingly original thinker, branded with the contemporary reputation of a libertine. For Hill, Milton is an author who found his real stimulus less in the literature of classical and times and more in the political and religious radicalism of his own day. Hill demonstrates, with originality, learning and insight, how Milton's political and religious predicament is reflected in his classic poetry, particularly 'Paradise Lost' and 'Samson Agonistes'.The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard Historical Studies #135)
By Rebecca L. Spang. 2019
As Spang explains, during the 1760s and 1770s, sensitive, self-described sufferers made public show of their delicacy by going to…
the new establishments known as “restaurateurs’ rooms” to sip bouillons. But these locations soon became sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality and later became symbols of aristocratic greed.Surviving the Peace: The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina
By Peter Lippman. 2019
Surviving the Peace is a monumental feat of ground-level reporting describing two decades of postwar life in Bosnia, specifically among…
those fighting for refugee rights of return. Unique in its breadth and profoundly humanitarian in its focus, Surviving the Peace situates digestible explanations of the region's bewilderingly complex recent history among interviews, conversations, and tableaus from the lives of everyday Bosnians attempting to make sense of what passes for normal in a postwar society.Essential reading for students of the former Yugoslavia and anyone interested in postwar or post-genocide studies, Surviving the Peace is an instant classic of long-form reporting, an impossible accomplishment without a lifetime of dedication to a place and people.