This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' "euthanasia" measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the lives of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective.

McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having "lives unworthy of living." While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

In 1941, three brothers witnessed their parents and two other siblings being led away to their eventual murders. It was a grim scene that would, of course, be repeated endlessly throughout the war. Instead of running or giving in to despair, these brothers -- Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski -- fought back, waging a guerrilla war of wits against the Nazis.

By using their intimate knowledge of the dense forests surrounding the Belarusan towns of Novogrudek and Lida, the Bielskis evaded the Nazis and established a hidden base camp, then set about convincing other Jews to join their ranks. As more and more Jews arrived each day, a robust community began to emerge, a "Jerusalem in the woods."

After two and a half years in the woods, in July 1944, the Bielskis learned that the Germans, overrun by the Red Army, were retreating back toward Berlin. More than one thousand Bielski Jews emerged -- alive -- on that final, triumphant exit from the woods.

"A Private Treason" is the memoir of a courageous German woman who, as a girl of nineteen from an upper-middle-class Gentile family, rejected Nazism completely and gave up her language and her country forever. Branded a "traitor," she fled from the blitzkrieg to Vienna, the Dalmation islands, Paris, finally to the "zone libre" in southern France--a fugitive's life preserved by forged identity papers and haunted by the fear of detention and arrest. Yet she managed to survive.
Now, she looks back on the war and her youth. Her intense, personal memories are recalled in fragments--she tells each one honestly and with powerful emotion, including her childhood in Berlin and the liberation of France in 1944. She recalls her neighborhood amid Berlin's plentiful parks and lakes and as she matures, we see her first perceptions of the ominous moods and events beginning to shake Germany--the deep resentment over losing World War I, the vicious gossip of "hereditary enemies," the first outburst of political and racial violence that would eventually be transformed into hobnailed boots, truncheons, and swastika armbands, separating her from schoolmates and playmates forever.
"A Private Treason" is filled with poignant recollections of the people in her life: her strict, deeply Teutonic grandfather--target of her childhood rebellions with his haughty refinement and tyrannical whims--who finally expresses his love openly just before she leaves Germany; her gentle, withdrawn father and talented, emotionally unstable mother; Loirette, a clever, myopic Vichy official secretly working for the Resistance; and Andre, her intellectual lover, continually frustrated in his attempts to work effectively for the maquis.
Much of "A Private Treason" tells the story of Ingrid and Andre's struggle to stay alive and together, of their separations and reunions, of her transporting forged papers for the maquis and his plotting to escape to England, of the enormous risks they both took to hide their comrades and condemned refugees, and of their hope, finally fulfilled, for the Allied invasion that would eventually drive the Germans out of France. A few days after the invasion begins, Andre is killed in one of the last military actions in the Vercors.
In its story of suffering and personal grief, "A Private Treason" denounces all wars. Yet, at the same time, Ingrid Greenburger's strength and natural exuberance shine throughout this stirring account of one woman's response to the outrages of war and Nazism.
The late Igrid Greenburger was the widow of literary agent Sanford Greenburger.

There is no such thunder in history -- nor ever will be again -- as the deep-throated roar of the mighty, four-engined B-17s that streamed across the skies in World War II. The long runways are silent now, the men and planes are gone.

But out of the massive files of records available, and the memories of the men who flew, Martin Caidin has assembled this dramatic portrait of America's most formidable heavy bomber of the war.

The B-17: The Flying Forts recreates a vanished era and a great and gallant plane -- a plane that could absorb three thousand enemy bullets, fly with no rudder, and complete its mission on two engines. A plane that American pilots flew at Pearl Harbor, Tunis, Midway, Palermo, Schweinfurt, Regensberg, Normandy, and Berlin, in thousands of missions and through hundreds of thousands of miles of flak-filled skies. A plane that proved itself in every combat theater as the greatest heavy bomber of World War II.

The first definitive account of one of the most critical naval battles of World War II in the Pacific!

Spring 1942: Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America was reeling under the successive Japanese victories in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines and more. Desperate to stop what was seen as an inexorable Japanese advance toward Australia, the weak U.S. Navy intercepted the larger Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea. The Battle of the Coral Sea ushered a new era in sea warfare. For the first time ever opposing fleets used carrier-launched aircraft to fight each other. It was a fight that would determine the future of the war.

This is the most comprehensive account of the Air Forces in Malta during Word War II. Malta was a vital base from which Allied aircraft could inflict serious damage on the crucial Axis supply route to Rommel in North Africa. In order to secure that route, the might of the Luftwaffe and Italian Air Forces were thrown together against the tiny island, affecting not just the defending servicemen and women, but the entire population. This book vividly describes how the fighters, bombers, torpedo, and reconnaissance aircraft of the RAF and FAA took the fight to the enemy and triumphantly succeeded with every odd stacked against them.

"The 22nd is very much a part of my life and had it not been for your journal I would have had no idea of its destiny and its ending. I am very grateful to you for this experience." -John Cheever Scores of combat incidents and fascinating insights are to be found aCin "A Soldier's Journal." aCRothbart aCprovides unusual details of the 4th Division's, and especially the 22nd Regiment's, achievements and obstacles in the Allied advance from Normandy to Germany; aCD-Day Normandy, the breakthrough at St. Lo, the liberation of Paris, the German counterattack in the Ardennes and the Battle of the Bulge, aCand the bloody Hurtgen Forest battle.-The Trenton Times (NJ) "Rothbart's meticulously- kept journal is an 'I was there' record of World War II. aCIt is a valuable piece of American history."-The Huntsville Times (AL) "From the day he was drafted in 1942...Rothbart did what many people plan but rarely follow up. aCHe kept a journal, tightly pencilled entries in little notebooks that somehow caught history roaring by, and in remarkably readable style."-Pittsburgh Tribune Review (PA) "Compelling reading ...made more so by the many 'slice of life' portraits...of his time in the U.S. Army." -John Gresham, bestselling co-author (with Tom Clancy) of Submarine and Special Forces. David Rothbart was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1916. Inducted into the Army on February 14, 1942. He served in the European Theatre of Operations, landing in Normandy shortly after D-Day, June 6, 1944. He was awarded the Bronze Star with five battle stars and was honorably discharged on September 28, 1945, with the rank of sargeant.

Fighter ace Col. Johannes Steinhoff commanded an elite group of pilots trained to fly the first jet aircraft employed in combat, the famous Messerschmitt Me-262, at a time when Reich Marshal Hermann Gsring, by then out of favor with Hitler for his failure to stop the Allied bombing raids, denounced his own pilots as cowards. After Gsring refused to deploy the Me-262 as a fighter, the role for which it was designed, and instead ordered its use as a bomber, Steinhoff and other senior air leaders devised a plot to depose Gsring from his command of the Luftwaffe in the futile hope of staving off final defeat in the air. The pilots' long-standing disgust with their Reich Marshal's military incompetence and technical dilettantism led to their dangerous intrigue in the fall of 1944. There was an added element of risk as their desperate gamble came in the wake of the July 20 plot against Hitler, the onrushing Allied onslaught, and the general disintegration of the German military and its war effort. Steinhoff crashed while trying to take off in a heavily laden Me-262. The explosion left him badly burned and still in the hospital when the war ended. German soldier the account that became The Final Hours. His memories are vivid, painful, and gripping. Free from the years of recrimination and reflection so common in similar works, his tale recounts the pressure of fighting for a lost cause and the intrigue fostered by an unstable command. His account reveals every facet of a remarkable fighter pilot's struggle for survival and provides an excellent case study of the plodding bureaucracy and scheming obscurantism so characteristic of the Third Reich. I first discovered Johannes Steinhoff as a graduate student, preparing a field in World War II. His name kept appearing as one of the gifted warriors who carried the Third Reich on their shoulders for six years. Never did men fight better in a worse cause than did the Germans from 1939 to 1945, and Steinhoff was a paladin. As a fighter pilot he served on every major front and scored 176 aerial victories. He was among the first to fly jets in combat, serving with the famous Squadron of Experts in the war's final days. He had been decorated with the Knight's Cross with Swords and Oak Leaves. bravery they recognized were no less real for that. There was also a certain karmic irony in someone often called the handsomest man in the Luftwaffe having his face burned off in a crash just at the end of the war, eventually emerging from years of restorative surgery with a gargoyle mask that was mostly scar tissue. It required little imagination to interpret Johannes Steinhoff as a symbol of Germany itself: disfigured by its past, permanently marked for everyone to see. I regularly suggested the trope to my classes, and considered myself a clever young professor indeed. It required no more research than reading German newspapers to discover that Johannes Steinhoff was more than a symbol of a vanished regime and a lost war. When the newly-established Federal Republic of Germany began considering recreating its armed forces as part of its reintegration into an emerging Western Alliance, Steinhoff was among the first veterans consulted. challenge openly what he considered the disastrously mistaken operational decisions of Hitler and his lieutenant, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goring. Initially reluctant, like many of his counterparts, to consider putting on a uniform once more, Steinhoff finally decided that he might after all be able to contribute directly to creating a new Germany. It would not be a Germany of power and conquest like its Imperial and National Socialist predecessors. Nor would it be the Holy Germany, a beacon to the nations, of which resisters like Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had dreamed. This Germany would be a state and a people among others, committed to a common European and Atlantic enterprise. Resisting the ideological and military challenges of the Soviet Union was merely a first step towards the eventual construction of a community of free peoples, linked by mutual interests and mutual respect. He saw German-American relations as the cornerstone of that enterprise. whose officers and men served a democracy in the context of the NATO Alliance. He eventually rose to be its Inspector-General, then as Chairman of the Military Commission of NATO, retiring as a four-star general. Neither he nor his pilots ever fired a shot in anger. In his later years, Steinhoff described that as the aspect of his career of which he was most proud. I learned that during our collaboration on a book titled Voices from the Third Reich. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan made international headlines by standing alongside German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to commemorate German war dead at Bitburg, in a cemetery including some graves of SS men. General Steinhoff, by then retired, attended the ceremony, and was shaken by the negative reactions it evoked in Europe and the United States. Johannes had told his own wartime story, in The Straits of Messina and this volume, The Final Hours. But he believed there was a larger story to tell: the story of the German people, especially the generation that had fought World War II in the front lines. understand the complex web of circumstances and principles that brought Adolf Hitler to power and held Germany in his thrall until nothing remained. To tell the story, Johannes decided he needed an American collaborator. By then I was teaching at Colorado College. Johannes's son-in-law was also on the faculty, in a different department, and the General and I had met casually a couple of times. When his daughter suggested What about Dennis? he was willing to consider it. We met, talked, and came to a quick agreement. For me it was the start of an adventure. We'll be working in each others' pockets for a long time, Johannes told me. I want someone who can discuss more than today's newspaper. It didn't take me long to discover that the general

By mid-1944, the U.S. Army was facing a critical shortage of the most important commodity in any war, the common foot soldier. Higher-than-expected casualties during the liberation of France had forced the Army to comb its ranks for replacement infantrymen. Plucked in 1944 from the safety and privilege of the Army Specialized Training Program (the World War II version of the college deferment of the Vietnam years), twenty-two-year-old John Babcock suddenly found himself an infantry private headed to Europe. Raised in an upper-middle-class family, this sensitive and literate youth was thrust into a group of coarse, uneducated, and sometimes brutal draftees who were headed to the 78th Infantry Division as replacements. Babcock demonstrates that the "greatest generation" was not always that. Instead, it was like any other cohort - full of liars, cowards, and ordinary men who simply wanted to stay alive and go home. Babcock lets us see the war through his eyes - just over the rim of the foxhole. Undergoing his baptism of fire in the Battle of the Bulge, he endures the trials of combat, advancing through attrition to become the senior sergeant in the company. This ordinary enlisted infantryman in "just another combat division" takes the reader from infantry basic training and seven months of combat to postwar occupation duty in Germany and back home. It is one infantry rifleman's story rather than an account of how his division fit into the grander scheme of the war in Europe - though the author relates to that by providing the reader with a roadmap of dates and locations taken. Babcock offers an intimate taste of combat, casualties, how he fought, and with which weapons (in clear "civilian" language), and both the heroism and cowardice of his fellow soldiers. Published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army, it is a gripping account of how an ordinary American boy felt and experienced the so-called good war. Foreword by Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn and In the Company of Soldiers. The best war stories are always less about battles than the men who fight them. The extravagant stress of combat is a great revealer of character, refracting a soldier's elemental traits the way a prism refracts light. We see the man's mettle, for good and for ill. Writing well about war can never ennoble combat, but it can redeem those forced to wage war by affirming their humanity. We sense the skull beneath the helmet, the boy behind the rifle, the heart beating under the olive-drab field jacket. Nearly sixty years after serving as an infantryman in Europe during the last months of World War II, John B. Babcock has written a memoir that is compelling, authentic, and deeply human. He reminds us that the war, like all truly epic stories, is bottomless; there is more to write, and there will always be more to write. His perspective is from the lip of a slit trench, the mud-spackled view of a junior sergeant in a mortar section. Larger military and political issues rarely intrude. We never see the big arrows on the map, never even know what division the writer is in. This allows us to experience the war as Sergeant Babcock saw it, smelled it, heard it, felt it. He bears witness well, with irony and sardonic humor and a flinty refusal to take refuge in retrospective sentimentality. He remembers the "rye bread and grease smell" of German prisoners tramping toward their cages; the "flick-of-a-whip swish" that precedes a mortar round detonating; the twitching of the mortally wounded; the smell of G.I. soap and G.I. socks, of Cosmoline and flea powder, of "pine pitch from freshly severed branches." He remembers how the dead become part of the landscape, even serving as landmarks for those giving directions, as in: "come up the street to the guy with the hole in his head, and turn right." He remembers the terror of the first near-miss from an artillery shell; the fumbling search of enemy corpses for spare lighter flints; the difficulty in hugging the ground for a mortarman wearing a canvas bib stuffed with a dozen shells. Sergeant Babcock will not, cannot avert his eyes. The war he remembers includes friendly fire and fragging, looting and rape and the execution of prisoners. He records these "shabby transgressions," but also valor, and hilarity, and infantrymen rubbing each others' frozen feet to ward off trench foot, a poignant image of mutual devotion that tells us much about comradeship. This is a thoroughly modern combat memoir, one that enriches the genre. If occasionally crude and often haunting, it is always vivid. Just like war.

"The Boys' Crusade is the great historian Paul Fussell's unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman's experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author's own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children--for children they were--who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war's brutal essence.
"A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth," Fussell writes in his Preface. Accord-ingly, he eschews every kind of sentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and human emotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows of war, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, and resentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature on World War II, "The Boys' Crusade stands wholly apart. Fussell's profoundly honest portrayal of these boy soldiers underscores their bravery even as it deepens our awareness of their experiences. This book is both a tribute to their noble service and a valuable lesson for future generations.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Imagine what it would be like to talk and fly with the men who flew the airplanes of World War II. What was in their minds as they made their first solos? And what was air combat like? "Flying Through Time" is the closest many of us will come to understanding what it was like to be a WWII aviator.Tens of thousands of America's pilots during World War II trained in the Boeing Stearman biplane. For most, it was their first airplane in a series of larger, faster, and more dangerous aircraft that they used to fight the war. The pilots would never forget their first flights in a Stearman and the adventures that followed. Jim Doyle, owner of a restored 1941 Stearman, retraced the wartime journeys of his plane, crossing the country twice; flying over California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas; and touching down at each of the eight bases at which it served. "Flying Through Time" is the story of Doyle's challenging flight and of the uncertainties of piloting a sixty-year-old biplane almost 8,000 miles. His experiences meeting, talking, and flying with the men who flew the legendary Stearman paint a vivid picture of the intense, emotion-filled days of World War II. The pilots' recollections, refreshed for many when they took the controls of Doyle's plane, are woven throughout the narrative of his trip. These anecdotes, and new information from an archive discovered during the flight, tell of fears, courage, humor, and the sheer adventure of the events that owned the veterans' youth. This is seat-of-the-pants flying at its most thrilling, recalling a time when ordinary young Americans were called upon to beheroes.

"
"In 1942, Hitler's Nazi regime trained eight operatives for a mission to infiltrate America and do devastating damage to its infrastructure. It was a plot that proved historically remarkable for two reasons: the surprising extent of its success and the astounding nature of its failure. Soon after two U-Boats packed with explosives arrived on America's shores-one on Long Island, one in Florida-it became clear that the incompetence of the eight saboteurs was matched only by that of American authorities. In fact, had one of the saboteurs not tipped them off, the FBI might never have caught the plot's perpetrators-though a dozen witnesses saw a submarine moored on Long Island.
As told by Michael Dobbs, the story of the botched mission and a subsequent trial by military tribunal, resulting in the swift execution of six saboteurs, offers great insight into the tenor of the country--and the state of American intelligence--during World War II and becomes what is perhaps a cautionary tale for our times.

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume III: The Battle of the Bulge to Hiroshima

From the thunderous battles in the Ardennes to the flight of the Enola Gay, this book recreates the triumphant return of MacArthur, Patton's irresistible drive into the German heartland, and the relentless kamikaze attacks off Okinawa.

THEIR WAR
THEIR WORDS

American fighting men engaged the enemy on land, at sea, and in the air. Now one of the nation's most acclaimed military historians presents an authoritative and dramatic three-volume oral history of World War II that is both richly sweeping and startlingly intimate. A gripping account of how American warriors, from buck privates to five-star generals, fought, bled, thought, and felt, THE GREATEST WAR is the ultimate tribute to the "greatest generation"—a saga of unparalleled courage, honor, and glory.

Look for Volumes I and II of
THE GREATEST WAR

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume I: From Pearl Harbor to the Kasserine Pass

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume II: D-Day and the Assault on Europe

Of the more than six hundred American servicemen captured or unaccounted for in Laos during the war in Southeast Asia, Lawrence R. Bailey, Jr., was the first. His terrifying memoir of brutal solitary confinement reveals a little-known aspect of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and describes a triumph of the human spirit over the most physically demeaning and mentally challenging circumstances.

Noel Cashford served for six years in the Royal Navy's Mine and Bomb Disposal Squad. During this time he made safe over 200 devices, 57 in a mere three days. Noel didn't intend to be a daring hero as poor eyesight had prevented him from joining the surface fleet. When the opportunity arose to do something more exciting than administration, he naturally went for it, little realising that he would end up defusing bombs and mines This book is a collection of his memories of those days. It is a touching and humorous account of his dangerous job where, in the early days of the war, you could be lucky to last more than just a few months.

Flying P-38s, Jerry Johnson shot down 24 aircraft in 265 combat missions in the Pacific theater. At the age of only twenty-four, he commanded the highest-scoring fighter group in the Pacific. Tragically, though Johnson had survived three combat tours, which included a mid-air collision with a Japanese aircraft and being shot down by friendly fire, the new father disappeared without a trace while flying a courier mission one month after the war s end.

More thrilling than any fiction, this book charts the true story of RAF crewman Denys Teare's year in Occupied France, a year spent a half-step ahead of Gestapo troopers determined to hunt him down.

When the German Army captured Lw w, Poland, in 1941, the city contained a vibrant Jewish community of 160,000 people. By 1945, all but a few hundred were dead. "Witness to Annihilation" is the book that Samuel Drix vowed he would write. Drix endured nearly a year in the Janowska concentration camp, escaped and hid from the Nazis, was liberated by the Red Army, and eventually fled from behind the Iron Curtain to America. This rare Holocaust memoir by a caring physician will both horrify and inspire.

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume II: D-Day and the Assault on Europe

From the invasion of Normandy to the advance of Allied forces across Europe, this book puts you in the ferocious battle for Omaha beach, the daring aerial strikes that shook Berlin, and the swift, momentous liberation of Paris.

THEIR WAR
THEIR WORDS

American fighting men engaged the enemy on land, at sea, and in the air. Now one of the nation's most acclaimed military historians presents an authoritative and dramatic three-volume oral history of World War II that is both richly sweeping and startlingly intimate. A gripping account of how American warriors, from buck privates to five-star generals, fought, bled, thought, and felt, THE GREATEST WAR is the ultimate tribute to the "greatest generation"—a saga of unparalleled courage, honor, and glory.

Look for Volumes I and III of
THE GREATEST WAR

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume I: From Pearl Harbor to the Kasserine Pass

THE GREATEST WAR
Volume III: The Battle of the Bulge to Hiroshima

From Pearl Harbor to D-Day and beyond and all-star examination of the conflict that shaped the modern world from World War II Magazine.

It was a war that defined a generation of the world, a war that saw America transform itself from an inward-looking isolationist nation to an arsenal of democracy whose reach spanned the globe. The World War II Reader presents in one extraordinary book the thrilling story of the greatest generation in its finest hour in the best essays from the world's most distinguished historians compiled by World War II Magazine, the only magazine that brings the history and drama of the 20th Century's defing conflict to life.

The World War II Reader includes insightful essays on the larger-than-life leaders who made life-and-death decisions that shaped grand strategy and crucial battles. In addition, this book cuts through the fog of war and presents though-provoking revelations of little known events that had far-reaching consequences, including the Niihau Incident, that tragically affected the fate of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii and mainland America.

The World War II Reader is a must-have for every history enthusiast, and for the person serching for the one book that not just tells the story of America's greatest conflict, but makes World War II come vividly alive as if it happened yesterday.

When Chief Gunner Hashiro Hayashi took dead aim on British Columbia's Estevan Point Lighthouse and wireless station on a June morning in 1942, the realities of war had come to North America. Sixty years later, the fascinating events of that era and their impact on both the Canadian and American psyches remain unknown to much of the world.After conducting decades of research and interviews with veterans on both sides of the conflict, author Brendan Coyle now reveals the campaign that included three attacks on British Columbia, an air raid on Portland, Oregon, and the harsh battles fought in Alaska. From the foreword: "Brendan Coyle has done a magnificent job in this comprehensive review of the war on the West Coast. No other single volume has so neatly tied together the myriad stories of how the war affected people in British Columbia, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska,"-Jim Delgado, Executive DirectorVancouver Maritime Museu

A former German soldier eloquently reflects on the insidious effects of Nazi propaganda, especially on young people, citing his own experience as the son of an anti-Semitic father whom he loved deeply. Bruno Manz also recounts his wartime experiences fighting the Soviets in Finland and presents a unique perspective on the United States, to which he came in the 1950s during Operation Paperclip along with Werner von Braun and other German rocket scientists. In the epilogue he draws conclusions about Germany??'s guilt and his own, baring his soul to the reader. This heartfelt memoir is for anyone who seeks to understand how a civilized people could plunge into mass insanity.

Adolf Hitler trusted few men, but his faith in pilot Hans Baur never wavered. Baur, a decorated World War I flier and one of Germany's leading commercial aviators of the 1920s, joined the fledgling Nazi Party in 1926. His skill and daring and his early party membership, catapulted him to the top of the list when Adolf Hitler went in search of a pilot for his political campaign of 1932. Later, Hitler became the first head of state to use air travel extensively, and, from 1932 to 1945, Hitler refused to fly with anyone but Baur at the controls. Baur ate meals with Hitler frequently and was one of the fuhrer's few true confidants. As the tide of war turned against Germany and relations between Hitler and the Luftwaffe leadership deteriorated, Hitler increasingly relied on Baur for advice about air war policy and technical developments. In the end, Baur paid for his blind loyalty to Hitler. Trapped by the Soviet Red Army in the war-torn city of Berlin, Baur was captured after Hitler's suicide and imprisoned in the Soviet Union. Aviation historian C. G. Sweeting provides the reader with fresh insight into the inner workings of the Third Reich and the madness of Adolf Hitler. The book details many surprising episodes, such as the time Baur allowed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to take the controls of the fuhrer's plane, and an account of Hitler's and Baur's narrow escape from a German air base as Soviet tanks arrived at the perimeter. Aviation buffs will also enjoy the author's in-depth examination of the aircraft used in Hitler's personal transport squadron. "Hitler's Personal Pilot" is a unique book that will fascinate both experts and novices on Nazi Germany with its detail andperspective on Hitler's infamous inner circle.