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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all
manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable
treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman
Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney
Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of
how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered
these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they
could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and
equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer
Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into
the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded
chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered
treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to
have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross)
and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts
steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from
Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation
upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city
Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most
precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a
would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took
them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the
war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art
historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing
treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn
landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and
arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted
in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the
burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of
neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden
fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn
has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and
former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help
legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master
Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so
explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as
well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United
States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing
story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a
failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of
his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted
in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.
Popular entertainment in antebellum Cincinnati ran the gamut from
high culture to shows barely above the level of the tawdry. Among
the options for those seeking entertainment in the summer of 1856
was the display of a "Wild Woman," purportedly a young woman
captured while living a feral life beyond the frontier. The popular
exhibit, which featured a silent, underdressed woman chained to a
bed, was almost assuredly a hoax. Local activist women, however,
used their influence to prompt a judge to investigate the display.
The court employed eleven doctors, who forcibly subdued and
examined the woman before advising that she be admitted to an
insane asylum. In his riveting analysis of this remarkable episode
in antebellum American history, Michael D. Pierson describes how
people in different political parties and sections of the country
reacted to the exhibit. Specifically, he uses the lens of the Wild
Woman display to explore the growing cultural divisions between the
North and the South in 1856, especially the differing gender
ideologies of the northern Republican Party and the more southern
focused Democrats. In addition, Pierson shows how the treatment of
the Wild Woman of Cincinnati prompted an increasing demand for
women's political and social empowerment at a time when the country
allowed for the display of a captive female without evidence that
she had granted consent.
In 1914, the Associated Newspapers sent correspondent Herbert Corey
to Europe on the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. During
the Great War that followed, Corey reported from France, Britain,
and Germany, visiting the German lines on both the western and
eastern fronts. He also reported from Greece, Italy, Switzerland,
Holland, Belgium, and Serbia. When the Armistice was signed in
November 1918, Corey defied the rules of the American Expeditionary
Forces and crossed into Germany. He covered the Paris Peace
Conference the following year. No other foreign correspondent
matched the longevity of his reporting during World War I. Until
recently, however, his unpublished memoir lay largely unnoticed
among his papers in the Library of Congress. With publication of
Herbert Corey's Great War, coeditors Peter Finn and John Maxwell
Hamilton reestablish Corey's name in the annals of American war
reporting. As a correspondent, he defies easy comparison. He
approximates Ernie Pyle in his sympathetic interest in the American
foot soldier, but he also told stories about troops on the other
side and about noncombatants. He is especially illuminating on the
obstacles reporters faced in conveying the story of the Great War
to Americans. As his memoir makes clear, Corey didn't believe he
was in Europe to serve the Allies. He viewed himself as an
outsider, one who was deeply ambivalent about the entry of the
United States into the war. His idiosyncratic, opinionated, and
very American voice makes for compelling reading.
Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska
youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets
of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold
the Pacific War as fought by "Frogs" and "Toads," humanoid
creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The
history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences
of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth
around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts.
The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic
strips from America's small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael
Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father's
adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that
formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic
Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for
these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers,
radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda
intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young
artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of
progressive American educational reform, these violent comic
stories, often in settings modeled on the artist's small Nebraska
town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral
conventions consistent with comic art's reputation for "outsider"
or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these
comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from
war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Kugler's thorough analysis of his father's adolescent art explains
how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture
of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious,
even shocking terms.
Based on previously unused French and German sources, this challenging and controversial new analysis of the war on the Western front from 1914 to 1918 reveals how and why the Germans won the major battles with one-half to one-third fewer casualties than the Allies, and how American troops in 1918 saved the Allies from defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans.
This is beautifully slipcased presented collector' s edition of the
best selling title, The Lost World of Bletchley Park, a
comprehensive illustrated history of this remarkable place, from
its prewar heyday as a country estate, its wartime requisition and
how it became the place where modern computing was invented and the
German Enigma code was cracked, to its post-war dereliction and
then rescue towards the end of the twentieth century as a museum.
Removable memorabilia includes: 1938 recruiting memo with a big
tick against Turing' s name Churchill' s ' Action this day' letter
giving code breakers extra resources Handwritten Turing memos Top
Secret Engima decryptions, about the sinking of the Bismark, German
High Command' s assessment of D-Day threat and the message
announcing Hitler' s suicide A wealth of everyday items such as
call-up papers, security notices and propoganda posters Newly
redesigned interiors with 25% new content, high end slipcase
package featuring removable facsimile documents, this is an
essential purchase for everyone interested and wanting to
experience the place where code-breaking helped to win the war.
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