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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
What was life like for ordinary Germans under Hitler? Hitler's Home Front paints a picture of life in Wurttemberg, a region in south-west Germany, during the rise to power and rule of the Nazis. It concentrates in particular on life in the countryside. Many Wurttembergers, while not actively opposing Hitler, carried on their normal lives before 1939, with their traditional loyalties, to region, village, church and family, balancing the claims of Nazism. The Nazis did not kill its own citizens (other than the Jews) in the way that Stalinist Russia did, and there were limits to the numbers and power of the Gestapo and to the reach of the Nazi state. Yet the region could not escape the catastrophic effect of the war, as conscription, labour shortages, migrant labour, bombing, hunger and defeat overwhelmed the lives of everyone.
Germany's Eastern Front in World War II saw many campaigns and battles that have been "forgotten" by a Soviet Union that tried to hide its military failures. The Red Army's invasion of Romania in April and May 1944 was one such campaign, which produced nearly 200,000 casualties and tarnished the reputations of its commanders. The redoubtable David Glantz, the world's leading authority on the Soviet military in World War II, now restores this tale to its proper place in the annals of World War II. Working from newly available Russian and long-neglected German archives--plus Red Army unit histories and commanders' memoirs--Glantz reconstructs an imposing mosaic that reveals the immense scope and ambitious intent of the first Iasi-Kishinev offensive. His re-creation shows that Stalin was not as preoccupied with a direct route to Berlin as he was with a "broad front" strategy designed to gain territory and find vulnerable points in Germany's extended lines of defense. If successful, the invasion would have also eliminated Romania as Germany's ally, cut off the vital Ploiesti oilfields, and provided a base from which to consolidate Soviet power throughout the Balkans. Glantz traces the 2nd Ukrainian Front's offensive along the Tirgu-Frumos, Iasi, and Dnestr River axes and the 3rd Ukrainian Front's simultaneous advance to the Dnestr River and dramatic struggle to seize bridgeheads across the river and capture Kishinev. He discloses General Ivan Konev's strategic plan as the 2nd Ukrainian Front prepared its Iasi offensive and fought a climactic battle with the German Eighth Army and its Romanian allies in the Tirgu-Frumos region in early May, then the regrouping of General Rodion Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front for its decisive offensive toward Kishinev, which aborted in the face of a skillful counterstroke by a threadbare German Sixth Army. Glantz describes how the Wehrmacht, with a nucleus of survived combat veterans, was able to beat back Soviet forces hampered by spring floods, while already fragile Soviet logistical support was further undermined by the Wehrmacht's scorched-earth strategy. Although Konev's and Malinovsky's offensives ultimately failed, the Red Army managed to inflict heavy losses on Axis forces, exacerbating the effects of Germany's defeats in the Ukraine and making it more difficult for the Wehrmacht to contain the Soviet juggernaut's ultimate advance toward Berlin. By re-creating this forgotten offensive, Glantz commemorates a rich and important chapter in the history of a war that brought down the German Army and reshaped the map of Europe.
Though much has been said about Japanese-American incarceration camps, little attention is paid to the community newspapers closest to the camps and how they constructed the identities and lives of the occupants inside. Dependent on government and military officials for information, these journalists rarely wrote about the violation of the evacuees' civil rights. Instead, they concentrated on the economic impact the camps-and the evacuees, who would replace workers off to enlist in the military and work for defense contractors-would have on the areas they covered. Newspapers like the Cody Enterprise and Powell Tribune in Wyoming, the Lamar Daily News, and the Casa Grande Dispatch regularly published overly optimistic updates on the progress of construction, the size of the contractor payrolls, and the amount of materials used to build the camps. Ronald Bishop and his coauthors reveal how journalists positioned the incarceration camps as a potential economic boon and how evacuees were framed as another community group, there to contribute to the region's economic well-being. Community Newspapers and the Japanese-American Incarceration Camps examines the rhetoric and journalistic approach of the local papers and how they informed the communities just outside their walls. This book will appeal to scholars of history and journalism.
On 19 February 1942 the Japanese air force bombed Darwin. Whilst this fact is well known, very few people know exactly what happened. Timothy Hall was the first writer to be given acess to all the official reports of the time and as a result he has been able to reveal exactly what happened on that dreadful day - a day which Sir Paul Hasluck (17th Governor-General of Australia) later described as 'a day of national shame'. The sequence of events in Darwin that day certainly did not reflect the military honour that the War Cabinet wanted people to believe. On the contrary, for what really happened was a combination of chaos, panic and, in many cases, cowardice on an unprecented scale.
This book analyses the film industries and cinema cultures of Nazi-occupied countries (1939-1945) from the point of view of individuals: local captains of industry, cinema managers, those working for film studios and officials authorized to navigate film policy. The book considers these people from a historical perspective, taking into account their career before the occupation and, where relevant, pays attention to their post-war lives. The perspectives of these historical agents" contributes to an understanding of how top-down orders and haphazard signals from the occupying administration were moulded, adjusted and distorted in the process of their translation and implementation. This edited collection offers a more dynamic and less deterministic approach to research on the international expansion of Third-Reich cinema in World War Two; an approach that strives to balance the role of individual agency with the structural determinants. The case studies presented in this book cover the territories of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the Soviet Union.
World War II was the first conflict in which air power was a deciding and indispensable factor. "May Day! May Day! Close Encounters (An Instructor Pilot Remembers)" reveals the personal stories of the aircrews who flew and maintained the planes and who upheld a continuous supply of trained personnel for the war effort. Full of rich, historical detail, author and former World War II pilot Jack Scott shares his experiences and those of others, giving an insightful view into the American home front and the war overseas. "While assigned to Walker Air Base, we were subjected to all of the restrictions of rationing. Shoes, food, clothes and just about everything was rationed. One thing, however never ceased to amaze us. We were allowed only a minimum amount of gasoline for our personal autos, yet we were encouraged to practice touch and go landings as often as we personally desired and were often reminded that at the end of every mission we should make a few extra landings and take offs. The paradox of this was that on one 'go around" we would burn a minimum of 80 gallons of aviation fuel. Rationing did not apply here."
This book is both a practical guide and an introduction to low-intensity conflict. In addition, it serves as a history of this type of conflict in the United States. A part of normal government operations in the U.S. from 1940 to the present, low-intensity conflict's antecedants can be traced back to the beginning of the republic. Sturgill discusses topics such as: insurgency and counterinsurgency, terrorism and counterterrorism, and military intervention.
This book is a study of the legal reckoning with the crimes of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police and its political dimensions in the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, and the United States in the context of the Cold War. Decades of work by prosecutors have established the facts of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. No group made a deeper mark in the annals of atrocity than the men of the so-called 'Arajs Kommando' and their leader, Viktors Arajs, who killed tens of thousands of Jews on Latvian soil and participated in every aspect of the 'Holocaust by Bullets.' This study also has significance for coming to terms with Latvia's encounter with Nazism - a process that was stunted and distorted by Latvia's domination by the USSR until 1991. Examining the country's most notorious killers, their fates on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and contemporary Latvians' responses in different political contexts, this volume is a record of the earliest phases of this process, which must now continue and to which this book contributes.
This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the 'deathscape' and the 'hopescape' of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.
Ruth SchwertfegerThis is the first book in English on Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in former Czechoslovakia and the only one of its kind which focuses on the women who were forced to live in it. Interwoven with the description of everyday life in the camp are memoirs and poems selected from the work of over twenty women. Carefully translated into English, these testimonies form an extraordinary and moving collection.
This book is the first comprehensive survey of resistance movements in Western Europe in World War II. Until now, most work on resistance has centred either on espionage networks, partisans and their external links, or on comparisons between national movements and theories of resistance. This book fills a major gap in the existing literature by providing an analysis of individual national historiographies on resistance, the debates they have engendered and their relationship to more general discussions of the occupation and postwar reconstruction of the countries concerned. Explaining the context, underlying motivations and development of resistance, contributors analyze the variety of movements and organizations as well as the extent of individual acts against the occupying power within individual states. While charting the growth of resistance activity as the war turned against the Axis, this book will also deal with the roles of specific groups and the theories which have been put forward to explain their behaviour. This includes patterns of Jewish resistance and the participation of women in what has largely been considered a male sphere. The conclusion then provides a comparative synthesis, and relates the work of the contributors to existing theories on the subject as a whole.This book will not only be core reading on courses on the social or military history of World War II but also, more generally, all courses covering the social and political history of Western European states in the twentieth century.
This study throws light for the first time on a neglected but very important aspect of Jewish life in the Third Reich, the Jewish press. This term does not refer to the significant number of Jews involved in the German media up to the Second World War but to the 65 newspapers and magazines published by 53 publishing houses with a specific German-Jewish readership in mind. These publications appeared until the end of 1938 and allow a valuable insight into the situation of the German Jews under the Nazi regime. They movingly document the efforts of the Jews to cope with the increasing precariousness of their existence in Germany and to find solutions to the growing problems of survival.
'AMERICAN EAGLES' is the thrilling, true story of the US 101st Airborne Division. From their rigorous training in 'Old Jolly' (England) to their first operational jump in Normandy, Whiting tells the story of this 'Band of Brothers', who fought, suffered and died in the eleven month campaign that followed. From Normandy through Holland, Bastogne, French Alsace till their final date with destiny at Hitler's Eagle's Nest in the Bavarian Alps, we gain a picture of a brave elite division 'warts and all'. Drawing on his own youthful experiences when his regiment was under the command of 101st Airborne in Holland, through painstaking research on the site of each of the 101st's battles, plus survivors stories, Whiting, perhaps Britain's most renowned popular WWII military historian, provides an ideal companion for the viewers of Steven Spielberg's celebrated $100 million TV series 'Band of Brothers'.
This book analyses the nationalist rebellion which emerged in Romania following the Second World War. The first two decades after the end of the war were times of rebellion in imperial peripheries. Armed movements, sometimes communist but nearly always nationalist in orientation, rose in opposition to retreating or advancing imperial powers. One such armed revolt took place in Romania, pitting nationalist partisans against a communist government. This book is an analysis of how the authorities crushed this rebellion, set in the context of parallel campaigns fought in Europe and the Third World. It focuses on population control through censorship, propaganda and deportations. It analyses military operations, particularly patrols, checkpoints, ambushes and informed strikes. Intelligence operations are also discussed, with an emphasis on recruiting informants, on interrogation, torture and infiltration. Bullets, brains and barbwire, not "hearts and minds" approaches, crushed internal rebels in post-1945 campaigns.
"This is a timely contribution to some of the most pressing debates facing scholars of Jewish Studies today. It forces us to re-think standard approaches to both antisemitism and liberalism. Its geographic scope offers a model for how scholars can "provincialize" Europe and engage in a transnational approach to Jewish history. The book crackles with intellectual energy; it is truly a pleasure to read."- Jessica M. Marglin, University of Southern California, USA Green and Levis Sullam have assembled a collection of original, and provocative essays that, in illuminating the historic relationship between Jews and liberalism, transform our understanding of liberalism itself. - Derek Penslar, Harvard University, USA "This book offers a strikingly new account of Liberalism's relationship to Jews. Previous scholarship stressed that Liberalism had to overcome its abivalence in order to achieve a principled stand on granting Jews rights and equality. This volume asserts, through multiple examples, that Liberalism excluded many groups, including Jews, so that the exclusion of Jews was indeed integral to Liberalism and constitutive for it. This is an important volume, with a challenging argument for the present moment."- David Sorkin, Yale University, USA The emancipatory promise of liberalism - and its exclusionary qualities - shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.
What did Hitler really want to achieve: world domination. In the early twenties, Hitler was working on this plan and from 1933 on, was working to make it a reality. During 1940 and 1941, he believed he was close to winning the war. This book not only examines Nazi imperial architecture, armament, and plans to regain colonies but also reveals what Hitler said in moments of truth. The author presents many new sources and information, including Hitler's little known intention to attack New York City with long-range bombers in the days of Pearl Harbor.
Cat Wilson brings together two strands of historical scholarship: Churchill's work as a historian and the history of WWII in the Far East. Examining Churchill's portrayal of the British Empire's war against Japan, as set down in his memoirs, it ascertains whether he mythologised wartime Anglo-American relations to present a 'special relationship'.
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