Showing how gender history contributes to existing understandings of the Second World War, this book offers detail and context on the national and transnational experiences of men and women during the war. Following a general introduction, the essays shed new light on the field and illustrate methods of working with a wide range of primary sources.

General Heinz Guderian's revolutionary strategic vision and his skill in armored combat brough Germany its initial victories during World War II. Combining Guderian's land offensive with Luftwaffe attacks, the Nazi Blitzkrieg decimated the defenses of Poland, Norway, France--and, very neatly, Russia--at the war's outset. But in 1941, when Guderian advised that ground forces should take a step back, Hitler dismissed him. In these pages, the outspoken general shares his candid point of view on what would have led Germany to victory, and what ensured that it didn't. In addition to providing a rare inside look at key members of the Nazi party, Guderian reveals in detail how he developed the Panzer tank forces and orchestrated their various campaigns, from the break through at Sedan to his drive to the Channel coast that virtually decided the Battle of France. "Panzer Leader"became a bestseller within one year of its original publication in 1952 and has since been recognized as a classic account of the greatest conflict of our time.

Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. In this exhaustive study, Stephan Lehnstaedt provides a nuanced, eye-opening portrait of the lives of these men and women, who constituted a surprisingly diverse population-including everyone from SS officers to civil servants, as well as ethnically German city residents-united in its self-conception as a "master race." Even as they acclimated to the daily routines and tedium of life in the East, many Germans engaged in acts of shocking brutality against Poles, Belarusians, and Jews, while social conditions became increasingly conducive to systematic mass murder.

Women are all too easily forgotten when it comes to war. In this unique volume, Cindy Weigand tells the individual stories of female WWII veterans now living in Texas. These courageious women reveal their war experiences detailing physical exams, troop train rides, and coping with the reactions of their families. They describe the trials of seeing fiances one day and losing them the next, healing the emotional and mental as well as the physical wounds, and enduring extreme conditions in service to their country.

Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the "long" Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe's Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

The battlefields of the USSR witnessed the most devastating confrontations of World War II. In every one of those battles, Communist dictator Josef Stalin exercised his influence, meddling with (and executing) his generals, hurling unprepared armies into pure chaos, and meeting with his Western allies to divide the world up into zones of influence that would soon be embroiled in a new war. World War II scholar Hoyt describes the war from Stalin's vantage point and shows how his decisions, especially his early refusal to go to war with Germany even after they attacked, led to the historic battles for Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow. Hoyt also explains how Stalin's bloody purges before the war left a military bereft of leadership, yet opened the doors for Zhukov, Chuikov, Rokossovsky, and other crucial commanders to spearhead a Soviet victory. Stalin's War also examines Stalin's use of propaganda to vilify the German army and blame Soviet war crimes and human rights violations on the Nazis.

This volume presents a study of the Second World War as a period of crisis which brought about significant changes in the relationship between business and the state. The requirements of the war economy increased the power of the state but also showed the limits of such power. The comparative approach of this volume permits the exploration of such questions as the extent to which corporatist forms of cooperation between business and the state were created in wartime conditions; the effectiveness of the control exerted by such institutions; how far conditions of crisis affected the forms of economic organisation that emerged; and the long-term consequences of the emergence of new forms of economic organisation.

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.

The Sunday Times bestselling author of Dresden on the most important city of the 20th century.

An almighty storm hit Berlin in the last days of April 1945. Enveloped by the unstoppable force of East and West, explosive shells pounded buildings while the inhabitants of a once glorious city sheltered in dark cellars - just like their Fuhrer in his bunker. The Battle of Berlin was a key moment in history; marking the end of a deathly regime, the defeated city was ripped in two by the competing superpowers of the Cold War.

In Berlin, bestselling historian Sinclair McKay draws on never-before-seen first-person accounts to paint a picture of a city ravaged by ideology, war and grief. Yet to fully grasp the fall of Berlin, it is crucial to also explore in detail the years beforehand and to trace the city being rebuilt, as two cities, in the aftermath. From the passionate and austere Communists of 1919 to the sleek and serious industrialists of 1949, and from the glitter of innovation from artists such as George Grosz to the desperate border crossings for three decades from 1961, this is a story of a city that shaped an entire century, as seen through the eyes not of its rulers, but of those who walked its streets.

In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald McKale contends that Hitler's persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was his primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered around the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this 'shadow war' even when Germany was losing the battles of the war's closing years. McKale explores the origins of the anti-Semitism that spread like wildfire through Germany before and during the Nazis' rise to power, and the failure of the Allies to perceive and stop the Holocaust even as they were defeating the Germans in combat.

This volume analyzes the effects of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 on the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. This Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty catapulted into worldwide consciousness this summer as a 370-mile human Freedom chain denied its legitimacy. Stretching across Baltic nation-states, the chain's human links proclaimed the password Freedom. Secret protocols contained in this Treaty led to fifty years of Soviet occupation. In the atmosphere of glasnost and peristroika, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians now demand restoration of their human and national rights and decolonization. While the news media focuses upon these events, this volume details the historical causes of the Treaty, its contemporary consequences, and its present day challenge.

With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia put aside their ideological difference and practiced expedient politics. Eastern Europe and the Baltic States were partitioned into German and Russian spheres of influence. This fifty year old pact continues to effect the Baltic States. It focuses our attention sharply on the consequences of secret deals made without regard to national and human rights. On the frontline of Soviet defense, the Baltic challenge to the Soviet Union has worldwide implications. After decades of denying their existence, the Soviet Union in August, 1989, finally admitted that the secret protocols of 1939 were an historical fact. However, they continued to deny that the protocols had any bearing on the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union. As of this writing, it seems evident that notwithstanding the era of glasnost, the Soviet government still lacks the determination to state the truth: that the incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was an act of aggression, carried out against the will of sovereign peoples.

The Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, across five sectors of the French coast - Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword - constituted the largest amphibious invasion in history. This study analyses in depth the preparations and implementation of the D-Day landing on Gold Beach by XXX Corps. Historians have tended to dismiss the landing on Gold Beach as straightforward but the evidence points to a different reality. Armour supported the infantry landing and prior bombing was intended to weaken German defences; however, the bulk of the bombing landed too far inland, and many craft foundered in difficult conditions at sea. It was the tenacity of the assault units and the flexibility of the follow up units which enabled the Gold landing to secure the right flank of the British Army in Normandy. Using detailed primary evidence from The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum, this volume provides a substantial assessment of the background to the landing on Gold, and analyses the events of D-Day in the wider context of the Normandy Campaign.

The bomb that exploded in the "Wolf's Lair"-Hitler's command headquarters-on July 20th, 1944 was the closest any assassination attempt ever came to ridding the world of the Nazis' Fuhrer. Pierre Galante's account of the years that led up to the attempt, and its grim aftermath, offers an illuminating look at how dissent among the German officer corps grew until something had to be done. Conspirator General Adolf Heusinger, who met with Hitler on hundreds of occasions, provides his personal accounts of the disintegrating obedience of the German commanders as the war turned against them. Their plan to kill Hitler, establish a provisional government, and negotiate with the Allies for peace-known as Operation Valkyrie-is described here in depth.

This book records the World War II experiences of Captain Elmer E. Haynes, who flew low-altitude night radar strikes against Japanese shipping in the South China Sea, and daylight raids against various enemy land based installations in eastern and central China. Haynes flew secretly developed B-24 Liberator bombers that were equipped with radar which had been integrated with the Norden bombsight for night missions. These B-24's operated with the 14th Air Force--General Chennault's Flying Tigers. The bombing attacks were so accurate and successful that, in a little over a year, Haynes and his fellow pilots had sunk approximately a million tons of Japanese shipping. Due to the Top Secret classification of this equipment, the story of the radar B-24's, operating with the Flying Tigers, has never before been told.

The war in the Pacific was definitely brought to a quicker end by the devastating destruction caused by the sinking of such a tremendous number of Japanese merchant and naval vessels in the South China Sea. In its three years of operation, the 14th Air Force was credited with sinking two and a half million tons of enemy shipping. The radar-equipped B-24's were also used on reconnaissance missions--locating Japanese convoys for U.S. naval ships and submarines. Military historians, and anyone interested in World War II, will find this story highly informative, since it discloses never before published facts about the development of radar systems by the United States. This same radar technique was used by B-17's during the saturation night bombing raids over Germany.

Children under the Allied bombs in France provides a unique perspective on the Allied bombing of France during the Second World War which killed around 57,000 French civilians. Using oral history as well as archival research, it provides an insight into children's wartime lives in which bombing often featured prominently, even though it has slipped out of French collective memory. How prepared were the French for this aerial onslaught? What was it like to be bombed? And how did people understand why their 'friends' across the Channel were attacking them? Divided into three parts dealing with expectations, experiences and explanations of bombing, this book considers the child's view of wartime violence, analysing resilience, understanding and trauma. It contributes significantly to scholarship on civilian life in Occupied France, and will appeal to students, academics and general readers interested in the history of Vichy France, oral history and the experiences of children in war. -- .

During the Second World War, British and Imperial forces captured more than half a million Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen. Although a symbol of military success, these prisoners created a multitude of problems for the authorities throughout the war. This book looks at how the British addressed these problems and turned liabilities into assets by using the Italians as a labor force, a source of military intelligence and as a political warfare tool before their final repatriation in 1946-47.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.

"This fascinating account, told in relentless detail, deserves a wide readership."--"Choice"

International Acclaim: "Thomas has written a quite enchanting book, magnificently researched, and cleverly and wittily presented. . . . I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Quite outstanding."
--"The Irish Times"

"[This] book is mesmerizing and is an unputdownable and brilliantly researched page-turner. An important and riveting study in social history."
--"The Sunday Times"

"Donald Thomas has chronicled one of the last untold stories of the war, and he does so with scholarship as well as humor."
--"The Spectator"

"Beautifully written, utterly compelling: almost without fault in every respect."
--"The Literary Review"

While the Second World War produced numerous acts of self-sacrifice, it also made many people rich. The criminal activities of the British underworld that extended from the civilian population right through to the armed forces constitute one of the great untold stories of the war. The Blitz of 1940 may have made a nation of heroes, but in the shadows the shelter gangs and looters prowled.

Acclaimed author Donald Thomas draws on extensive archival material for these tales of profiteering. He retells how between 1940 and 1941 a Liverpool ship repairer cheated the government of the modern equivalent of $30 million, while $120 million a month was looted from relief supplies at the port of Trieste. Professional gangs raided British government offices for ration books, and underground presses counterfeited gasoline and clothing coupons by the tens of thousands. Illegal food supplies threatened the nation'shealth--a consignment of black market sausages in Hackney contained tuberculous meat, while the industrial alcohol, or "hooch," served to pilots in London's West End clubs could produce blindness and brain damage.

The Enemy Within also recounts colossal theft within the army. Vehicles would arrive at front line railheads stripped of tools, spare parts, and removable components, and whole consignments of cigarettes and razor blades disappeared.

In addition to these stories, The Enemy Within includes revealing photos of known law-breakers, victims, and illegal transactions. The facts Thomas uncovers are often so preposterous that in a novel they would seem unbelievable. These are the extraordinary and often absurd stories of less-than-heroic Britons.