From birth, Nazi propaganda bombarded children with images romanticising war and a glorious death for the Fuehrer and Fatherland. Third Reich social planners emphasised physical activity over the intellect, all toward ensuring absolute loyalty to the Fuehrer and to Nazi ideology, ultimately in preparation for military service. Well over 3 million boys and girls were involved in organisations such as the Hitler Youth. Evidence of the intensity of the indoctrination programme can be seen in ...

Heldentod - The Nazi Culture of Death graphically focuses on the Third Reich's conception and promotion of the "Hero's Death" as it fostered and then fuelled a cataclysm of apocalyptic carnage and destruction. This underlying driving force, ultimately self-destructive, is shown infusing both State sponsored propaganda and echoed by the personal battlefield images captured by its soldiers' personal cameras. In so doing it confronts the matter of subject vs. observer and their intimate conne...

The men featured in this book originally came from Germany’s big city police forces, where they had previously dealt with traffic control, street crime and the often violent street demonstrations occurring during Germany’s politically turbulent 1920s. They shared their long-standing police traditions and comradeship and held the safety and security of their homeland at heart. With the rise to power of the Nazi Party and the assimilation of the German police under Himmler’s SS and military ...

Of the millions of German soldiers who went to war, many were armed with their personal cameras and intent on photographically chronicling their Dienstzeit, or military service, via meticulously prepared albums or by turning their photos into postcards sent to family and friends or as a single photo to carry into battle. Others were professional photographers and film makers recruited by the military and the Nazi State propaganda ministry to produce images for their agendas. In the era bef...

While many films have attempted to convey the experience of the Second World War European battlefield, none adequately portray the mayhem and suffering that befell untold thousands of horses, their bodies impacted by bullet, flame and bomb as well as disease, starvation and backbreaking toil in the searing heat of summer and the freezing winds and snows of winter. In great part, the role of the horse in the Second World War, and in particular their use by the Third Reich, has been eclipsed...

Through both World Wars, young African conscripts from Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, the Congo and elsewhere found themselves fighting for their colonial rulers, facing unknown enemies in unknown lands. German soldiers regarded their African enemies with a mixture of curiosity and malice, sometimes posing for snapshots with black POWs, sometimes summarily executing them on the battlefield. Mistreated by their own commanders during wartime, African troops had to fight for equal postwar compens...

No other combatant nation employed motorcycles on the scale produced by the Third Reich. During Nazi Germany’s campaigns, first of invasion, then of the retreat that followed, motorcycles served a variety of functions: as couriers, for reconnaissance, for medical evacuation, as assault shock troops taking the brunt of battle, even as tank destroyers and for delivering hot meals to the frontline. As the Third Reich gained absolute control of Germany and sought to spread its domain by fire a...