This World War II memoir by a Nazi soldier details his unimaginable experience as a German prisoner-of-war in the Soviet Union.Lothar Hermann grew up in Bavaria, going through the RAD (Nazi Labor Service) before being conscripted into a Wehrmacht Mountain Division (the Gebirgsdivision) in 1940. He participated in Germany's advance through southern Ukraine in 1941 and, in 1944, was arrested in Romania while retreating to Germany. The Romanians passed him onto the So...

The WWII memoir of a young German conscript who survived the Eastern Front and the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff.Born in Munich in 1926, Hans Fackler was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the age of seventeen. He became an infantryman on the brutal frontlines of the war in Russia. But after suffering a grievous injury from a grenade explosion, he could no longer fight.Hans was given morphine onboard the controversial Wilhelm Gustloff, a...

A pictorial history of the two Nazi-German World War II concentration camps in Poland, featuring rare photographs from wartime archives.Auschwitz and Birkenau were separated from each other by about a forty-five-minute walk. Auschwitz was adapted to hold political prisoners in 1940 and evolved into a killing machine in 1941. Later that year a new site called Birkenau was found to extend the Auschwitz complex. Here a vast complex of buildings was constructed to hold ...

John “Iwan” Demjanjuk was at the center of one of history’s most complex war crimes trials. But why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to bring him to justice as a Nazi collaborator? The answer lies in the annals of the Cold War, when fear and paranoia drove American politicians and the U.S. military to recruit “useful” Nazi war criminals to work for the United States in Europe as spies and saboteurs, and to slip them into America through loopholes in U.S. immigration pol...

The author of Japan's Gestapo details the atrocities committed by the Japanese Navy during World War II.While the Japanese Navy followed many of the British Royal Navy's traditions and structures, it had a totally different approach to the treatment of its foes. Author Mark Felton has uncovered a plethora of outrages against both servicemen and civilians that make chilling and shocking reading. These range from the execution of POWs to the abandonment of su...

An enlightening and entertaining inside look at the lifestyles of America's extremely wealthy from the bestselling author of "Our Crowd"It's no secret that the rich are different from the rest of us. But the rich, as author Stephen Birmingham so insightfully points out, are also different from the very rich. There's Society, and then there's Real Society, and it takes multiple generations for families of the former to become entrenched in the latte...

**"By turns moving, evenhanded and lyrical in its evocation of time and place."—**Seattle TimesIn this rigorously researched and incisively written account, historian and journalist Cassandra Tate challenges generations of received wisdom about the 1847 killing of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven others at their Presbyterian mission on Cayuse land near present-day Walla Walla.Far from a simple story of martyrdom and savagery, the Whitman inci...

For the first time ever the full story of how Charles “Lucky” Luciano—the U.S. Mafia boss who put the “organized” into organized crime—was recruited by U.S. Naval Intelligence in 1944 to aid the Allied war effort in the U.S. invasion of Sicily that was a turning point in WWII.In 1942, fears were growing that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents, the U.S. Navy needed a secret plan just as insidious...

**Perfect for readers of A Woman of No Importance, Three Ordinary Girls, and Eleanor: A Life comes the first-ever biography of Anna Marie Rosenberg, the Hungarian Jewish immigrant who became FDR’s closest advisor during World War II and, according to Life, “the most important official woman in the world”—a woman of many firsts, whose story, forgotten for too long, is extraordinary, inspiring, and uniquely American. Her life ran parallel to the front line...

This examination of six usurper kings of England, and the people and circumstances surrounding them, is "a masterpiece of academic scholarship" ( Midwest Book Review).In the Middle Ages, England had to contend with a string of usurpers who disrupted the British monarchy—and ultimately changed the course of European history by deposing England's reigning kings and seizing power for themselves. Some of the most infamous usurper kings to come out of medieval ...

This fascinating study of medieval warfare examines the vital role of castles during the English civil wars of the 15th century.The Wars of the Roses comprise one of the most fascinating periods in medieval history. Much has been written about the leading personalities, bitter dynastic rivalries, political intrigues, and the rapid change of fortune on the battlefields of England and Wales. However, there is one aspect that has been often overlooked, the role of cast...

The camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau were an important part of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. Over one million people were murdered in its gas chambers and tens of thousands of prisoners were worked to death in the nearby sub-camps. Others were held in the quarantine area before they were deported to work in the Third Reich.This is the story of the development of Auschwitz from a Polish prison camp into a concentration camp, and a thorough account of the building of Birkenau ...