This is a brutal story - but, from the safety of fifty years distance in time - it is an extremely compelling one. It is also an enduring lesson that a military unit, formed under an evil ideology, led by a social outcast and composed of vicious criminals, will sink to its lowest common denominator - hate. The Dirlewanger Battalion, also known as "Sonderkommando (special commando) Dirlewanger" was perhaps the least understood, but at the same time the most notorious German SS anti-partisan unit in World War II. German propaganda correspondents and wartime photographers did not follow them in...

nside these pages you will meet over 960 infamous men - the officers of Nazi Germany's Totenkopf (Death's Head). You will encounter the 256 SS officers who worked at Dachau - the SS concentration camp that doubled as a training school for death. You will encounter twelve SS officers who served in Treblinka and the other very secret camps of Operation Reinhard - Heinrich Himmler's extermination plan for the Jews of Poland. And, you will confront the 161 SS officers who ran the largest killing center of all time - Auschwitz. These officers of the Death's Head, many of whom later served in the...

In World War I German and British bombers sometimes faced a few dozen light machine-guns defending the target. In World War II Luftwaffe Stuka dive-bombers braved the combined fire of over 1,000 anti-aircraft guns to sink several capital ships at Kronstadt in the Gulf of Finland. In World War I hundreds of thousands of German troops fought months to gain ground measured in yards. During World War II, eighty-five Fallschirmjager captured one of the world's strongest fortifications at Fort Eben Emael, Belgium - manned by 1,200 defenders - in only eighteen hours in May 1940. As a result of these...

Stalingrad: The Death of the German Sixth Army on the Volga, 1942-1943, is the first published work to detail the situation of every German corps and division for every day of the six-month Stalingrad campaign. Derived from the Sixth Army daily operation reports and the German Army High Command (OKH) situation maps (Lage Ost), this two-volume set presents the situation on the flanks of the army, as well as the combat in the city itself, a level of detail never before attempted. Stalingrad was the perfect storm that would lead to the death of an army - the German Sixth Army. Led by Field...