Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Germany

The battle of El Alamein in World War II saw the shattering of Germany's hopes for victory in North Africa. From this point on the end was inevitable, as Rommel's forces began the long retreat that was to end in Tunisia in May 1943 when, hemmed in by British and American forces on all sides, over 250,000 Axis soldiers filed into prisoner of war camps, a number comparable to those captured at Stalingrad.

In the six months that passed between Alamein and the final surrender there was much hard fighting, as the defeated German and Italian Panzer Army sought to hold off the encroaching...

From the Boxer Rebellion to Tsingtao to German East Africa (Tanzania), and colonies across Africa and the central Pacific, the Kaiser's Second Reich created a worldwide empire, and then lost it.

Following Prussia's victory over France in 1871 and German unification, the invigorated Second Reich sought international status alongside the older colonial powers - Britain, France, Spain and Russia. Actual overseas settlement was always sparse, counted in the low tens of thousands only, but by the mid-1880s German trading companies had established footholds in what became German East...

In early May 1940, the fortress of Eben Emael was a potent sentinel over the Belgian-Dutch borderlands. A ferro-concrete monster built in the 1930s on the Albert Canal, the fortress covered 75 hectares on the surface, had 5km of tunnels underground and was studded with bunkers, gun turrets and casemates. Add a garrison of 1,200 men and the natural protection of 60m-high canal walls, and Eben Emael gave the impression of near-impregnability.

Yet on 10 May, in the very first hours of Hitler's campaign in Western Europe, just 78 elite airborne soldiers managed to defeat this fortress in...

When the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanies were reunited, culture was held up to be one of the keys to national unity. Ironically, however, it is the realm of culture that most clearly demonstrates the continued divisions between east and west. Taking culture as broadly defined, this book examines state memorialization, literature, television, film, and the internet, to map out the problematic path of German national identity as it struggles to deal with the legacy of division. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the author argues that the east has been defined as the west's "exotic...

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Hitler's autobahn was more than just the pet project of an infrastructure-friendly dictator. It was supposed to revolutionize the transportation sector in Germany, connect the metropoles with the countryside, and encourage motorization. The propaganda machinery of the Third Reich turned the autobahn into a hyped-up icon of the dictatorship. One of the claims was that the roads would reconcile nature and technology. Rather than destroying the environment, they would embellish the landscape. Many...

" Carrier] argues convincingly that what really matters about these memorials is not so much the finished product as the social and political...

Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the...

..".an essential book. It provides precise facts and figures for many issues that have heretofore been presented in impressionistic terms." - The International History Review

Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht's triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration,...

"Bozo's masterly book is the definitive study of French President Mitterrand's important, and often denied or dismissed, contribution to German unification and to the reunification of Europe. It is indispensable to anyone interested in these momentous events, in French foreign policy, and -- in the truth." - Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard University

"This outstanding study... is obligatory reading on the end of the...

Osprey's survey of German fighter pilots of World War II (1939-1945). Fighter pilots have always been held in the highest regard and the Luftwaffe Fighter pilots or Experten were undoubtedly the best pilots in the world, often racking up huge scores when compared to Allied fighters. It is for this skill, the sheer number of kills they obtained and their glamour that they are remembered even today. But what of the men themselves? It took a certain type of man to brave the skies in 1939-45, which were often more dangerous than the battlefields below and where a lone fighter pilot was often...