Showing results for "Stories" in Germany

The astounding memoir of a World War II veteran who spent three and a half years in the slave-labor camps made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Loet Velmans was 17 when the Germans invaded Holland. He and his family fled to London on the Dutch Coast Guard cutter Seaman’s Hope and then sailed to the Dutch East Indies - now Indonesia - where he joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago and made prisoners of the Dutch soldiers. For the next three and a half years Velmans and his fellow POWs toiled in slave-labor camps.

BEN MACINTYRE'S NEXT AUDIOBOOK, REDWOOD, IS AVAILABLE TO BUY NOW. THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER - AND PERFECT GIFT FOR HISTORY BUFFS! FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SAS: ROGUE HEROES Colditz Castle: a forbidding Gothic tower on a hill in Nazi Germany. You may have heard about the prisoners and...

Four days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Suddenly, a German Messerschmitt fighter pulled up on his tail. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber in the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would later be called 'the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.'

One man had a single goal…to eliminate Hitler from the face of the Earth. Living as a carpenter who had spent time working in a watch factory, Georg Elser was just an ordinary member of society living in Munich. That is, however, until he took it upon himself to attempt to assassinate the Fhrer, Adolph Hitler. Being a common man who opposed the Nazi regime, Elser took the skills from his craft and worked to assemble his own bomb detonator.

Colditz - the dreaded POW camp was supposed to be impregnable. It was the German fortress from which there was no escape. It had been escape-proof in the 1914-18 war and was to be again in the Second World War, according to the Germans... This is the true story that has passed into legend: the story of the incredible courage and daredevil ingenuity of those who refused to admit defeat - those who burrowed, leapt and ran their way to freedom.

Bloomsbury presents Operation Mincemeat written and read by Ben Macintyre. THE SUNDAY TIMES NO 1. BESTSELLER 'Astonishing . . . Sheds riveting new light on this breathtaking plan' Daily Mail 'A rollicking read' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'Brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining' Malcolm...

The Schutzstaffel, or SS—the brutal elite of the Nazi Party—was founded by Hitler in 1925 to be his personal bodyguard. From 1929 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler, who built its numbers up from under 300 to well over a million by 1945. The SS became the very backbone of Nazi Germany, taking over almost every function of the state.

From best-selling author of Tail-End Charlie and Tornado Down comes this powerful and deeply moving account of Bomber Command’s 1944 Nuremberg Raid – the RAF’s bloodiest night of the Second World War More men from Royal Air Force Bomber Command died on one single night of the Second World...

From Sunday Times bestselling author John Kampfner: a sweeping history of Berlin, city of haven and hell, disaster and reinvention No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin. Ever since John Kampfner was a...

Dark skies and barbed wire fences were all Bluma Plaskovsky saw as she stepped down from the train onto the main platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After surviving the Wehrmacht’s decimation of her hometown, Bluma and what remained of her family were finally put on the long, harsh train ride through inhuman conditions that seemed to last an eternity.

'My only complaint is that it was so fascinating I wish it had been longer. What a story!' Philip Mansel BERLIN is Europe’s most fascinating and exciting city. The great movements that have shaken Europe, from the Reformation to Marxism, have their origins in Berlin’s streets. With its...

'Finally, eight decades on, there comes a convincing reason as to how an entire nation was able to swallow and then endorse the warped ideology of Hitler and the Nazis. Not only a brilliantly argued book, Mobilising Hate is also a grimly compelling and utterly absorbing examination of one of the...

Bloomsbury presents Broken Republik by Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes, read by Dugald Bruce Lockhart. 'A splendid book by authors who long ago detected Germany’s fragility – and aimed at readers who take no pleasure in the sight of its precipitous decline' YANIS VAROUFAKIS The compelling story...

The forgotten tale of MI6's top spy in Nazi Germany and his bid to stop the Second World War. In the world of espionage, where the accounts of renowned spies often dominate the narrative, this is a rare gem - an untold story of a completely unknown spy. Baron William de Ropp, a Baltic German...

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be...

For 32 days, they were chased across the mountains as they headed for the coast and a rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch waiting to spirit the general to Cairo. Rick Stroud, whose Phantom Army of Alamein won plaudits for its meticulous research and its lightness of touch in the telling, brings these same gifts to bear in this new project.

In Top 10 Nazi Conspiracies Debunked, historian and researcher Cyril Marlen unpacks and exposes the most infamous Nazi-related myths that have persisted for decades. These aren’t just fringe internet rumors—they’re global narratives that continue to shape pop culture, political thinking, and historical misunderstanding. This powerful and thoroughly researched book offers a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the top ten conspiracy theories associated with Nazi Germany.

In the summer of 1962, one year after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a group of daring young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture and even death to liberate friends, lovers and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the wall. Then, as the world's press heard about the secret projects, two television networks raced to be the first to document them from the inside, funding two separate tunnels for exclusive rights to film the escapes.

‘We felt an urge to document what we had witnessed. If we who had experienced it, I reasoned, did not reveal the bitter truth, people simply would not believe the extent of the Nazis’ evil. I wanted to share our life, the events and our struggle to survive.’ Thomas Geve was just 15 years...

In Hitler’s Germany, loyalty is demanded and dissent is deadly. But for young Waltraud, nothing is more devastating than the day the Nazis steal away her father to fight in a war he didn't believe in. Even as their reign of terror spreads, she’s convinced war will never touch her quiet village. But when bombs start falling and innocent people disappear, she’s confronted with a stark reality…she might be next.