Chocolate Cake with Hitler tells the remarkable story of Helga Goebbels, twelve-year-old daughter of the Nazi Party's head of propaganda, who spent the last ten days of her life cooped up in a bunker in Berlin with Adolf Hitler.
Chocolate Cake with Hitler tells the remarkable story of Helga Goebbels, twelve-year-old daughter of the Nazi Party's head of propaganda, who spent the last ten days of her life cooped up in a bunker in Berlin with Adolf Hitler.
A story about friendship, honor, and bravery—now in paperback. For David Nathan, Copenhagen is the most beautiful city in the world. Even Nazis in the street can’t make Copenhagen ugly. But life has changed since the soldiers arrived. His parents are always worried. And his older sister goes to school early and comes home late. Sometimes she doesn’t come home at all! David’s father is a baker, and since the war began, butter and cream are very hard to find. So David is amazed when his father makes a “special order” of cream-filled chocolate éclairs. But when no one comes to pick up the éclairs, David is asked to run a very special errand. It’s an errand that will change his life . . . forever. Joan Betty Stuckner’s early chapter book brings an important time period to light in a way that is thrilling, inspirational, and age-appropriate for Stepping Stone readers. From the Trade Paperback edition.
When 12-year-old Helga Goebbels walks into Hitler's underground shelter, she expects to emerge as the most important girl in the victorious German empire. Bewildered by the lack of celebrations, Helga defies her father's orders to stop asking questions. Horrified to discover how many lies she's been told, she plans to escape from Berlin.
“Not only a memoir, it’s also a fierce reply to those who criticized German-Jewish assimilation and the tardiness of many families in leaving Germany” (Publishers Weekly). In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—“the story,” says Peter Gay, “of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.” With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany its people. Gay relates that the early years of the Nazi regime were relatively benign for his family, yet even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, they were convinced they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry. “Not a single paragraph is superfluous. His inquiry rivets without let up, powered by its unremitting candor.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “[An] eloquent memoir.” —The Wall Street Journal “A moving testament to the agony the author experienced.” —Chicago Tribune “[A] valuable chronicle of what life was like for those who lived through persecution and faced execution.” —Choice
Escaping Hitler is the true story, covering ninety years, of a fourteen-year-old boy Gnter Stern who, when Adolf Hitler threatened his family, education and future, resolved to escape from his rural village of Nickenich in the German Rhineland. In July 1939 Gnter boarded a bus to the border with Luxembourg, illegally crossed the river and walked alone for seven days through Belgium into Holland, intent on catching a ferry to England and freedom. The outcome was not exactly as he had planned. The author gathered her information through interviews with Gnter, now known as Joe Stirling, and with those closest to him. During an emotional foot-stepping journey in September 2013 the author visited Gnters birthplace, met with a school friend, discovered the apartment in Koblenz where he fled following Kristallnacht in 1938, drove the route of Gnters walk through Europe and retraced the final steps of his parents prior to their deportation to a Nazi death camp in Poland during 1942.
Relates the final days of World War II in a study of Hitler's final days in the bunker and the torment in Germany's cities and towns as the Third Reich collapsed under the weight of American, British, French, and Russian forces.
A “deeply impressive . . . devastating but quite stunning” novel about doomed love and ambition in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Set during World War II amid the trenches of the eastern front and the turmoil of Berlin under the Third Reich, The Undertaking intertwines the lives of two German strangers entering into a proxy marriage of convenience, self-interest, and of ideology. Peter Faber is a soldier desperate to escape the madness of war if only by a three-week honeymoon leave. His new wife is Katharine Spinell, a resourceful young woman from Berlin who anticipates the likelihood of a widow’s pension should Peter die in battle. When they finally meet there is an attraction as unexpected as it is intense. But as Peter returns to Stalingrad, and as Katherine ruthlessly works her way into Nazi high society, the tides of war change. So do Peter and Katharine’s fates and fortunes, in this “bold, honest novel about Nazi greed and moral blankness . . . and the small people who are inseparably part of a great ravagement” (The Guardian). Finalist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Undertaking is “one of the most riveting accounts of love in time of war that this reviewer has ever read” (Library Journal (starred review)—“a violent, elegant, unsentimental journey through hell and halfway back” (Chris Cleave, New York Times–bestselling author of Everyone Brave is Forgiven).
A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich” (Washington Post). The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor. Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows. “Delightfully nuts.”—The New Yorker
A bracing meditation on the nature of evil and a moving evocation of the human heart, Siegfried is one of Harry Mulisch's most powerful novels. After a reading of his work, renowned Dutch author Rudolf Herter, who had recently commented in a television interview that it may be only through fiction that the uniquely evil figure of Adolf Hitler can be truly comprehended, is approached by an elderly couple. The pair reveal that as domestic servants in Hitler's Bavarian retreat in the waning years of the war, they were witness to the jealously guarded birth of Siegfried—the son of Hitler and Eva Braun. For more than fifty years they have kept silent about the child they once raised as their own. Only now and only to Herter are they willing to reveal their astonishing story.