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Author: Alexander B. Rossino
Publisher:
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA gripping examination of the systematic and murderous ways that Germans first put into place their criminal ideology in their invasion of Poland, during which tens of thousands of civilians were killed to make ``living space'' for Germans in the east.
Author: Joshua D. Zimmerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-06-05
Total Pages: 473
ISBN-13: 1107014263
DOWNLOAD EBOOKZimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.
Author: Alexander B. Rossino
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2003-05-01
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0700613927
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIt was one of the most ruthlessly conceived and executed invasions in the annals of warfare. Hitler's Polish campaign unleashed a blitzkrieg in which SS troops, police squads, and the army itself waged an ethnic war of unprecedented brutality. Tens of thousands of Poles--roughly 80 percent of whom were Christian--were summarily executed in acts of collective punishment. After six weeks, a country was crushed and the world was at war. Usually given short shrift in most histories of World War II, the invasion of Poland was more than a series of opening salvos; it was a testing ground for German brutalities to come. In this first intensive study of the invasion, Alexander Rossino provides a comprehensive study of the Polish campaign, including disturbing new insights into its racist and ideological underpinnings. Rossino tells how this invasion melded the ideology of the Nazi party with Germany's military yearning for empire in the East. The Polish campaign was important as the first step in Hitler's drive for "living space" for Germans in Eastern Europe, and as the blitzkrieg decimated urban residential areas, civilians soon became indistinguishable from combatants. In addition to describing military operations, Rossino also provides a close analysis of SS plans to murder Polish leaders, German army reprisal policies, and the close collaboration of Wehrmacht and SS forces in the subjugation and execution of Polish citizens. Rossino considers both top-level decision making and the experiences of German soldiers as he explores the mentality of those who perpetrated crimes against civilians. He particularly investigates the links between Nazi racial-political policies and military action to show that Poland was merely the German army's dress rehearsal for the later slaughter of other Slavs and Jews during the Russian campaign. By providing a detailed examination of atrocities committed by both military and SS personnel, he shows that the Wehrmacht's criminality was clearly evident at the beginning of the war. Hitler Strikes Poland is a startling reconstruction of history that clearly reveals the extent to which Nazi philosophy drove the German war machine. By placing German expansionism in its ideological context, it can help us better understand the brutality of the years that followed and better appreciate the suffering of the Polish people.
Author: Steve Zaloga
Publisher: Greenwood
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 104
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of World War II in Europe. If the outcome of the campaign was predictable, its conduct was not. The Polish campaign introduced the world to a new style of warfare: Blitzkrieg.
Author: Ian Ona Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0190675144
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPre-publication subtitle: Soviet-German military cooperation in the interwar period.
Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-10-02
Total Pages: 546
ISBN-13: 0465032974
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
Author: Winson Chu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-06-25
Total Pages: 343
ISBN-13: 1107008301
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores what happened when Germans from three different empires were forced to live together in Poland after the First World War.
Author: Henrik O. Lunde
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2009-05-11
Total Pages: 616
ISBN-13: 1612000452
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn “excellent” history of the often overlooked WWII campaign in which Hitler secured a vital resource lifeline for the Third Reich (Library Journal). After Hitler conquered Poland and was still fine-tuning his plans against France, the British began to exert control over the coastline of neutral Norway, an action that threatened to cut off Germany’s iron-ore conduit to Sweden and outflank from the start its hegemony on the Continent. The Germans responded with a dizzying series of assaults, using every tool of modern warfare developed in the previous generation. Airlifted infantry, mountain troops, and paratroopers were dispatched to the north, seizing Norwegian strongpoints while forestalling larger but more cumbersome Allied units. The German navy also set sail, taking a brutal beating at the hands of Britannia, but ensuring with its sacrifice that key harbors would be held open for resupply. As dive-bombers soared overhead, small but elite German units traversed forbidding terrain to ambush Allied units trying to forge inland. At Narvik, some six thousand German troops battled twenty thousand French and British until the Allies were finally forced to withdraw by the great disaster in France, which had then gotten underway. Henrik Lunde, a native Norwegian and former US Special Operations colonel, has written the most objective account to date of a campaign in which twentieth-century military innovation found its first fertile playing field.
Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-07-14
Total Pages: 433
ISBN-13: 0465095410
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.
Author: Ben H. Shepherd
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-06-28
Total Pages: 681
ISBN-13: 0300219520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people’s army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army’s early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler’s mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings—moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational—of the army’s own leadership.
