The last British Governor of Spandau Allied Prison puts the record straight about the final years of Rudolf Hess' life, and his ultimate suicide while in Allied custody.

Contains both walking and driving tours of various exploration, allowing the user to determine one-day tour or longer.

"First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane."--Title page verso

This book is an explosive memoir of a 17 year old German boy called up to fight in the last weeks of the Second World War. This is a teenager's vivid account of his experiences as a conscript during the final desperate weeks of the Third Reich, during which he experienced training immediately behind the front line east of Berlin, was caught up in the massive Soviet assault on Berlin from the Oder, retreated successfully and then took part in the fight for the western suburb of Spandau, where he became one of the only two survivors of his company of seventeen year-olds.

The Battle of Berlin was a conflict of unprecedented scale. The Soviets massed 1,600,000 troops for Operation Berlin, and but Marshal Zhukov's his initial attack floundered and was so costly that he had to revise his plans for taking of the city when Stalin allowed his rival, Marshal Koniev, to intervene. The fight for Berlin thus became a contest for the prize of the Reichstag, fought in the sea of rubble left by Allied aerial bombardments, now reduced further by the mass of Soviet siege artillery. Meanwhile, Hitler and his courtiers sought to continue the struggle in the totally unrealistic atmosphere that prevailed in his bunker, while soldiers and civilians alike suffered and perished unheeded all around them.

A detailed account of British intelligence operations in Cold War East Germany, revealing Soviet and East German military secrets from 1946 to 1990. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces reached the West. Who were they? Where were they located? What were they doing? How were they equipped? What were their intentions? NATO was lined up in West Germany to face these forces and relied on getting up-to-date intelligence to warn of any threat, ‘Indicators of Hostility’ that could be a precursor to an invasion. BRIXMIS, the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, was on hand to provide that intelligence. Thanks to an obscure 1946 agreement between the British and Soviets that established ‘liaison missions’ in their respective zones of occupation, the British were able to send highly qualified military ‘observers’ into East Germany to roam (relatively) freely and keep an eye on what was going on. What started as ‘liaison’, a point of contact between the British and Soviet occupation forces, developed into a very sophisticated intelligence collection operation, sending ‘tours’ out every day of the year, between 1946 and when the Mission closed in 1990. These tours were undertaken in high-performance, highly modified marked vehicles, with personnel in uniform and unarmed, apart from professional photographic equipment and occasionally some top-secret gadgets from the boffins back in the UK. They joined their French and American colleagues in snooping around the opposition, photographing military bases, equipment, and maneuvers, and trying to evade capture by the secret police and counterintelligence units. They faced danger and violence daily, but thanks to their bravery and professionalism, the West had accurate and up-to-date information on what was happening in East Germany which helped keep the peace all that time. This is the story of this little-known unit and their exploits behind enemy lines.

Abstract: The 94th US Infantry Division was an organization formed late in the Second World War, made up of draft-deferred university students as enlisted men and an officer corps pulled together from various domestic postings. This book presents a study of the fighting between the 94th US Infantry Division and their German counterparts.