This book contains an in-depth study including some 340 photographs -most of them published for the first time- of the all-road Mercedes Benz G4: the magnificent automobile clearly associated with Adolf Hitler who favored it before and during WWII for traveling and parades. Only three out of a limited series of 57 units have survived till today. But only one of these is in fully original condition: the G4-540 presented by Hitler to General Franco. This car is thoroughly documented here in an outstanding pictorial report.

This book is the first ever illustrated study on the often photographed - but never fully explained - mechanical marvel, the Mercedes-Benz G-4 cross-country touring car, the vehicle that carried Adolf Hitler across much of Europe before and during World War II. Culled from the rich photo archives of Daimler-Benz, as well as from captured German albums in U.S. archives, this work depicts the G-4 in fascinating images and detailed text. Volume 2 will cover the Daimler-Benz 770K Grosser Mercedes. ILLUSTRATIONS 300 b/w images

Few war films made about the 1939-45 period are complete without sight of a boxy little Kübelwagen light utility vehicle being smartly driven by a German officer. Designed by Ferdinand Porsche and built by Volkswagen, the ‘Kübel' was to the Germans what the Jeep was to the Allies and was used widely by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. When production ceased at the end of the war, 50,435 Kübelwagen had been built. Of simple but sturdy construction, the VW Type 82 Kübelwagen (which translates as 'bucket car' because of its similarity to a metal bathtub on wheels) was based closely on the legendary VW Beetle. Its winning design features included air cooled engine (the absence of a radiator meant the engine was less vulnerable to bullet damage), a light-weight, flat and smooth under-body that allowed the car to slide over the surface when its wheels were sinking into sand, mud or snow, independent suspension, portal gear hub reduction and self-locking differential. Because the body was not a load-bearing part of the structure of the vehicle it could easily be modified to special purposes. Several dozen variants of the 'Kübel' were developed and built during the war including its cousin the Schwimmwagen. The VW Type 128 and 166 Schwimmwagen (which means floating or swimming car) were amphibious four-wheel drive off-roaders. Like the Kübel, they were used widely by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS during the Second World War. The Type 166 Schwimm is the most numerous mass-produced amphibious car in history (14,265 between 1942 and 1944). Erwin Komenda, Ferdinand Porsche's first car body designer, developed an all-new unitized body-tub structure for the Schwimmwagen swimming car. When crossing water a screw propeller could be lowered from the rear deck engine cover and coupled to the engine's crankshaft to provide drive. The ‘Schwimm' also shared many of the Kübel's mechanicals. The appeal of the Kübel lived on long after the war's end when a derivative version, the Volkswagen Type 181, was manufactured by VW from 1968 to 1983. This was a two-wheel drive, four-door, convertible, off-road military vehicle, which had been developed for the German Army but was also sold to the civilian market as the Kurierwagen in Germany, the Trekker in the UK, the Thing in the US, and the Safari in Mexico. In recent years both the Kübel and Schwimm have acquired something of a cult status among military vehicle collectors worldwide, particularly in Europe (eg, Germany, Poland Czech Republic, Switzerland), the UK and US. There are literally dozens of Kübelwagen and Schwimmwagen enthusiast/owner/interest groups! About 150 original Type 166 Schwimmwagens remain today.

Critically acclaimed author Robert Klara's The Devil's Mercedes chases down one of the most improbable stories of the postwar era: the national drama that erupted when Hitler’s armored limousine surfaced in the US. In 1938, Mercedes-Benz began production of the largest, most luxurious limousine in the world. A machine of frightening power and sinister beauty, the Grosser 770K Model 150 Offener Tourenwagen was 20 feet long, seven feet wide, and tipped the scales at 5 tons. Its supercharged, 230-horsepower engine propelled the beast to speeds over 100 m.p.h. while its occupants reclined on glove-leather seats stuffed with goose down. Armor plated and equipped with hidden compartments for Luger pistols, the 770K was a sumptuous monster with a monstrous patron: Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. Deployed mainly for propaganda purposes before the war, the hand-built limousines—in which Hitler rode standing in the front seat—motored through elaborate rallies and appeared in countless newsreels, swiftly becoming the Nazi party’s most durable symbol of wealth and power. Had Hitler not so thoroughly dominated the scene with his own megalomania, his opulent limousine could easily have eclipsed him. Most of the 770Ks didn’t make it out of the rubble of World War II. But several of them did. And two of them found their way, secretly and separately, to the United States. In The Devil’s Mercedes, author Robert Klara uncovers the forgotten story of how Americans responded to these rolling relics of fascism on their soil. The limousines made headlines, drew crowds, made fortunes and ruined lives. What never became public was how both of the cars would ultimately become tangled in a web of confusion, mania, and opportunism, fully entwined in a story of mistaken identity. Nobody knew that the limousine touted as Hitler’s had in fact never belonged to him, while the Mercedes shrugged off as an ordinary staff car—one later abandoned in a warehouse and sold off as government surplus—turned out to be none other than Hitler’s personal automobile. It would take 40 years, a cast of carnies and millionaires, the United States Army, and the sleuthing efforts of an obscure Canadian librarian to bring the entire truth to light. As he recounts this remarkable drama, Klara probes the meaning of these haunting hulks and their power to attract, excite and disgust. The limousines’ appearance collided with an American populous celebrating a victory even as it sought to stay a step ahead of the war’s ghosts. Ultimately, The Devil’s Mercedes isn’t only the story of a rare and notorious car, but what that car taught postwar America about itself.

In a world of chaotic alignments, traditional logic with its strict boundaries of truth and falsity has not imbued itself with the capability of reflecting the reality. Despite various attempts to reorient logic, there has remained an essential need for an alternative system that could infuse into itself a representation of the real world. Out of this need arose the system of Neutrosophy (the philosophy of neutralities, introduced by FLORENTIN SMARANDACHE), and its connected logic Neutrosophic Logic, which is a further generalization of the theory of Fuzzy Logic. In this book we study the concepts of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) and their Neutrosophic analogue, the Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps (NCMs). Fuzzy Cognitive Maps are fuzzy structures that strongly resemble neural networks, and they have powerful and far-reaching consequences as a mathematical tool for modeling complex systems. Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps are generalizations of FCMs, and their unique feature is the ability to handle indeterminacy in relations between two concepts thereby bringing greater sensitivity into the results. Some of the varied applications of FCMs and NCMs which has been explained by us, in this book, include: modeling of supervisory systems; design of hybrid models for complex systems; mobile robots and in intimate technology such as office plants; analysis of business performance assessment; formalism debate and legal rules; creating metabolic and regulatory network models; traffic and transportation problems; medical diagnostics; simulation of strategic planning process in intelligent systems; specific language impairment; web-mining inference application; child labor problem; industrial relations: between employer and employee, maximizing production and profit; decision support in intelligent intrusion detection system; hyper-knowledge representation in strategy formation; female infanticide; depression in terminally ill patients and finally, in the theory of community mobilization and women empowerment relative to the AIDS epidemic.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 52nd Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India, CSI 2017, held in Kolkata, India, in January 2018. The 59 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 157 submissions. The theme of CSI 2017, Social Transformation – Digital Way, was selected to highlight the importance of technology for both central and state governments at their respective levels to achieve doorstep connectivity with its citizens. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Signal processing, microwave and communication engineering; circuits and systems; data science and data analytics; bio computing; social computing; mobile, nano, quantum computing; data mining; security and forensics; digital image processing; and computational intelligence.