"This edition ... includes an updated Introduction, Notes and Biographies, and a new Foreword by Ian Kershaw"--T.p. verso.

With essays from Carlo D'Este, Martin Blumenson, Walter Goerlitz, Gen. John Hackett, and Martin Middlebrook, Hitler's Generals probes the central mystery of why a generation of the world's most able commanders and staff officers came to be seduced by Hitler, and why they failed to deflect him from his disastrous decisions. From Kenneth Macksey's essay on Heinz Guderian, who created the Panzier divisions and innovated the use of dive bombers, to Earl Ziemke's portrait of Karl Gerd von Runstedt, whose stalling of the German blitzkrieg allowed 338,000 Allied troops enough time to fall back on Dunkirk and escape to fight again, these are bold and incisive assessments of the twentieth century's greatest strategists and villains. Book jacket.

These transcripts of wiretapped conversations between Nazi officers reveal “a fascinating—and chilling—insight into the German view of the war” (Financial Times). Between 1939 and 1942, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence created a number of POW interrogation camps in and around London where they secretly recorded private conversations between senior German staff officers. In this extraordinary work, historian Sonke Neitzel examines these transcripts in depth and presents the private thoughts, opinions, and secrets of Nazi officers during the Second World War. These transcripts address important questions regarding the officers’ attitudes towards the German leadership and Nazi policies: How did the German generals judge the overall war situation? From what date did they consider it lost? How did they react to the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944? What knowledge did they have of the atrocities? By turns insightful and horrifying, this unprecedented research is a must for any serious scholar of the period. “A goldmine of information about what the German High Command privately thought of the war, Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and each other.” —Daily Mail

Det Tredie Rige; Tyske Flåde; Luftwaffe; von Rundstedt; Rommel; von Reichenau; Mussolini; von Paulus; Model; von Manstein; von Kluge; Kesselring; von Kleist; Keitel; Franz Halder; Guderian; Göring; von Brauchitsch; von Bock; Hermann Hoth; Operation Overlord, Normandiet; Juli-komplottet; Attentatforsøg;

Americans are familiar with prisoner of war narratives that detail Allied soldiers' treatment at the hands of Germans in World War II: popular books and movies like The Great Escape and Stalag 17 have offered graphic and award-winning depictions of the American POW experience in Nazi camps. Less is known, however, about the Germans captured and held in captivity on U.S. soil during the war. In Hitler's Generals in America, Derek R. Mallett examines the evolution of the relationship between American officials and the Wehrmacht general officers they held as prisoners of war in the United States between 1943 and 1946. During the early years of the war, British officers spied on the German officers in their custody, housing them in elegant estates separate from enlisted soldiers, providing them with servants and cooks, and sometimes becoming their confidants in order to obtain intelligence. The Americans, on the other hand, lacked the class awareness shared by British and German officers. They ignored their German general officer prisoners, refusing them any special treatment. By the end of the war, however, the United States had begun to envision itself as a world power rather than one of several allies providing aid during wartime. Mallett demonstrates how a growing admiration for the German officers' prowess and military traditions, coupled with postwar anxiety about Soviet intentions, drove Washington to collaborate with many Wehrmacht general officers. Drawing on newly available sources, this intriguing book vividly demonstrates how Americans undertook the complex process of reconceptualizing Germans -- even Nazi generals -- as allies against what they perceived as their new enemy, the Soviet Union.

Hitler's Generals is an analysis of the generalship, in both the military and political fields, of the men who took the Thrid Reich to victory against Poland, France and the Low Countries, and almost to victory against Soviet Russia. In the later stages of World War II they attempted with courage and skill to stress the great Allied advances from the East and from the West.