Like many heroes, the narrator of this remarkable story, his own, was a reluctant and even unwilling one. It happened when he was confronted with a moral dilemma and something within him made the right choice, to the surprise and even the disapproval of the rest of him that much wanted to protect his young family. He too was young. The time was early 1945, when savage World War II was coming to an end in Europe. Alfred Wallner, a doctor serving in the lower Austrian alps as the Allied armies closed in on Germanys appalling Third Reich that Austria had joined in 1938, detested the Nazis but not enough to risk virtually certain death if hed be caught helping Americans. But he did help a team of them and was quickly caught, after which he was taken to a Gestapo prison where the people he met, from his cellmates to the warders, were not merely a fascinating cast of characters but also a fair sample of the types one encounters in any country under stress. In that way and others, Dr. Wallners story is a cautionary as well as a gripping tale, and it contains a great surprise.

In 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen. Germany 1945 examines the country's emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; survivors had lost their families; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses. Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on a transition to relative peace. Germany's return to humanity and prosperity is the hinge on which Europe's twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.

One of the few survivors of the German Resistance, von Schlabrendorff traces his anti-Nazi activity from his student days in the 1920s, through Hitler's rise to power, to the war and his involvement in the July 20, 1944, plot. He vividly recalls the double life of the Resistance leaders during World War II, the futile secret meetings of the conspirators, and their efforts to enlist the aid of weak and vacillating German generals.

On 14 January 1930, Horst Wessel, a young and ambitious member of the SA was shot at close range at his home in Berlin. Although the crime was never completely solved, the murder was most likely committed by a group of communists with close ties to the city's gangland. Wessel later died from his injuries. Joseph Goebbels, whose attention had already been drawn to Wessel as a possible future Nazi leader, was the first to recognize the propaganda potential of the case. 'A young martyr for the Third Reich' he wrote in his diary on 23 February 1930 immediately after receiving the news of Wessel's death. This was the beginning of the myth-making that transformed an ordinary individual into a masculine role model for an entire generation. Two months later, thousands of people lined the streets for Wessel's funeral parade and Goebbels delivered a graveside eulogy. In the years that followed - and as Nazi power increased - Horst Wessel became the hero of the Nazi movement - with his elaborate memorial quickly becoming a site of pilgrimage. The song Die Fahne Hoch for which Wessel had written the lyrics (and which subsequently became popularly known as the Horst Wessel Song) became the official Nazi party anthem and the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, where Wessel was murdered was renamed Horst-Wessel-Stadt in his honour. Numerous biographies and films followed. Using previously unseen material, Daniel Siemens provides a fascinating and gripping account of the background to Horst Wessel's murder and uncovers how and why the Nazis made him a political hero. He examines the Horst Wessel 'cult' which emerged in the aftermath of Wessel's death and the murders of revenge, particularly against Communists, committed by the SA and Gestapo after 1933. At the same time, the story of Horst Wessel provides a portrait of the Nazi propaganda machine at its most effective and most chilling.

A former WWII intelligence agent searches for redemption in this thriller by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Midnight Bell. It’s been nearly twenty years since Hugh Lomax set foot on the Greek island of Kyros. During World War II, British Intelligence sent him there on a mission to take out a high-tech German radar station. Aided by the local resistance, he succeeded—but was also captured and spent the rest of the war imprisoned. Now, he’s returned. But he is far from welcome. When he reunites with someone he thought an old friend, the man threatens to kill him. The local authorities make it clear that he should leave and never come back. Because although he thought he had helped save Kyros, Lomax soon learns that his former comrades believe he turned traitor in captivity—a betrayal that cost many lives. Unwilling to live with the betrayal, Lomax must delve into the violent past and dig into the unfamiliar present to find the man who stained his name with the blood of his friends. But this secret enemy is still watching his every move, waiting to silence him forever . . . Written before his novel The Eagle Has Landed took the world by storm, Jack Higgins’s adventure of war and treachery showcases his absolute mastery of combining plot, action, and vividly drawn characters into the perfect thriller.

State prisons played an indispensable part in the terror of the Third Reich, incarcerating many hundreds of thousands of men and women during the Nazi era. This important book illuminates the previously unknown world of Nazi prisons, their victims, and the judicial and penal officials who built and operated this system of brutal legal terror. Nikolaus Wachsmann describes the operation and function of legal terror in the Third Reich and brings Nazi prisons to life through the harrowing stories of individual inmates. Drawing on a vast array of archival materials, he traces the series of changes in prison policies and practice that led eventually to racial terror, brutal violence, slave labor, starvation, and mass killings. Wachsmann demonstrates that "ordinary" legal officials were ready collaborators who helped to turn courts and prisons into key components in the Nazi web of terror. And he concludes with a discussion of the whitewash of the Nazi legal system in postwar West Germany.