In April 1945, the American 71st Infantry Division exacted the final vestiges of life from the Reich’s 6th SS Mountain Division in central Germany. This analysis of the battle demonstrates that the Wehrmacht’s last gasp on the Western Front was anything but a whimper as some historians charge. Instead, Stephen Rusiecki argues, the Nazis fought to exact every last bit of pain possible. The book follows the histories of both the German and American divisions from their inceptions until their fateful confrontation and serves as a testament to the human experience in war, from the perspective of the soldiers and the civilians who suffered the brunt of the fighting.

Starting in 1940, Germany was subjected to a growing threat of Allied bomber attack. The RAF night bombing offensive built up in a slow but unrelenting crescendo through the Ruhr campaign in the summer of 1944 and culminating in the attacks on Berlin in the autumn and early winter of 1943-44. They were joined by US daylight raids which first began to have a serious impact on German industry in the autumn of 1943. This book focuses on the land-based infrastructure of Germany's defense against the air onslaught. Besides active defense against air attack, Germany also invested heavily in passive defense such as air raid shelters. While much of this defense was conventional such as underground shelters and the dual use of subways and other structures, Germany faced some unique dilemmas in protecting cities against night fire bomb raids. As a result, German architects designed massive above-ground defense shelters which were amongst the most massive defensive structures built in World War II.

Often written during imprisonment in Allied War camps by former German officers, with their memories of the World War fresh in their minds, The Foreign Military Studies series offers rare glimpses into the Third Reich. In this study Oberst a.D. Wilhem Willemar discusses his recollections of the climatic battle for Berlin from within the Wehrmacht. “No cohesive, over-all plan for the defense of Berlin was ever actually prepared. All that existed was the stubborn determination of Hitler to defend the capital of the Reich. Circumstances were such that he gave no thought to defending the city until it was much too late for any kind of advance planning. Thus the city’s defense was characterized only by a mass of improvisations. These reveal a state of total confusion in which the pressure of the enemy, the organizational chaos on the German side, and the catastrophic shortage of human and material resources for the defense combined with disastrous effect. “The author describes these conditions in a clear, accurate report which I rate very highly. He goes beyond the more narrow concept of planning and offers the first German account of the defense of Berlin to be based upon thorough research. I attach great importance to this study from the standpoint of military history and concur with the military opinions expressed by the author.”-Foreword by Generaloberst a.D. Franz Halder.

Revealed for the first time: how the SS rounded up the Nazis' most prominent prisoners to serve as human shields for Hitler in the last days of World War II In April 1945, as Germany faced defeat, Hitler planned to round up the Third Reich's most valuable prisoners and send them to his "Alpine Fortress," where he and the SS would keep the hostages as they made a last stand against the Allies. The prisoners included European presidents, prime ministers, generals, British secret agents, and German anti-Nazi clerics, celebrities, and officers who had aided the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler--and the prisoners' families. Orders were given to the SS: if the German military situation deteriorated, the prisoners were to be executed--all 139 of them. So began a tense, deadly drama. As some prisoners plotted escape, others prepared for the inevitable, and their SS guards grew increasingly volatile, drunk, and trigger-happy as defeat loomed. As a dramatic confrontation between the SS and the Wehrmacht threatened the hostages caught in the middle, the US Army launched a frantic rescue bid to save the hostages before the axe fell. Drawing on previously unpublished and overlooked sources, Hitler's Last Plot is the first full account of this astounding and shocking story, from the original round-up order to the prisoners' terrifying ordeal and ultimate rescue. Told in a thrilling, page-turning narrative, this is one of World War II's most fascinating episodes.

In Sabers through the Reich, William Stuart Nance provides the first comprehensive operational history of American corps cavalry in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) during World War II. The corps cavalry had a substantive and direct impact on Allied success in almost every campaign, and served as offensive guards for armies across Europe, conducting reconnaissance, economy of force, and security missions, as well as prisoner of war rescues. From D-Day and Operation Cobra to the Battle of the Bulge and the drive to the Rhine, these groups had the mobility, flexibility, and firepower to move quickly across the battlefield, enabling them to aid communications and intelligence gathering, reducing the Clausewitzian "friction of war."

The Third Reich was the name Hitler and the Nazi Party gave to the dictatorship that began in 1933 and ended twelve years later with the utter destruction of Germany and Hitler's suicide. Defined by the messianic, iconic figure of the Fuhrer, the Third Reich was one of the pivotal periods of the modern age. From small beginnings in the 1920s, Hitler's movement came to dominate German society in the 1930s, bringing with it the militarization of German society, the apparatus of state terror and a policy of violent discrimination against political opponents, the so-called "asocials:" gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, the Jews. The history of the Reich is bound up with territorial aggression, total war and genocide. The end result was the complete defeat of Germany and the annihilation of millions of Europeans, a historical drama without precedent that still lies as a shadow over modern-day Germany. Richard Overy charts the rise and fall of Nazi power in a compelling narrative of the period, amplified by extensive quotations from documents, letters, diaries and oral testimony, and accompanied by many original and striking images of the era. There are also fact boxes which explore many of the important aspects of the Third Reich in greater detail. Authoritative, informative and sumptuously illustrated, written by a scholar steeped in knowledge of the period, The Third Reich brings the bloody realities of war, conquest and genocide vividly to life. It is an ideal book for anyone fascinated by the stormy history of the twentieth century, World War II and the age of dictators.

The compelling story of leading physicists in Germany—including Peter Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg—and how they accommodated themselves to working within the Nazi state in the 1930s and ’40s. After World War II, most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the true story is much more complicated. In Serving the Reich, Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history, contrasting the career of Peter Debye, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich: Max Planck, the elder statesman of physics after whom Germany’s premier scientific society is now named, and Werner Heisenberg, who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons. Mixing history, science, and biography, Ball’s gripping exploration of the lives of scientists under Nazism offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility, as scientists navigated “the grey zone between complicity and resistance.” Ball’s account of the different choices these three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgment of their conduct. Yet, despite these ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state. Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship between science and politics today. Ultimately, Ball argues, a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is “above politics” can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.