Its April 1940 & German troops are pouring onto the streets of Denmark. 12-year-old Bamse is ordered by his father to keep his head down & stay out of trouble. But Bamse & his daring friend Anton cant resist playing the occasional practical joke on the invading soldiers. When it becomes clear that the trouble isnt just going to pass them by the people of Denmark decide to take action & Bamse & his eccentric family are about to take part in one of historys most dramatic rescues
- smuggling Denmarks Jewish population across the water to Sweden & safety. Many of the characters are based on Sandis own family including her father Bamse & the book was inspired by the stories he told to her.
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In January 1945 the Red Army unleashed its long-awaited thrust into Germany with terrible fury. One by one the provinces & great cities of the German East were captured by the Soviet troops. Breslau capital of Silesia a city of 600 000 people stood firm & was declared a fortress by Hitler.A bitter struggle raged as the Red Army encircled Breslau then tried to pummel it into submission while the citys Nazi leadership used brutal methods to keep the scratch German troops fighting & maintain order. Aided by supplies flown in nightly & building improvised weapons from torpedoes mounted on trolleys to an armoured train the men of Fortress Breslau held out against superior Soviet forces for four months. The price was fearful. By the time Breslau surrendered on May 6 1945 four days after Berlin had fallen the city was a wasteland & 25 000 soldiers & civilians had died. Savage retribution was visited on the survivors by the Russian conquerors. What was left of the city was pillaged its womenraped & every German inhabitant driven out of the city which became Wroclaw in post-war Soviet-occupied Pol&. Hitlers Final Fortress is the first full length account of the notorious siege of Breslau in English is based on painstaking research of official documents newspapers letters diaries & personal testimonies. ...

Fascinating
- assiduously researched". (Michael Burleigh). " Hitlers Foreign Executioners" reveals for the first
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A fresh perspective on Hitlers secret weapons which stresses the true impact they had on the course of the war The German Third Reich had the most technologically advanced & innovative weapons industries in World War II with aircraft tanks & bombs that could match & beat anything else in the World. What is less known is the extent of Germanys secret weapons development. Germany pioneered rocket & jet-propelled aircraft the pilot-less plane long-range rocket technology & robot bombs & the worlds first super-heavy tanks. Many of these weapons had a real impact on the course of the war. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union & the realisation that a state of conflict could continue for years Hitler put great resources into the development of new & technologically advanced weaponry in the belief that the production of wonder weapons were the key to winning the war. This book gets behind this little-know aspect of the Nazi war machine to reveal the real extent of German secret weapons development. Broken down by weapon types the book

Includes:: exhaustive reference tables diagrams colourful maps & charts presenting all the core data in easy-to-follow formats. World War II Data Book: Germanys Secret Weapons 1939
- 45 is an essential reference guide for anyone interested in the history & make-up of Germanys secret weapons industry.


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Sturmgeschutz III was originally designed as an assault weapon but as war progressed it was increasingly used in a defensive role & evolved into an assault gun & tank destroyer. By 1943 its main role was providing anti-tank support to the units in its area of operation. This consequently led to many Stu Gs being destroyed in battle. Nonetheless they were very successful as tank killers & destroyed among others many bunkers pillboxes & other defences. The Stu G was not considered to be a true tank because it lacked a turret. The gun was mounded directly in the hull in a casemate-style fashion with a low profile to reduce vehicle heights & had a limited lateral traverse of a few degrees in either direction. Thus the entire vehicle had to be turned in order to acquire targets. Omitting the turret made production much simpler & less costly enabling greater numbers to be built. Its significantly shorter vertical profile as compared to contemporary tanks made the Stu G more difficult to hit. Most assault guns were mounted on the chassis of a Panzer III or Panzer IV with the resultant model being called either a Stu G III or Stu G IV respectively. The Stu G was one of the most effective tracked vehicles of World War II & over 10 000 of them were eventually produced. During the course of the war Stu G III assault guns were issued to Sturmartillerie Batteries Sturmgeschutz Abteilungen Sturmgeschutz Brigades Sturmartillerie Batteries Ersatz (Reserve) Abteilungen & Funklenk (Remote Control) Companies. Stu G III assault guns served on all fronts of WWII until the end of the war. ...

By the end of the Second World War there were soldiers of more than 30 nationalities fighting in the 38 combat division of the Waffen SS; Reich Germans were in the minority. How did a regime founded upon notions of its own racial superiority come to welcome hundreds of thousands of foreigners into its military elite
- & what motivated these men? Following the sell-out success of his first volume in this series Hitler's Gauls the author examines in depth the Langemarck division composed entirely of fighters drawn from the Flemish lands of Northern Belgium. Motivated by a powerful anti-communist zeal & a desire to escape forever the interference of their traditional enemy France these men fought at Stalingrad & in the encircling battles of the Volkhov pocket. They fought the bitter campaign in the Ukraine in 1943-44 then in Estonia at the Narva. The Division was destroyed by the Russian juggernaut in 1945. Illustrated with rare photographs many previously unpublished & with close analysis of the key figures such as Flemish Knight's Cross winner Remy Schrijnen this is a fascinating study of fanatical courage.
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The divisions of the Waffen-SS were among the elite of Hitler's armies in the Second World War. But alongside the Germans in the Waffen-SS fought an astonishingly high number of volunteers from other countries. By the end of the Second World War these foreign volunteers comprised half of all Hitler's Waffen-SS & filled the ranks of over twenty-four of the nominal thirty-eight Waffen-SS divisions. So during the most brutal war that mankind has ever known hundreds of thousands of men flocked to fight for a country that was not theirs & for a cause that was one of the most monstrous & barbaric in history. Who were these men & why did they fight? Hitler's Gauls" is an in-depth examination of one of these legions of foreign volunteers the Charlemagne division who were recruited entirely from conquered France. The men in Charlemagne often motivated by an extreme anti-communist zeal fought hard on the Eastern Front including battles of near annihilation in the snows of Pomerania & the final stand in the ruins of Berlin. This definitive history illustrated with rare photographs explores the background training key figures & full combat record of one of Hitler's lesser known foreign units of the Second World War." ...

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police the SS Security Service & the Gestapo ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia & Moravia & leading planner of the ' Final Solution' Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities & up to his assassination in Prague in 1942 he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich. Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich's adult character his motivations the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities & the consequences of his murderous efforts toward recreating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe. ...

Hitler's mountain troops or Gebirgsjager were a group of elite soldiers ready for battle whatever the conditions. These mountain men were trained to ski climb & endure long marches survive appalling conditions & were given a role as crack shock troops. Yet many of the campaigns in which the Gebirgsjager fought were on level ground where they had little opportunity to demonstrate their unique skills. Instead they were invariably employed as assault infantry in conventional battle a role in which every individual trooper excelled but not one for which they had been trained. They fought in virtually all theatres of World War notably on the Eastern Front where operations took them into the Caucasus. The Gebirgsjager were proud to wear the Edelweiss the famous badge that set them apart & distinguished them as Hitler's mountain men. This superb book shows the Gebirgsjager in training & action from Poland Norway & France through Yugoslavia the Eastern Front & in the closing stages of the War. ...

What if the Second World War had started in 1938? The two sides of the Spanish civil war are still locked in a blood-soaked stalemate. Stalin's purge of the Red Army is barely underway. & Neville Chamberlain
- sickened by the arrogance & duplicity of the Germans- does not return from Munich waving the piece of paper that would give the Czech arms factories to Hitler & postpone the war until 1939. On October 1 German tanks cross the Czech frontier touching off declarations of war from France from England from the USSR. Poland fearing the Russians more than Hitler declares war on the German side. Soon Fascist Spain attacks Gibraltar the Japanese army crosses the Manchurian frontier into Siberia.. .and the British Army sets off for France which has launched a pre-emptive attack on the Rhinel&. The war we know as World War II has begun
- a year early in an entirely different way.

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