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, and 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, and for a cause that was one of the most monstrous and barbaric in history. Who were these men, and 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 and the final stand in the ruins of Berlin. This definitive history, illustrated with rare photographs, explores the background, training, key figures and full combat record of one of Hitler’s lesser known foreign units of the Second World War.

A charismatic yet notorious character, Sepp Dietrich the man is impossible to separate from Sepp Dietrich the General, who was awarded twenty-four different honors during his service to the Nazi party and was known for his devotion to his men as he led them through some of the fiercest fighting in the war. In this extensively researched book, historian Charles Messenger attempts to discover the truth about this sparsely documented man, painting a vivid picture of the aggressive war and politics under the Third Reich. From Dietrich’s humble upbringing and his eventual rise to General, to his dissatisfaction with Hitler’s leadership and the trials he faced after the war, Dietrich remains a mysterious figure in history.

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.

Of more than a million pages of Hitler's military conferences that were recorded, about 1,000 survived destruction. This book contains newly discovered documents never before published.

As well as providing photographs of Hitler’s cars and the men who became his chauffeur, John Starkey lists the technical specifications of those cars, and describes many of the journeys undertaken by the German leader over the course of two dramatic decades. Many are the photographs of Hitler standing proudly in the passenger seat of a midnight blue Mercedes, arm outstretched in his famous salute to the adoring German crowds. Hitler loved cars and loved to be seen in and next to the special automobiles he purchased or was presented with through friends and Nazi Party funds. His first car was a 1920 green Selve 8/30, purchased in 1922, which was soon disposed of in favor of a Daimler-built Mercedes 15/70/100 – and from that moment on every car in which Hitler was chauffeured around the Third Reich and occupied countries would be a Mercedes. Indeed, even while in Landsberg prison following his failed putsch in 1923, he was writing to a Mercedes-Benz car salesman in Munich about his next car, concerning the merits of the Benz 11/40 versus the larger 16/50. It was a grey 11/40 in which Hitler was driven away from Landsberg on his release in 1924. It was in his next car – a super-charged Mercedes-Benz 15/70/100 – that Hitler was involved in an accident with a large truck in March 1930. The truck was completely wrecked while the large Mercedes suffered only minor damage. This prompted Hitler to remark: ‘It was then I decided to use only a Mercedes for the rest of my life.’ From 1930 onwards, Hitler was driven around in a Mercedes-Benz 770, also known as the Grosser Mercedes. Only 205 of these huge, luxury cars were manufactured with many of those being used by top-ranking Nazis. Such was Hitler’s interest in cars, he arranged state sponsorship for Mercedes and Porsche (Auto Union) to participate in Grand Prix racing (today’s F1). So strong was the resulting financial support that German teams swept all before them between 1935 and 1939. Security was always a great concern of Hitler and his entourage and his 770 was protected with bullet-proof windows and steel armor-plate built into all metal work. Wartime brought increased security fears, resulting in another Mercedes entering the German leader’s car collection. This was the heavily armored, six-wheel G4, the first off-road Mercedes, in which Hitler could safely parade through the streets of conquered lands. As well as providing photographs of Hitler’s cars and the men who became his chauffeur, John Starkey lists the technical specifications of those cars, and describes many of the journeys undertaken by the German leader over the course of two dramatic decades.

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

"Inside the Nazi War Machine vividly recounts how Rommel, von Manstein and Guderian turned the Blitzkrieg into a fearsome weapon of war in France in 1940, and how Hitler botched his best opportunity to have defeated the BEF, and perhaps defeated Britain.”—Carlo D’Este, author of Patton: A Genius For War In 1940, as Hitler plotted to conquer Europe, only one nation posed a serious threat to the Third Reich's domination: France. The German command was wary of taking on the most powerful armed force on the continent. But three low-ranking generals—Eric von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel—were about to change the face of modern warfare. By grouping tanks into juggernauts to slam through enemy lines, the blitzkrieg was born. With this aggressive, single-minded plan, the Nazis bypassed the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line, charged into the heart of France, and alerted the world that the deadly might of Germany could no longer be ignored.