"During World War II, Marione and her family miraculously escape the firestorms of Hamburg and seek shelter with a contact in the countryside who grudgingly agrees to house them in a shed for more than a year. "--Provided by publisher.

In this gripping narrative, John Koehler details the widespread activities of East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or "Stasi." The Stasi, which infiltrated every walk of East German life, suppressed political opposition, and caused the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of citizens, proved to be one of the most powerful secret police and espionage services in the world. Koehler methodically reviews the Stasi's activities within East Germany...

While the flames of World War II still raged, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin issued a warning to the Nazi leaders. Those responsible for the torture and murder of millions of innocent and defenseless civilians were promised that "... the three Allied Powers will pursue them to the furthest corners of the earth and deliver them to their judges so that justice may be done." That promise was not kept. Justice was not done. In 1945, twelve of the most...

After the First World War Germany was forced by the Treaty of Versailles to give up her colonies; the misappropriation of these colonies by the Allies was justified to the world with the mendacious claims that Germany had proven herself incapable and unworthy of governing native peoples. In this book Dr. Heinrich Schnee, the late Governor of German East Africa, refutes this "Colonial Lie" with hard facts and throws upon the subject a very different...

"In the aftermath of WWII, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals "to the ends of the earth." Yet many slipped away to the four corners of the world or were shielded by the Western Allies in exchange for cooperation. Most prominently, Reinhard Gehlen, the founder of West Germany's foreign intelligence service, welcomed SS operatives into the fold. This shortsighted decision nearly brought his cherished service down, as the KGB found...

Hunting Eichmann is the first complete narrative of a relentless and harrowing international manhunt. When the Allies stormed Berlin in the last days of the Third Reich, Adolf Eichmann shed his SS uniform and vanished. Following his escape from two American POW camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe, and his path to an anonymous life in Buenos Aires, his pursuers are a bulldog West German prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his...

For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed "undesirable," suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis...

Using newly available material from both sides of the Iron Curtain, William Glenn Gray explores West Germany's efforts to prevent international acceptance of East Germany as a legitimate state following World War II. Unwilling to accept the division of their country, West German leaders regarded the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as an illegitimate upstart--a puppet of the occupying Soviet forces. Together with France, Britain, and the United States,...

More than half a century before the mass executions of the Holocaust, Germany devastated the peoples of southwestern Africa. While colonialism might seem marginal to German history, controversial new scholarship compares the acts of this period with Nazi practices on the Eastern and Western fronts. Examples of the most important research conducted on the "continuity thesis" over the past five years, the chapters in this anthology debate the connections...

Over the course of the German Empire the Social Democrats went from being a vilified and persecuted minority to becoming the largest party in the Reichstag, enjoying broad-based support. But this was not always the case. In the 1870s, government mouthpieces branded Social Democracy the "party of assassins and conspirators" and sought to excite popular fury against it. Over time, Social Democrats managed to refashion their public image in large part...