Hitler's Home Front

Hitler's Home Front
Author: Jill Stephenson
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2006-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781852854423

This is a groundbreaking new study of an overlooked area of Second World War History.

Hitler's Home Front

Hitler's Home Front
Author: Don A Gregory
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473858224

A “candid and revealing memoir shows a normal boy and a family at war and in its aftermath, determined to do what it took to survive . . . fascinating” (The Great War). When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in 1933, he promised the downtrodden, demoralized, and economically broken people of Germany a new beginning and a strong future. Millions flocked to his message, including a corps of young people called the Hitlerjugend—the Hitler Youth. By 1942 Hitler had transformed Germany into a juggernaut of war that swept over Europe and threatened to conquer the world. It was in that year that a nine-year-old Wilhelm Reinhard Gehlen, took the ‘Jungvolk’ oath, vowing to give his life for Hitler. This is the story of Wilhelm Gehlen’s childhood in Nazi Germany during World War II and the awful circumstances which he and his friends and family had to endure during and following the war. Including a handful of recipes and descriptions of the strange and sometimes disgusting food that nevertheless kept people alive, this book sheds light on the truly awful conditions and the twisted, mistaken devotion held by members of the Hitler Youth—that it was their duty to do everything possible to save the Thousand Year Reich.

Hitler's Housewives

Hitler's Housewives
Author: Tim Heath
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 152674810X

The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party cowed the masses into a sense of false utopia. During Hitler’s 1932 election campaign over half those who voted for Hitler were women. Germany’s women had witnessed the anarchy of the post-First World War years, and the chaos brought about by the rival political gangs brawling on their streets. When Hitler came to power there was at last a ray of hope that this man of the people would restore not only political stability to Germany but prosperity to its people. As reforms were set in place, Hitler encouraged women to step aside from their jobs and allow men to take their place. As the guardian of the home, the women of Hitler’s Germany were pinned as the very foundation for a future thousand-year Reich. Not every female in Nazi Germany readily embraced the principle of living in a society where two distinct worlds existed, however with the outbreak of the Second World War, Germany’s women would soon find themselves on the frontline. Ultimately Hitler’s housewives experienced mixed fortunes throughout the years of the Second World War. Those whose loved ones went off to war never to return; those who lost children not only to the influences of the Hitler Youth but the Allied bombing; those who sought comfort in the arms of other young men and those who would serve above and beyond of exemplary on the German home front. Their stories form intimate and intricately woven tales of life, love, joy, fear and death. Hitler’s Housewives: German Women on the Home Front is not only an essential document towards better understanding one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies where the women became an inextricable link, but also the role played by Germany’s women on the home front which ultimately became blurred within the horrors of total war. This is their story, in their own words, told for the first time.

Hitler's Home Front

Hitler's Home Front
Author: Nathan Morley
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9781090461773

"One of the best new Nazi Germany books" - BookAuthority. Hitler's Home Front provides a compelling and comprehensive year-by-year account of ordinary life in wartime Germany, chronicling how the population tried to find normality during an unprecedented emergency.Drawing on a multitude of sources, this book spans from the mundane to the momentous, such as how people coped with rationing, crime, travel restrictions, bombing, and how civilian morale fluctuated as the war rapidly turned against the Nazis.The official newspapers of those years - including Das Reich, Völkischer Beobachter, and Der Angriff - show how the public learned about the successes and failures of their nation at war.As well as drawing on the vast archives of German newspapers, police reports, and diaries of the public and politicians - period speeches, private unpublished letters, broadcasts, Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels and witness accounts help to build a picture of daily living in Nazi Germany. From reaction to the dramatic events on the Eastern Front to the domestic difficulties of cooking with synthetic foods, life on the German home front is richly documented.

Hitler at Home

Hitler at Home
Author: Despina Stratigakos
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300187602

A look at Adolf Hitler’s residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator’s private persona both within Germany and abroad. Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him. “Inarguably the powder-keg title of the year.”—Mitchell Owen, Architectural Digest “A fascinating read, which reminds us that in Nazi Germany the architectural and the political can never be disentangled. Like his own confected image, Hitler’s buildings cannot be divorced from their odious political hinterland.”—Roger Moorhouse, Times

Under the Bombs

Under the Bombs
Author: Earl R. Beck
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2013-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813143705

“A tribute to human resilience under extreme stress, both in response to the terror from the sky and to the sacrifices the Nazis imposed on their people.” —History Under the Bombs tells the story of the civilian population of German cities devastated by Allied bombing in World War II. These people went to work, tried to keep a home (though in many cases it was just a pile of rubble where a house once stood), and attempted to live life as normally as possible amid the chaos of war. Earl Beck also looks at the food and fuel rationing the German people endured and the problems of trying to make a public complaint while living in a totalitarian state. “An easily accessible ‘impressionistic description’ of life in Germany under Allied aerial bombardment . . . this evocative study captures the horror of war for a trapped population.” —Library Journal “The most vivid account available of what it was actually like to live under the bombings.” —Historian “Challenges the contention of Allied commanders that airpower was the ultimate key to victory and that it could have defeated the enemy by itself.” —America “A powerful study.” —American Historical Review “An enlightening, highly readable account of life in the war-ravaged Third Reich.” —Pineville Sun “A description of what it was like to live, work, suffer, and die in wartime Germany.” —The Historian

The German Home Front 1939–45

The German Home Front 1939–45
Author: Brian L Davis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2012-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 178096806X

This book outlines and illustrates the living conditions of German civilians in World War II, and the Nazi state's basic structure. German families suffered the same hardships as British labour conscription, extra civic duties, severe shortages of food and necessities, disrupted transport, homelessness and evacuation, separation from loved ones and, for many, bereavement. However, there were important differences. The dictator for whom many had voted was leading them to ruin; unequalled death and devastation ensued from Allied air raids; and every aspect of life was caged around with repressive decrees that began to replace the true rule of law well before September 1939.

Hitler's Home Guard: Volkssturmmann

Hitler's Home Guard: Volkssturmmann
Author: David Yelton
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781846030130

Osprey's study of Germany's Home Guard during the latter part of World War II (1939-1945). The creation of the German Home Guard or Volkssturm on 18 October 1944 was a desperate measure by the Nazi regime to utilize every available manpower resource in their last-ditch attempts to delay their inevitable defeat. All able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 60 who were not already members of the German Armed Forces were conscripted into one organization. The aim of the Volkssturm was to shore up the defense of the Reich, but also to restrict any possible revolt or dissent by exercising military discipline over the entire male population of fighting age. This Nazi fantasy was the creation of a new force of highly-motivated Aryans dedicated to the heroic defense of their fatherland. However, the Volkssturm failed due to poor equipment, lack of training, and low morale. Men who had no experience of combat and little or no inclination to fight, and who had little interest in the Nazi regime found themselves sent into battle against impossible odds and achieving little or nothing. The focus of the book is the section of Germany's western front where the Volkssturm fought in vain to slow the advance of Canadian forces and where the desertion rate was very high. David K. Yelton follows the experience of a Volkssturm conscript from his call-to-arms, into action and through to his capture and time as a POW, examining his personal reaction to the creation of the German Home Guard and his response to the fighting into which he was thrust.

Ostkrieg

Ostkrieg
Author: Stephen G. Fritz
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2011-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813140501

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events. In Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, Stephen G. Fritz bridges the gap in scholarship by incorporating historical research from the last several decades into an accessible, comprehensive, and coherent narrative. His analysis of the Russo-German War from a German perspective covers all aspects of the eastern front, demonstrating the interrelation of military events, economic policy, resource exploitation, and racial policy that first motivated the invasion. This in-depth account challenges accepted notions about World War II and promotes greater understanding of a topic that has been neglected by historians.