Bestselling historian Andrew Nagorski takes a fresh look at the decisive year 1941, when Hitler’s miscalculations and policy of terror propelled Churchill, FDR, and Stalin into a powerful new alliance that defeated Nazi Germany. In early 1941, Hitler’s armies ruled most of Europe. Churchill’s Britain was an isolated holdout against the Nazi tide, but German bombers were attacking its cities and German U-boats were attacking its ships. Stalin was observing the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and Roosevelt was vowing to keep the United States out of the war. Hitler was confident that his aim of total victory was within reach. \By the end of 1941, all that changed. Hitler had repeatedly gambled on escalation and lost: by invading the Soviet Union and committing a series of disastrous military blunders; by making mass murder and terror his weapons of choice, and by rushing to declare war on the United States after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain emerged with two powerful new allies—Russia and the United States. By then, Germany was doomed to defeat. Nagorski illuminates the actions of the major characters of this pivotal year as never before. 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War is a stunning examination of unbridled megalomania versus determined leadership. It also reveals how 1941 set the Holocaust in motion, and presaged the postwar division of Europe, triggering the Cold War. 1941 was a year that forever defined our world.
Reading about the Nazis is not supposed to be fun, but Nagorski manages to make it so. Readers new to this story will find it fascinating” (The Washington Post).
This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history.
At once powerful, engrossing, and edifying, William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary is an essential historical record that illuminates one of the darkest periods in human civilization.
In Fateful Choices Ian Kershaw re-creates the ten critical decisions taken between May 1940, when Britain chose not to surrender, and December 1941, when Hitler decided to destroy Europe’s Jews, showing how these choices would recast the ...
Richard Zeitlin of the Veterans' Museum in Madison, Wisconsin has also been most helpful. The historian Paddy Griffith very kindly organized an advanced wargame of Barbarossa, which lasted almost as long as the operation itself, ...
Describes the experiences of ordinary people living in Nazi Germany, explains how they aided or avoided Nazi programs, and analyzes the use of terror against social outsiders
In the light of the many Verey lights, you can see clearly that some of the Russians have already disappeared towards the rear; but there are plenty of them left in front of us. We're all praying for it to get light: the Verey lights ...
71. 414 'Early this morning ...': cited in Burgwyn, Mussolini Warlord, p. 51. 414 'F. in a rage. ..': Engel, Heart of the Reich (diary, 28/10/1940). 415 'Two of theirs went down .. .': Ciano, Diary, 1/11/1940. 416 'As may be imagined .
... summit at sea of Churchill and Rostovtsev, F. Royal Air Force (RAF) Rubinin, Yevgeny Rugan (factory personnel director) Russia, tsarist Russian Civil War Russian Liberation Movement Russian Orthodox Church Russo-Polish War Rychagov, ...
With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.