German Memoirs

After World War II, 50 percent of Americans polled said they didn’t believe Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in 1945, as captured Nazi officials claimed. Instead, they believed the dictator faked his death and escaped, perhaps to Argentina. This wasn’t a crazy opinion: Joseph Stalin told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler’s body and that he personally believed the Nazi leader had escaped justice. At least two German submarines crossed the Atlantic and landed on the coast of Argentina in July 1945.

At seventeen, he was thrown into the deadliest front of World War II. In 1942, a young German soldier was sent to the Eastern Front—into the icy Caucasus Mountains. Surrounded by cold, fear, and despair, he faced horrors that no teenager should ever endure. Wounded three times, every day could have been his last. More than eighty years later, his memories come to light—a raw and unfiltered testimony of survival, fear, and resilience—also available as an unabridged audiobook on Audible and Spotify. Inside this powerful World War II memoir, you will discover: • Survival against all ...

Wounded five times and awarded numerous decorations for valor, Gottlob Herbert Bidermann saw action in the Crimea and siege of Sebastopol, participated in the vicious battles in the forests south of Leningrad, and ended the war in the Courland Pocket. In his memoir, he shares his impressions of countless Russian POWs seen at the outset of his service, of peasants struggling to survive the hostilities while caught between two ruthless antagonists, and of corpses littering the landscape.

Almost all accounts of D-Day are told from the Allied perspective, with the emphasis on how German resistance was overcome on June 6, 1944. But what was it like to be a German soldier in the bunkers and gun emplacements of the Normandy coast, facing the onslaught of the mightiest seaborne invasion in history? What motivated the German defenders, what were their thought processes - and how did they fight from one strong point to another, among the dunes and fields, on that first cataclysmic day?

Es ist die Geschichte einer furchtlosen Frau und ihres unermüdlichen Einsatzes für politischen Wandel, Gleichberechtigung, Frauenrechte und die Rechte eines ganzen Volkes. Narges Mohammadi blickt zurück auf ihren außergewöhnlichen Lebensweg – als unerschrockene Aktivistin, die trotz Gefängnisses, Repressionen und Folter nicht schweigt.

Wer die Philosophien zur Moderne verstehen will, der sollte Leben und Werke der französischen Existenzialistin und Feministin kennen. Der erfahrene Autor und Herausgeber Bert Alexander Petzold nimmt uns mit auf eine faktenreiche Bildungsreise und erläutert verständlich, unterhaltsam und strukturiert Basiswissen zu Simone de Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) gilt als wichtigste französische Intellektuelle des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ihr 1949 veröffentlichter Roman "Das andere Geschlecht" gilt als Meilenstein feministischer Literatur.

In no less than seven concentration and extermination camps, the Polish-Jew Noach (Natan) Żelechower was imprisoned during World War II. His first wife and their daughter were transported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka and perished there during the Great Deportation of the Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942, and he was left alone to face the threat of Nazi persecution and death. With great resilience, fortitude, and the hope to be reunited with his wife and daughter, Noach was able to withstand and survive the hardships of the camp world, forced labor, and death marches. Throughout the...

Zum 100. Todestag Rilkes: ein eindringliches Porträt des großen Dichters! Als Rainer Maria Rilke vor 100 Jahren starb, lagen ruhelose Jahrzehnte hinter ihm. Ob in der Künstlerkolonie Worpswede, bei dem Vorbild Rodin in Paris oder bei den Frauen, die ihn durchs Leben trugen, es hielt ihn nirgends lange. Der europaweit bestens vernetzte Einzelgänger, der bis zu Tolstoi nach Russland kam, wollte Bewegungsfreiheit, Berührungen, Resonanzen.

Amanal Petros ist die „German Machine" – der erste Deutsche in der absoluten Weltspitze des Langstreckenlaufs. Doch sein Weg dorthin begann nicht auf einer Tartanbahn, sondern mit der Flucht aus Äthiopien. In seiner packenden Autobiografie erzählt der deutsche Rekordhalter im Marathon und Vizeweltmeister von 2025 erstmals seine ganze Geschichte: von der Ankunft in Deutschland mit 16 Jahren bis hin zum Silber-Märchen von Tokio.

Heinz Knoke was one of the outstanding German fighter pilots of the Second World War. This vivid firsthand record of his experiences has become a classic among aviation memoirs and is a fascinating counterbalance to the numerous accounts written by Allied pilots.

Gunter K. Koschorrek was a machine-gunner on the Russian front in WWII. He wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on. As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some 40 years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. 

Named a Best History Book of 2019 by The Times (UK) The astounding true story of how thousands of ordinary Germans, overcome by shame, guilt, and fear, killed themselves after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II. By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen...

This “elegant and sobering” (The New York Times) history reveals how Germany’s fractured republic gave way to the Third Reich, from the breakthrough of the Nazi party to the rise of Hitler Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes...

Raus aus der Komfortzone und rein ins Abenteuer – mit der bekannten YouTuberin Eva zu Beck! Als junge Erwachsene hat Eva zu Beck alles erreicht: einen Oxford-Abschluss, einen gut bezahlten Job, einen Traummann und die Aussicht auf Familie, Wohlstand und gesellschaftliches Ansehen. Doch war es...

The complete war memoirs of the resistance leader Charles de Gaulle, who led France out of its darkest hour during the Nazi occupation during World War II. “Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.” This was how Charles de Gaulle answered the call of history. One of the few...

Nach den beiden Bestsellern „Ich bin zu alt für diese Scheisse!" und „Man wird nicht jünger durch den Scheiss!" entführt Sie Notfallsanitäter Horst Heckendorn zum dritten Mal in die unglaubliche, aber wahre Welt des Rettungsdienstes. Diesmal ohne das böse „S"-Wort im Titel, aber garantiert wieder mit seinem berühmt-berüchtigten rabenschwarzen Humor.

Das 17. Jahrhundert war eine Zeit großer Gegensätze. Während mächtige Herrscher ihre Reiche ausbauten und prächtige Höfe errichteten, revolutionierten Wissenschaftler, Philosophen und Entdecker das Wissen über die Welt. Kunst und Kultur erlebten im Zeitalter des Barock eine beeindruckende Blüte.

A rare, unfiltered memoir of a seventeen-year-old German soldier on the Eastern Front during the final winter of the Second World War—presented in a faithful English translation by his grandson. In the winter of 1944/45, the author—then a teenage Flakhelfer turned infantryman—found himself in East Prussia as the Red Army advanced toward the heart of the collapsing Third Reich. Written decades later, from memory and from notes scribbled during his time as a prisoner of war, his account offers a stark and deeply personal perspective on the brutal final months of the Secon World War. ...

Erhard Steiniger joined his Wehrmacht unit on October 12, 1940, as a radio operator, a role which required his constant presence with troops at the Front, right in the midst of combat. On June 22, 1941, he accompanied his division to Lithuania where he experienced the catastrophic first day of Operation Barbarossa. He later witnessed intense clashes during the conquest of the Baltic islands and the battles leading up to Leningrad on the Volkhov and Lake Ladoga.

The first book of D Day Through German Eyes has fascinated listeners around the world with its insight into the German experience of June 6, 1944. Now, book 2 contains a completely different set of astonishing German testimonies from the same archive. These newly translated eyewitness statements by German veterans show the defenders to be determined but psychologically insecure, often deluded in their thinking, and all too human in their shock at the onslaught they faced.