"Growing up in Paris, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. All she knew was that her grandmother and her mother had fled their home city of Konigsberg in the far east of Germany near the end of World War II, never to return. But everything changed when O'Donnell traveled to Konigsberg -- now known as Kaliningrad, and part of Russia -- and called her grandmother, who uncharacteristically...

"The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact,...

"Sophia Alexander, the beautiful daughter of a famous surgeon in Berlin, has had to grow up faster than most young women. When her mother falls ill, Sophia must take charge of her younger sister, Theresa, and look after her father and the household, while also volunteering at his hospital after school. Meanwhile, Hitler's rise to power and the violence in her very own town have Sophia concerned, but only her mother is willing to share her fears openly....

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s. It was in 1940, when he was still a virtual unknown, that Shirer wondered whether his eyewitness account of the collapse of the world around Nazi Germany could be of any interest or value as a book. Shirer's Berlin Diary, which is considered the first...

The thrilling and definitive history of World War I in the Middle East. By 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In “The Fall of the Ottomans”, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's...

From a young age Brigitte learns to support the Nazi party and attend her League of German Girls meetings, but after reading a forbidden pamphlet from the White Rose she begins to question everything she has been taught.

"The best-selling author of "Hitler: Ascent" and "Hitler: Downfall" reconstructs the chaotic, otherworldly last days of Nazi Germany. On April 30, 1945, in a bunker deep beneath the Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his newly wedded wife, Eva Braun, killed themselves. But Nazi Germany lived on, however briefly. The subsequent eight days were among the most turbulent in history, witnessing not only the final battles of World War II and the collapse...

An elderly London resident befriends the little boy who moves in downstairs, but his parents' fighting brings her back to her harrowing escape from Nazi Germany at age twelve and grim post-war years in France with her mother. Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn't talk about her escape from Nazi...