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The Making of Martin Luther takes a provocative look at the intellectual emergence of one of the most original and influential minds of the 16th century. Richard Rex traces how, in a concentrated burst of creative energy in the few years surrounding his excommunication by Pope Leo X in 1521, this lecturer at an obscure German university developed a startling new interpretation of the Christian faith that brought to an end the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe.

John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR, because of its vast size and population, and that the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. Neither statement is accurate, says Mosier; Hitler came very close to winning outright.

Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people in the know. This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight - whether escaping persecution or just down on their luck. It was a language of the road associated with vagabonds, travelers, Jews, and thieves that blended words from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Romani, Czech, and other European languages and was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as being in a pickle. This renegade language unsettled those in power.

Germany's Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these "ordinary" men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler's orders.

February 26, 1924 was the first day of the greatly anticipated high treason trial that would galvanize Germany - but few in the courtroom that morning anticipated that the leading defendant, General Erich Ludendorff, whose risky offensives during World War I doomed Germany to defeat, would soon be eclipsed by the private first class at his side, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was charged with treason after unsuccessfully trying to seize power in the notorious Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.

The White Rose tells the story of Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, who in 1942 led a small underground organization of German students and professors to oppose the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazi Party. They named their group the White Rose, and they distributed leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime. Sophie, Hans, and a third student were caught and executed.

In April 1945, Soviet forces descended on Berlin in the final phase of the war in Europe. The fighting was fierce as soldiers fanatically loyal to the Nazi party - and those afraid of the vengeance their opponents might enact - sought to stave off the end of the regime as long as possible.

In Hitler's Death, author and expert Luke Daly-Groves rigorously looks at the question: Did Hitler shoot himself in the Führerbunker or did he slip past the Soviets and escape to South America? Countless documentaries, newspaper articles, and internet pages written by conspiracy theorists have led the ongoing debate surrounding Hitler's last days. Historians have not yet managed to make a serious response. Until now. This book is the first attempt by an academic to return to the evidence of Hitler's suicide in order to scrutinize the most recent conspiracy arguments.

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined. 

It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery: in an authoritarian state where the future was preordained, punk, with its rejection of society and DIY approach to building a new one, planted the seeds for revolution.

In the highly anticipated new book from the best-selling author of Judgment of Paris,George M. Taber reveals the integral role gold played in World War II, from its influence on the Nazi war machine to the ultimate triumph by the Allies and the fall of Berlin.

In Hitler's Army, Omer Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union—where the vast majority of German troops fought—to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. 

The successes of the German Blitzkrieg in 1939-41 were as surprising as they were swift. Allied decision-makers wanted to discover the secret to German success quickly, even though only partial, incomplete information was available to them. The false conclusions drawn became myths about the Blitzkrieg that have lingered for decades.

An unprecedented, page-turning narrative of the Nazi rise to power, the Holocaust, and Hitler’s post-invasion plans for Russia told through the recently discovered lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg – Hitler’s ‘philosopher’ and architect of Nazi ideology. Only recently discovered by former...

Glanz und Mythos einerseits, Schande und Schreckbild andererseits. Mit dem Namen Preußen verbinden sich gegensätzliche Assoziationen und eine Reihe von Klischees, so etwa Graf Mirabeaus Ausspruch: "Andere Staaten haben eine Armee; in Preußen hat die Armee einen Staat." Für Golo Mann jedoch wurde es Preußens Funktion, "seine unvorhersagbare, ungewollt, vom Eigensinn der Geschichte ihm zugespielte Chance und Aufgabe, der deutschen Nation ihre moderne Form zu geben".

In April 1945, German troops withdrawing from the Seelow Heights were encircled by the Soviet Army near the small town of Halbe, south-east of Berlin. Rather than surrender, their orders were to attempt to break out, westward, and join up with the German twelfth Army. A brutal battle ensued, with an estimated 30,000 German and 20,000 Russian soldiers killed, along with thousands of civilians. 

"Wer sich in die Geschichte der deutschen Nation vertieft, der hat leicht den Eindruck eines unruhigen Lebens in Extremen." (Golo Mann)

Die Revolution von 1848 ist, so Golo Mann, "eine kummervoll, kläglich zu erzählende Geschichte", denn 1848 wurde "nicht zu Ende gedacht, nicht zu Ende getan".

In the autumn of 1938, Europe believed in the promise of peace. But only a year later, the fateful decisions of just a few men had again led Europe to a massive world war. Drawing on contemporary diaries, memoirs, and newspapers, as well as recorded interviews, 1939 is a narrative account of what the coming of the Second World War felt like to those who lived through it.

Sie alle prägten die deutsche Geschichte: Kaiser wie Otto I. , Karl der Große oder Wilhelm II., Wissenschaftler wie Albert Einstein...