Description
This book narrates the tumultuous era of total war through the fate of AachenImperial Germany's seat of power for 600 years, site of Charlemagne's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor, and a place with greater geopolitical significance for Adolf Hitler in 1944 than Stalingrad in 1943.
This was a stark contrast with the events of the Great War: in 1918, the Imperial German Army had abandoned Aachen in a rout-like flight. In the Nazi period, however, Aachen became a major symbol of Germany's defiance against the Allies. For Hitlerhis mind warped after surviving the Stauffenberg bomb plotGermany's westernmost city became pivotal in his last-ditch defence of the thousand-year Reich'.
War Comes to Aachen weaves together the city's story from 1900, tracing its entrenched Catholic orthodoxy, its growth as an industrial urban centre, the demise of democracy, the rise of Nazism, the two world wars, and the Holocaust. The book surveys Churchill's wartime
