Search results for ""Author French MacLean""

The twenty-eight day siege of the Warsaw Ghetto was one of the most protracted large-scale urban battles in World War II. Only the fighting at Leningrad from 1941-1943, Stalingrad in 1942-1943, the Warsaw Rebellion of 1944, and Budapest in 1944-1945 lasted longer. The Jews had resisted en masse and had created a legend that would transcend the war and continue even to this day. Much has been written on this heroic struggle from the standpoint of the young men and women of the Jewish War Organization. Nevertheless, a book from the German perspective has yet to be written that captures all aspects of the fight from the standpoint of the attackers – until now. The Ghetto Men presents every fact possible concerning the who, when, with what and how the SS troops razed the Warsaw Ghetto. The men and officers of the dreaded Security Service and Gestapo are here as well as the units, weapons and tactics, and a day-by-day analysis of the fighting.

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Stalingrad: The Death of the German Sixth Army on the Volga, 1942-1943, is the first published work to detail the situation of every German corps and division for every day of the six-month Stalingrad campaign. Derived from the Sixth Army daily operation reports and the German Army High Command (OKH) situation maps (Lage Ost), this two-volume set presents the situation on the flanks of the army, as well as the combat in the city itself, a level of detail never before attempted. Stalingrad was the perfect storm that would lead to the death of an army – the German Sixth Army. Led by Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, but micromanaged by Adolf Hitler, who insisted that his forces fight to the last man and bullet, the Sixth Army became fixated on an objective that continued to be just past their grasp. Believing that Stalingrad would be theirs “if only” one more attack against the urban rubble was mounted, the Sixth Army did not see that it was in a situation where if something did go wrong, it would not “see” impending doom until it was too late. That something was the massive Soviet attack that broke through both flanks of the Sixth Army in such a violent manner and to such a great operational depth that any hope of relieving the surrounded pocket from the outside in such horrible winter conditions was probably illusionary. Thus, defeat was in order for the Sixth Army, but it would not end there. Adolf Hitler had insisted that this would be a fight between the supermen of Aryan Germany against the sub-humans of Slavic Russia. In this fight, according to Nazi ideology, the sub-humans had no right to live. Given the polar ideological differences of Fascism and Communism, combined with this racial antagonism, when the Red Army did gain the upper hand and isolate the German forces around Stalingrad in November 1942, the situation guaranteed that the Sixth Army would not only be defeated, but that it and most of its soldiers were headed for annihilation.

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Two thousand nine hundred forty-five men lined up in four motorized columns immediately behind the German Army on June 22, 1941 as it prepared to launch Operation Barbarossa – the German attack on the Soviet Union – an attack designed to win the war. Their mission – for the glory of Greater Germany – was to butcher as many human beings as they could get their hands on – men, women and children who were at that very moment peacefully sleeping in their warm beds in dozens of large cities and scores of small hamlets from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, and from the border with old Poland to the outskirts of Moscow. The field men of the Einsatzkommandos, the men of Bach and Beethoven, Grimm and Gutenberg – and now Hitler and Heydrich – were very thorough at what they did. Over the course of the next two years, by means of machine-guns, carbines, gas vans, explosives, rifle butts or ax handles, the field men would slaughter 1,300,000 people. The Field Men, a companion volume to MacLean’s The Camp Men: the SS Officers Who Ran the Nazi Concentration Camp System, covers the entire gamut, from the organization of the units, to the SS officers who served in this scourge on the Eastern Front. Some 380 SS officers are described in full detail and extensively analyzed. The photographic section of the book contains over 175 photographs, while detailed maps show the locations for each unit throughout the campaign.

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