Hell Before Their Very Eyes

Author : John C. McManus
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421417669
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hell Before Their Very Eyes written by John C. McManus and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life-altering experiences of the American soldiers who liberated three Nazi concentration camps. On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and—perhaps most disturbing of all—the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes. Military historian John C. McManus sheds new light on this often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on a rich blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts—including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections—Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history.

Author : John C. McManus
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421417642
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hell Before Their Very Eyes written by John C. McManus and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encountering Ohrdruf -- "The smell of death was thick in the air": witnessing Buchenwald -- Treating Buchenwald: medicine and Murrow -- Dachau: the approach -- "My heart was going a mile a minute": liberating Dachau -- Dachau: the impact

Author : John C. McManus
Publisher : Dutton Caliber
ISBN 13 : 0451475046
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fire and Fortitude written by John C. McManus and published by Dutton Caliber. This book was released on 2019 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "John C. McManus, one of our most highly-acclaimed historians of World War II, takes readers from Pearl Harbor--a rude awakening for a ragtag militia woefully unprepared for war--to Makin, a sliver of coral reef where the Army was tested against the increasingly-desperate Japanese. In between were nearly two years of punishing combat as the Army transformed, at times unsteadily, from an undertrained garrison force into an unstoppable juggernaut, and America evolved from an inward-looking nation into a global superpower."--Provided by publisher.

Author : Dan Stone
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300216033
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Liberation of the Camps written by Dan Stone and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving, deeply researched account of survivors’ experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed When tortured inmates of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps were liberated in 1944 and 1945, the horror of the atrocities came fully to light. It was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners, yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors—their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors’ immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead.

Author : Alfréd Wetzler
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 184545183X
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Escape From Hell written by Alfréd Wetzler and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2007-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews: the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." - Sir Martin Gilbert "Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. ...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans." - From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett] Together with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive's revelations met with after their return. Ewald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

Author : Eugen Kogon
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374529922
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Theory and Practice of Hell written by Eugen Kogon and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the spring of 1945, the Second World War was drawing to a close in Europe. Allied troops were sweeping through Nazi Germany and discovering the atrocities of SS concentration camps. The first to be reached intact was Buchenwald, in central Germany. American soldiers struggled to make sense of the shocking scenes they witnessed inside. They asked a small group of former inmates to draft a report on the camp. It was led by Eugen Kogon, a German political prisoner who had been an inmate since 1939. The Theory and Practice of Hell is his classic account of life inside. Unlike many other books by survivors who published immediately after the war, The Theory and Practice of Hell is more than a personal account. It is a horrific examination of life and death inside a Nazi concentration camp, a brutal world of a state within state, and a society without law. But Kogon maintains a dispassionate and critical perspective. He tries to understand how the camp works, to uncover its structure and social organization. He knew that the book would shock some readers and provide others with gruesome fascination. But he firmly believed that he had to show the camp in honest, unflinching detail. The result is a unique historical document—a complete picture of the society, morality, and politics that fueled the systematic torture of six million human beings. For many years, The Theory and Practice of Hell remained the seminal work on the concentration camps, particularly in Germany. Reissued with an introduction by Nikolaus Waschmann, a leading Holocaust scholar and author of Hilter's Prisons, this important work now demands to be re-read.

Author : Shlomo Venezia
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745683770
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inside the Gas Chambers written by Shlomo Venezia and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine. Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a ‘Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the ‘special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies. Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, ‘Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944. It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a ‘Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Author : John C. McManus
Publisher : Dutton Caliber
ISBN 13 : 1524745502
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dead and Those about to Die written by John C. McManus and published by Dutton Caliber. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a detailed, harrowing account of the D-Day assault on Omaha Beach from the perspective of the soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division as well as from the Gap Assault Team engineers who dealt with mines and other dangerous obstacles.

Author : Jeremiah A. Denton
Publisher : Wnd Books
ISBN 13 : 9781935071150
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When Hell Was in Session written by Jeremiah A. Denton and published by Wnd Books. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Denton, a Navy pilot, recounts his experiences as a prisoner of war held in Hanoi's infamous Hanoi Hilton prison complex.

Author : Stella Cameron
Publisher : Harlequin
ISBN 13 : 1460308522
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Cold Day in Hell written by Stella Cameron and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Tis the season to be wary... Christmas is coming and all is far from calm in Pointe Judah, Louisiana. Newcomer Christian DeAngelo--Angel to his friends--is at his wit's end trying to manage Sonny, the hotheaded nineteen-year-old everyone believes is his nephew. In fact, Sonny is the orphaned son of a notorious mob boss, a protected witness...and Angel's responsibility. Angel has been commiserating with Eileen Moggeridge, whose lonely son Aaron has latched on to Sonny and gotten into deeper trouble than ever. But nothing could prepare Angel and Eileen for the boys' latest crisis: as they are horsing around in the swamp one afternoon, a shot rings out. Aaron is hit, but was the bullet meant for Sonny? Suddenly, goodwill toward men is in short supply and Angel doesn't know who's more dangerous: the hoodoo mystic with an eerie hold over the boys, the hit man roaming the bayou or Eileen's volatile ex-husband, Chuck.