Author: Fritz Kraemer
Publisher: German Canadian Museum of
ISBN: 1894643070
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description

Author: Michael Frank Reynolds
Publisher: Spellmount, Limited Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A military historical account of the actions of the 1st and 12th SS Panzer Divisions in Normandy; Hitler's elite Leibstandarte Corps. The author describes the successes and failures of the Battle of the Bulge and the final offensive on the Eastern Front in 1945.

Author: Douglas E. Nash
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781612008738
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
The second part of a new history of IV. SS-Panzerkorps, which fought on the Eastern Front in the last months of World War II.

Author: Dieter Stenger
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811765903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Organized and trained during 1943, the 10th SS Panzer Division saw its first action in the spring of 1944 during the relief of an encircled German army on the Eastern Front. Several months later, in response to the Allied invasion at Normandy, the division returned to the West in mid-June 1944. Here the division engaged in a series of armored attacks and counterattacks against British and American forces. The 10th SS briefly held off a few enemy thrusts but gradually had to fall back to Falaise, where the division escaped the Allied encirclement with no tanks and only a fraction of its men. The 10th SS Panzer Division next defended against the Allied parachute assault during Operation Market Garden in September 1944. Depleted and now a division in name only, the 10th SS fought in Alsace before Hitler sent it to the Eastern Front again. There, east of Berlin, the division participated in the final battles to enable the escape of German soldiers and civilians from Soviet captivity.

Author: Donald Graves
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1848326831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Ordered by Hitler 'to hold, or to die' and to fight 'to the last grenade and round', the German army was a formidable opponent during the 1944 Normandy campaign. This book depicts the experience of that army in Normandy through its own records and documentation.??Blood and Steel, The Wehrmacht Archive : Normandy 1944 is an informative and colourful collection of translated original orders, diaries, letters, after action reports, and even jokes, as well as Allied technical evaluations of German weapons, vehicles and equipment and transcripts of prisoner of war interrogations. The translations also feature comments from wartime Allied intelligence officers which provide an insight into how the German army was regarded by its opponents at the time.??As you read the landser''s letters to wives and families in Germany, his forbidden diaries, his gripes about food, officers, and shortages of just about everything, the daily life of the German soldier in the long and bloody summer of 1944 will come to life. You will also learn from official documents about his superiors' efforts to cope with Allied air and artillery superiority, create new tactical methods for all arms and maintain discipline in the face of overwhelming odds with both exaggerated claims of miraculous new 'Vengeance Weapons' and threats of the ultimate sanction for desertion or surrender.

Author: Lennart Westberg
Publisher: Helion & Company Limited
ISBN: 9781909982949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
This photographic volume depicts Himmler's favorite unit in the Waffen-SS: the III 'Germanic' SS Panzerkorps, for it fulfilled Himmler's longtime political plans of recruiting 'Germanic' volunteers for the creation of a greater Germanic Reich in the future. As such, it consisted in part of SS volunteers from western and northern European countries. Although largely forgotten today, this elite SS unit fought on a variety of battlefields ranging from Croatia and Ingermanland's snow-covered forests near Leningrad to the historic Estonian city of Narva, where it defended the Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia against the Red Army in 1944-45. The remnants of the Panzerkorps ended up in both the hopeless defense of Pomerania and the final apocalypse at the battle for Brandenburg and Berlin in April-May 1945, when the Third Reich went down in a storm of fire and steel. Volume 1 covers the period from the creation of the III SS Panzerkorps in the summer of 1943 until the German evacuation of Estonia in September 1944. The coverage includes the unit's involvement in anti-partisan operations in Croatia (September-December 1943), the fighting at Oranienbaum-Leningrad and the battle for Ingria (January-February 1944); the defense of the Narva bridgehead and the battles for Dorpat and the Blue Hills, finishing with the German evacuation of Estonia (February-September 1944). On the Eastern Dront, a motley mix of nationalities and individuals fought under the Swastika and subsequently it was volunteers from various countries who served in the III 'Germanic' SS Panzerkorps, including Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, Swiss, Dutch, Flemings, Walloons, Estonians, Germans and ethnic Germans from Rumania. Even a handful of renegade British volunteers turned up in this unit during the final weeks of the Second World War. All of these soldiers had widely varying reasons for joining the Waffen-SS. The 2 volumes forming this series will not only include well over 1,000 mostly unpublished photographs of the III SS Panzerkorps during 1943-45, but also a large number of previously unpublished personal battle descriptions by surviving officers and soldiers of this corps from the authors' archives of personal correspondence. The photographs are also accompanied by interesting unit histories, biographies, commentaries on weapons and vehicles, as well as analyses of battlefield tactics. These volumes also destroy the myth that the Waffen-SS was purely a military phenomenon. The Waffen-SS was, and remained, in the world and in the long-term planning of Hitler, Himmler and the SS, primarily a political-ideological institution. The multinational Waffen-SS and its esprit de corps must be seen within the context of the European fascist movements of the time and of the polarization between fascism and communism during the years between the First and Second World War. This is especially true for the III 'Germanic' SS Panzerkorps as a future cadre providing SS functionaries for the creation and maintenance of a greater Germanic Reich in the West and the colonization of Lebensraum in the East. SS propaganda deliberately associated the character of the III 'Germanic' SS Panzerkorps with the medieval Teutonic Order in the East as an historic continuity. The dream of a Germanic empire and the Nazi war of extermination against Slavs and Jews were two sides of the same coin. Despite serious flaws during the hasty creation of the III 'Germanic' SS Panzerkorps in 1943, this unit achieved a remarkably successful military performance against a numerically superior opponent, the Red Army. The corps inflicted severe losses on Soviet units during all engagements. However, the losses of the III SS Panzerkorps in manpower and equipment were also extremely high. The personal battle descriptions included in the volumes provide a most powerful witness to the 'slaughterhouse' character of the Eastern Front in 1944-45.

Author: Douglas E. Nash
Publisher: Casemate
ISBN: 1612006361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
The first volume of the tactical and operational history of World War II Germany’s fourth SS-Panzerkorps division and its leader. During World War II, the armed or Waffen-SS branch of the Third Reich’s dreaded security service expanded from two divisions in 1940 to 38 divisions by the end of the war, eventually growing to a force of over 900,000 men until Germany’s defeat in May, 1945. The histories of the first three SS corps are well known—the actions of I, II, and III (Germanic) SS-Panzerkorps have been thoroughly documented and publicized. Overlooked in this pantheon is another SS corps that never fought in the west or in Berlin but one that participated in many of the key battles fought on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war: the IV SS-Panzerkorps. Activated during the initial stages of the defense of Warsaw in late July, 1944, the corps—consisting of the 3. and 5. SS-Panzer Divisions (Totenkopf and Wiking, respectively)—was born in battle and spent the last ten months of the war in combat, figuring prominently in the battles of Warsaw, the attempted Relief of Budapest, Operation Spring Awakening, the defense of Vienna, and the withdrawal into Austria where it finally surrendered to U.S. forces in May, 1945. Herbert Otto Gille’s IV SS-Panzerkorps was renowned for its tenacity, high morale, and, above all, its lethality. Often embroiled in heated disputes with its immediate Wehrmacht higher headquarters over his seemingly cavalier conduct of operations, Gille’s corps remained to the bitter end one of the Third Reich’s most reliable and formidable field formations.

Author: Samuel W. Mitcham Jr.
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 1461751632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The battles for the Germans' last line of defense in World War II, including Arnhem, Aachen, the Huertgen Forest, and Metz How German commanders made decisions under fire Built as a series of forts, bunkers, and tank traps, the West Wall--known as the Siegfried Line to the Allies--stretched along Germany's western border. After D-Day in June 1944, as the Allies raced across France and threatened to pierce into the Reich, the Germans fell back on the West Wall. In desperate fighting--among the war's worst--the Germans held off the Allies for several months.

Author: Steven J. Zaloga
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472832507
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Following the successful landings in Normandy on D-Day and consolidation during Operation Cobra, the Wehrmacht was ordered to begin a counter-offensive named Operation Lüttich. The plan was to send a large Panzer force across the First US Army sector, cutting off its spearheads, and finally reach Avranches on the coast. Had this succeeded, it not only would have cut off the First US Army spearheads, but also Patton's newly deployed Third US Army operating in Brittany. However, thanks to an intercepted radio message, the Allies were well-prepared for the offensive and not only repelled the oncoming panzers, but went on a counter-attack that would lead to a whole German army becoming encircled in the Falaise Pocket. Fully illustrated with stunning full-colour artwork, this book tells the story of Operation Lüttich, the failed offensive which ended any prospect of Germany winning the battle of Normandy.

Author: Joachim Ludewig
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081314079X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a critical turning point in the European theater of World War II. The massive landing on France's coast had been meticulously planned for three years, and the Allies anticipated a quick and decisive defeat of the German forces. Many of the planners were surprised, however, by the length of time it ultimately took to defeat the Germans. While much has been written about D-day, very little has been written about the crucial period from August to September, immediately after the invasion. In Rückzug, Joachim Ludewig draws on military records from both sides to show that a quick defeat of the Germans was hindered by excessive caution and a lack of strategic boldness on the part of the Allies, as well as by the Germans' tactical skill and energy. This intriguing study, translated from German, not only examines a significant and often overlooked phase of the war, but also offers a valuable account of the conflict from the perspective of the German forces.