A biography of the man who served as head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Hitler’s personal secretary, and the monster who decided the fate of millions. Born on June 17, 1900, Martin Ludwig Bormann became one of the most powerful and most feared men in the Third Reich. An obsessive bureaucrat, it was Bormann who helped steer Hitler’s apparatus of terror so effectively that he became the clandestine ruler of Nazi Germany. After joining the Nazi Party in 1927 Bormann rose through its ranks. Indeed, by July 1933 Bormann had maneuvered himself into the position where he became the Chief of Cabinet in the Office of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. In this role Bormann gradually consolidated his power base, so that when Hess carried out his infamous flight to the United Kingdom in 1941, Bormann stepped into his shoes. As the head of the Party Chancellery, Bormann took control of the Nazi Party. By the end of 1942, he was Hitler’s deputy and his closest collaborator. With the Führer increasingly preoccupied with military matters, Hitler came to rely more and more on Bormann to handle Germany’s domestic affairs. On 12 April 1943, Bormann was appointed Personal Secretary to the Führer. Feared by ministers, Gauleiters, civil servants, judges and generals alike, Bormann identified strongly with Hitler’s ideas on racial politics, destruction of the Jews, and forced labor, and made himself indispensable as the Führer’s executioner. Cold as ice, he decided the fate of millions of people. In January 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing, Bormann returned to the Führerbunker with Hitler. Following Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, Bormann was named as Party Minister, thus officially confirming his rise to the top of the Party. Late the following day he fled from the bunker to escape the encircling Red Army; his fate remaining a mystery for many years. In October 1946 he was found guilty in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and sentenced to death. Drawing heavily on recently declassified documents and files, the historian and journalist Volker Koop reveals the full story of the most faithful member of Hitler’s inner circle, an individual who, whilst little known to the German people, became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Praise for Martin Bormann: Hitler’s Executioner “An unbelievable monster, but people still need to know about him and what he did, here fulfilled by Volker Koop, who simply doesn't hold back.” —Books Monthly (UK)
Born on 17 June 1900, Martin Ludwig Bormann became one of the most powerful and most feared men in the Third Reich. An obsessive bureaucrat, it was Bormann who helped steer Hitler’s apparatus of terror so effectively that he became the clandestine ruler of Nazi Germany. After joining the Nazi Party in 1927 Bormann rose through its ranks. Indeed, by July 1933 Bormann had maneuvered himself into the position where he became the Chief of Cabinet in the Office of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. In this role Bormann gradually consolidated his power base, so that when Hess carried out his infamous flight to the United Kingdom in 1941, Bormann stepped into his shoes. As the head of the Party Chancellery, Bormann duly took control of the Nazi Party. By the end of 1942, he was in effect Hitler’s deputy and his closest collaborator. With the Führer increasingly preoccupied with military matters, Hitler came to rely more and more on Bormann to handle Germany’s domestic affairs. On 12 April 1943, Bormann was appointed Personal Secretary to the Führer. Feared by ministers, Gauleiters, civil servants, judges and generals alike, Bormann identified strongly with Hitler’s ideas on racial politics, destruction of the Jews and forced labor and made himself indispensable as the Führer’s executioner. Cold as ice, he decided the fate of millions of people. In January 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing, Bormann returned to the Führerbunker with Hitler. Following Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, Bormann was named as Party Minister, thus officially confirming his rise to the top of the Party. Late the following day he fled from the bunker in an attempt to escape the encircling Red Army; his fate remaining a mystery for many years. In October 1946 he was found guilty in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and sentenced to death. Drawing heavily on recently declassified documents and files, the historian and journalist Volker Koop reveals the full story of the most faithful member of Hitler’s inner circle, an individual who, whilst little known to the German people, became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.
The renowned WWII historian’s definitive biography of the notorious German SS officer convicted of war crimes for his role in the Holocaust. Described as one of the greatest mass-murderers in history, Rudolf Höss was the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. He was one of the chief architects behind Hitler’s Final Solution. In The Commandant of Auschwitz, Volker Koop details Höss’s military career, his conversion to Nazi ideology, and his ruthless commitment to the Nazi cause. At the age of fourteen, Höss joined the 21st Regiment of Dragoons and rose through the ranks to become the youngest non-commissioned officer in the German Army. After joining the Nazi party in 1922, he was convicted of participating in at least one political assassination, for which he spent six years in prison. In 1934, Höss became a Block Leader at Dachau concentration camp. By 1940, he would be given command of his own camp near the town of Auschwitz. Charged with carrying out the Final Solution of the Jewish question, Höss set about his task with relish. By his own estimation, he was responsible for the deaths of at least 3,000,000 individuals. Justice caught up with Höss after the German surrender. He was arrested on March 11th, 1946, after a year of posing as a gardener under a false name. He was found guilty of war crimes and hanged on April 16th, 1947.
A riveting account of the dictator’s final years, when he got the war he wanted but led his nation, the world, and himself to catastrophe—from the author of Hitler: Ascent “Skillfully conceived and utterly engrossing.” —The New York Times Book Review In the summer of 1939, Hitler was at the zenith of his power. Having consolidated political control in Germany, he was at the helm of a newly restored major world power, and now perfectly positioned to realize his lifelong ambition: to help the German people flourish and to exterminate those who stood in the way. Beginning a war allowed Hitler to take his ideological obsessions to unthinkable extremes, including the mass genocide of millions, which was conducted not only with the aid of the SS, but with the full knowledge of German leadership. Yet despite a series of stunning initial triumphs, Hitler’s fateful decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 turned the tide of the war in favor of the Allies. Now, Volker Ullrich, author of Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939, offers fascinating new insight into Hitler’s character and personality. He vividly portrays the insecurity, obsession with minutiae, and narcissistic penchant for gambling that led Hitler to overrule his subordinates and then blame them for his failures. When he ultimately realized the war was not winnable, Hitler embarked on the annihilation of Germany itself in order to punish the people who he believed had failed to hand him victory. A masterful and riveting account of a spectacular downfall, Ullrich’s rendering of Hitler’s final years is an essential addition to our understanding of the dictator and the course of the Second World War.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This landmark biography of Hitler puts an emphasis on the man himself: his personality, his temperament, and his beliefs. “[A] fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Volker Ullrich's Hitler, the first in a two-volume biography, has changed the way scholars and laypeople alike understand the man who has become the personification of evil. Drawing on previously unseen papers and new scholarly research, Ullrich charts Hitler's life from his childhood through his experiences in the First World War and his subsequent rise as a far-right leader. Focusing on the personality behind the policies, Ullrich creates a vivid portrait of a man and his megalomania, political skill, and horrifying worldview. Hitler is an essential historical biography with unsettling resonance in contemporary times.
Providing a comprehensive overview of the key fields in political network research, Volker Schneider demonstrates that relational structures play a crucial role in many areas and levels of politics and policymaking as interaction, communications, or dependency relations. Schneider expertly guides the reader from the basic concepts through to advanced methods, using empirical analysis of both local and national case studies.
This self-contained text/reference provides a basic foundation for practitioners, researchers, and students interested in any of the diverse areas of multiscale (geo)potential theory. New mathematical methods are developed enabling the gravitational potential of a planetary body to be modeled using a continuous flow of observations from land or satellite devices. Harmonic wavelets methods are introduced, as well as fast computational schemes and various numerical test examples. Presented are multiscale approaches for numerous geoscientific problems, including geoidal determination, magnetic field reconstruction, deformation analysis, and density variation modelling With exercises at the end of each chapter, the book may be used as a textbook for graduate-level courses in geomathematics, applied mathematics, and geophysics. The work is also an up-to-date reference text for geoscientists, applied mathematicians, and engineers.
The only comprehensive, systematic comparison of major mechanical surface treatments, their effects, and the resulting material properties. The result is an up-to-date, full review of this topic, collating the knowledge hitherto spread throughout many original papers. The book begins with a description of elementary processes and mechanisms to give readers an easy introduction, before proceeding to offer systematic, detailed descriptions of the various techniques and three very important types of loading: thermal, quasistatic, and cyclic loading. It combines and correlates experimental and model aspects, while supplying in-depth explanations of the mechanisms and a very high amount of exemplary data.
This highly informative monograph offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary reference guide for the management and treatment of the whole spectrum of painful tears in the anus and anal canal. Based upon a systematic review of all relevant papers on the topic since 1865, it addresses primary, acute and chronic anal fissures – providing a new definition of the last form – and secondary anal fissures in detail, particularly their medical history, etiology, signs and symptoms, medical findings, therapy and its evaluation, and differential diagnosis. The book also covers all available evidence-based therapeutic strategies. As such, it will appeal to a wide readership, from proctologists and surgeons to gynecologists, urologists, dermatologists and gastroenterologists.
Micro process engineering is approaching both academia and industry. With the provision of micro devices, systems and whole plants by commercial suppliers, one main barrier for using these units has been eliminated. This book focuses on processes and their plants rather than on devices: what is 'before', 'behind' and 'around' micro device fabrication - and gives a comprehensive and detailed overview on the micro-reactor plants and three topic-class applications which are mixing, fuel processing, and catalyst screening. Thus, the book reflects the current level of development from 'micro-reactor design' to 'micro-reactor process design'.
[G]ripping, immaculately researched . . . In Mr. Ullrich’s account, the murderous behavior of the Reich’s last-ditch loyalists was not a reaction born of rage or of stubbornness in the face of defeat—common enough in war—but of something that had long ago tipped over into the pathological." —Andrew Stuttaford, Wall Street Journal The best-selling author of Hitler: Ascent and Hitler: Downfall reconstructs the chaotic, otherworldly last days of Nazi Germany. In a bunker deep below Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, took their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 30, 1945—Hitler by gunshot to the temple, Braun by ingesting cyanide. But the Führer’s suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern history, witnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmacht, but the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich. In Eight Days in May, the award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sources, including diaries and letters of ordinary Germans, to narrate a society’s descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the north, residents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied Prague, Czech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reich, huge numbers of people were on the move, creating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home. A taut, propulsive narrative, Eight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of Hitler’s chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, revealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failed, as frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truth, however, the post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanity, an attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgame, but a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.
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