Author : David Blake Knox
Publisher : New Island Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 25,50 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Irish
ISBN : 9781848402003
In February 1943, 32 Irish merchant seaman were sent to a Nazi labour camp in northern Germany. They were being punished for refusing to join the Nazi war effort, and they became part of a slave work force that was used to construct an enormous bunker. However, in order to achieve this goal, the Nazis were prepared to work thousands of slaves to their deaths - including five of the Irishmen who died in one of their camps. This is their story.
Author : David Blake Knox
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 32,88 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Irish
ISBN : 9781848406223
Author : Sean Longden
Publisher : Constable
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 47,67 MB
Release : 2012-10-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1472103599
Sean Londgen has conducted numerous interviews and reveals a new perspective on life under the Nazis that has long been forgotten and replaced by the myth of Colditz and The Great Escape. Between 1939 and 1945 almost 200,000 British and Commonwealth Servicemen were held as Prisoners of War in Germany. Every Allied soldier under the rank of Sergeant was forced to work 12 hour shifts, six days a week, cutting timber, quarrying stone, carving ice from frozen rivers and clearing bombsites. It drove the soldiers to the brink, in which survival was a daily trial. Many starved to death or died from disease, others were killed in accidents or at the hands of their guards.
Author : Michèle Callan
Publisher : Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 49,93 MB
Release : 2017-03-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1848896069
In 1943, thirty-two Irish POWs refused a Gestapo request to work for Germany. They were sent to a labour camp, where they were starved, beaten and forced to dig the foundations for a Nazi super-structure codenamed Bunker Valentin - an immense U-boat factory. Thousands of the camp's prisoners perished, including five of the Irishmen; bodies fell into the foundations and were never recovered. The surviving Irishmen were saved by the goodwill of decent Germans.Among them was Harry Callan, a Catholic boy from Derry who went to sea at sixteen as a British Merchant Navy seaman. His ship had been captured by a German raider two years before he ended up at the labour camp. Harry was unable to speak about the brutality he experienced for decades after he was liberated. When he finally began to tell his story, his family were shocked by what they heard.In his eighties, Harry agreed to revisit the site of his incarceration. He found local historians had no evidence of the Irish prisoners: they had disappeared from official records. Determined to give his comrades recognition, he began working to preserve their memory. This is the gripping story of Harry's capture, resistance and liberation.But above all, it is the final chapter in his quest to honour the forgotten heroes of Bunker Valentin.
Author : Jackson J. Spielvogel
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 32,14 MB
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1351003720
Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler’s role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.
Author : Giles Milton
Publisher : John Murray
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 44,90 MB
Release : 2012-04-12
Category : History
ISBN : 1444717723
This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour. As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime. Gripping, immaculately researched, and brilliantly realised, WHITE GOLD reveals an explosive chapter of popular history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.
Author : Dan Harvey
Publisher : Merrion Press
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 43,59 MB
Release : 2020-05-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1785373358
Post D-Day, with the Allies on the newly created ‘Second Front’ driving fast eastwards beyond Paris, and the Russians on the ‘Eastern Front’ pressing westwards, the fervour of the fanatical Fascist Nazi Regime remained undiminished. For the Third Reich it was intolerable to believe that they must now concede. Instead of ending the war and suing for peace, the levels of hostility, hatred, and horror heightened, and the brutality, viciousness and terror increased. The resistance to the Allied advances across Europe, first towards, then within, Germany intensified, and every inch of the Fatherland was bitterly contested. With the Allies, in their thousands, were the Irish. A Bloody Victory unearths these people from the corners of Irish history and transports them back to the D-Day beaches and the bridge at Arnhem, to the frozen landscapes at the Battle of the Bulge, the banks of the River Rhine, to the unimaginable horrors of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps, and finally to the ruinous Battle of Berlin. There was no one individual ‘Irish narrative’ in the Second World War, but there was a narrative of Irish Individuals, and in A Bloody Victory, Dan Harvey pays due tribute to their significant contribution.
Author : Richard J. Evans
Publisher : Verso
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 18,88 MB
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 9781859844175
Richard J. Evans worked on the historical evidence on behalf of the defence during the Irving libel trial. In Telling Lies about Hitler, the author discusses the importance of historical writing and the social role of historians in such trials.
Author : Tom Wall
Publisher : Merrion Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 41,77 MB
Release : 2019-01-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1785372270
Dachau to the Dolomites is the dramatic but little-known story of a group of prominent Nazi SS hostages transported from various concentration camps to a remote Alpine valley in the final days of the Third Reich. Five Irishmen were among the 160 prisoners whom Himmler and other SS leaders attempted to use as barter to save the regime or, as a final resort, themselves. As well as eminent international statesmen, aristocrats and clergy, the group contained opposition German generals and civilian relatives of those who had plotted against Hitler, including the family of Claus von Stauffenberg, who placed the bomb in Hitler's Wolf's Lair. Among the hostages were a number of British officers, survivors of the famous 'Great Escape', and also Colonel John McGrath from Roscommon, a World War I veteran who had left his job as manager of Dublin's Theatre Royal to rejoin the British Army in 1939. They had been held with Russian, Italian and Polish special prisoners as 'Nacht und Nebel' - Night and Fog - prisoners, whose existence was a state secret. They lived in constant danger of execution, a fate some did not escape, including Stalin's son, who died following a fracas with Irish prisoners. It is an astonishing and epic tale encompassing heroic endurance, escape, betrayal, tragedy and love.
Author : Rónán Gearóid Ó Domhnaill
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 33,99 MB
Release : 2015-04-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1784622303
A long, long time ago… Fadó Fadó: More Tales of Lesser Known Irish History is the sequel to Fadó: Tales of Lesser Known Irish History (Matador, 2013). It reveals more episodes from Irish history throughout the ages. The Irish abroad are not neglected in this collection of tales, many of which are not widely known or have been long forgotten about. The author makes no attempt to heroise or demonise the figures, though some of the characters do not deserve the obscurity to which the passage of time has condemned them, while others are probably best forgotten. Their stories illustrate the rich tapestry that forms Irish history… Who was the walking gallows of Wicklow? What was it about a cave in Donegal that attracted visitors from all over Europe? What happened to the priest who evoked the ire of the Irish government? How did an Irish civil servant defy the Nazis at a time when appeasement was popular? Whose corpse in Galway created wonder and fear? Why did a Monaghan man eat his fellow convicts? And how did a Dublin woman try to assassinate Mussolini? Laid out in chapters long enough to cover what is important and still retain the reader’s interest, this book can be started from anywhere. Just like its prequel, Fadó Fadó is a must-have book for anyone interested in Irish history.
