The Hague, Netherlands · May 15, 1940 Following the Dutch surrender on this date in 1940, Adolf Hitler appointed fellow Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart to be Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands. Previously, long-time Nazi Party member Seyss-Inquart had served as Reichsstatthalter (governor) of the new German province of Ostmark, which had once been the independent country of…
Rotterdam, Netherlands · May 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Holland, the German Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam’s medieval city center, killing nearly 1,000 people and leaving 85,000 homeless. Rather than endure more bombings—leaflets dropped on Utrecht indicated it was next Dutch city in German crosshairs—the Dutch army surrendered the next day. The German offensive against the…
Slapton Sands, Devonshire Coast, Southwest England · April 28, 1944 Shortly after midnight on this date in 1944 German torpedo boats (E-boats, or Schnellboote in German) on a routine patrol out of Cherbourg in occupied France suddenly found themselves in the middle of Operation (or Exercise) Tiger (codenamed T‑4), a convoy of eight American LSTs…
Berlin, Germany · April 25, 1945 In the same month World War II began in Europe, September 1939, the German Army Weapons Agency (Heereswaffenamt, or HWA) placed all programs associated with the nation’s nascent nuclear energy project under its authority. The weapons program eventually expanded into three main efforts: setting up a nuclear reactor, producing…
London, England · February 27, 1942 Under the cover of darkness on this date in 1942, over 100 British paratroopers kicked off Operation Biting when they parachuted into Nazi-occupied Normandy close to a German radar station in the tiny village of La Poterie-Cap-d’Antifer, 12 miles north of the large French harbor of Le Havre. A number of…
Near Holtzwihr, Colmar Area, Northeastern France · January 26, 1945 On this date in 1945 U.S. Army Second Lt. Audie Murphy, age 20, commanded an infantry company when it came under attack from two hundred German infantrymen and a half dozen tanks on the outskirts of Holtzwihr, near Colmar in northeastern France. Armed with an M1 carbine,…
London, England · January 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed command of the Allied Expeditionary Force preparing to liberate France from the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. A month earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had designated the 53‑year‑old army general Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion of…
CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE 2009
“…an essential book. It provides precise facts and figures for many issues that have heretofore been presented in impressionistic terms.” · The International History Review
Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht’s triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration, the author concentrates on the complex problems of occupying a foreign territory after a surprisingly swift conquest. By exploring in detail such topics as the regulation of public comportment, economic policy, forced labor, culture and propaganda, police activity, persecution and deportation of Jews, assassinations, executions, and torture, this study supersedes earlier attempts to investigate the German domination and exploitation of wartime France. In doing so, these findings provide an invaluable complement to the work of scholars who have viewed those dark years exclusively or mainly from the French perspective.
The classic biography of Hitler that remains, years after its publication, one of the most authoritative and readable accounts of his life. Here in an abridged edition.