D-Day veteran interview – What was it like saying goodbye to your parents to go to war?
Two children interview a D-Day veteran.
His name is Ted Owens. He was a commando and a sniper. He almost died on D-Day and was wounded twice more in the Netherlands.
I’ll be posting some of their clips over the next fortnight.
Question one: What was it like saying goodbye to your parents to go to war?
“Detailed new history” of anti-fascist heroes
Major new review of Defying Hitler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, describing it as a “detailed new history of the people dedicated to stopping a fascist madman” which “sums it all up with an inventive weaving of key players and the steps they took to resist a monster.”
Perry Munyon writes: “Drawing from the vast Nazi and German archives, but also from documented testimonies of major and minor players, execution records, diaries, journals and long forgotten books, newspaper and magazine accounts from around the world, Defying Hitler brings a vast number of stories and heroes together in a concise new history. It reminds us all that good people can dare to stand and fight evil and powerful regimes regardless of the odds.”
Thanks, Perry.
‘Freiheit’. Tribute: the White Rose
For those fascinated by this week’s tributes to Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst (all executed 76 years ago) this is the spot at which their fate was sealed.
Sophie threw anti-Nazi leaflets from the balcony under the clock and into the hall below at Munich university.
All these years later it is still an emotional place to be.
A university is a place for free thinking, for questioning, for youthful exuberance. The Scholls went to the guillotine for displaying these qualities, as would many more connected to their White Rose movement.
When a prison guard came to clear her cell after her execution he found that she had written a single word on the back of her indictment sheet: “Freiheit.” Freedom.
Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule
Coming soon from Dutton Caliber in the US (published April 2019):
An enthralling work of popular history that vividly resurrects the web of everyday Germans who resisted Nazi rule
Nazi Germany is remembered as a nation of willing fanatics. But beneath the surface, countless ordinary, everyday Germans actively resisted Hitler. Some passed industrial secrets to Allied spies. Some forged passports to help Jews escape the Reich. For others, resistance was as simple as writing a letter denouncing the rigidity of Nazi law. No matter how small the act, the danger was the same–any display of defiance was met with arrest, interrogation, torture, and even death.
Defying Hitler follows the underground network of Germans who believed standing against the Fuhrer to be more important than their own survival. Their bravery is astonishing–a schoolgirl beheaded by the Gestapo for distributing anti-Nazi fliers; a German American teacher who smuggled military intel to Soviet agents, becoming the only American woman executed by the Nazis; a pacifist philosopher murdered for his role in a plot against Hitler; a young idealist who joined the SS to document their crimes, only to end up, to his horror, an accomplice to the Holocaust. This remarkable account illuminates their struggles, yielding an accessible narrative history with the pace and excitement of a thriller.
Praise for Defying Hitler:
“The question was often asked amid the ruins of the Third Reich: why did the Germans fight on for so long when all was lost? Those liberated from concentration camps knew the answer. Terror, mass murder, ruthless and barbaric persecution—all opposition had been mercilessly quashed. In Defying Hitler, Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis show in chilling and vivid detail just how courageous were those who dared to defy Hitler. A terrifying and timely account of resistance in the face of the greatest of evils.”—Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris
“This carefully researched book challenges the myth that the German people were virtually unanimous in support of Hitler… Defying Hitler is filled with almost unbearable suspense and drama.”—Booklist (starred review)
“A deeply researched work that passionately challenges the popular myth that ‘the German people followed Hitler as if as one mass, mesmerized like the children of Hamelin by the Pied Piper.'”—Kirkus
Greg Lewis 