germany

Describes the efforts of Nazi propagandists to promote the technical achievements of the German Air Force and provides details on all the major aircraft types used by the Luftwaffe, the major figures in command, and the leading pilots.

German midshipman Erich Killinger was captured by Russia at the start of World War I. Killinger escaped the Russian POW train in Siberia, fled to China, and passed through a series of German consulates and safe houses to Shanghai. Given fake identity papers, Killinger traveled in style by ship and rail from Shanghai to Skien, Norway, via the United States. He arrived back in Germany on March 6, 1916--eleven months after being captured.

Discuses the tipping point in World War II when United States and British air forces launched the largest bombing campaign of the war, irreparably damaging the German Luftwaffe.

Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. As a child, she was close to her Catholic grandfather. She knew he fought to end the Russian occupation of Lithuania before Hitler's Nazis came, but she did not know her grandfather's history from 1941-1943. She found out he was the chief of security police under the Gestapo in a Lithuanian town near the killing fields of Poligon where eight thousand Jews were murdered in three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942 the local Polish population was also killed. As Gabis continued to research her grandfather's life, she knew she needed closure. No matter what she learned she had to know the complicated truth about the man she thought she knew.

An illustrated account of the rise and fall of the German air force during World War II as they fought against an enemy who eventually had overwhelming and irresistible forces.