World War Two

Five months, one week and three days of hell. The German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in August 1942, using Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by intense bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble.

From childhood smuggling adventures to the devasting destruction of bombing raids, these are tales of humour and tragedy from those who have stories to tell.

As Adolf Eichmann sent hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz gas chambers, the Jews of Budapest needed the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz escapees Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosinto save them. 

In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became the first Jews ever known to break out of Auschwitz. Under electrified fences and past armed watchtowers, evading thousands of SS men and slavering dogs, they trekked across marshlands, mountains and rivers to freedom. Vrba's mission: to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust.

To probe the past is to submit the memory of one's ancestors to a certain kind of trial. In this case, the trial came to me. A few years ago Linda Kinstler discovered that a man fifty years dead a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in Latvia.

From the bestselling author of Normandy '44 and Sicily '43, a brilliant new history of the last days of the war

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat comes the gripping untold story of one of the most heroic units that fought in World War II. On December 7th 1941, the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.

In August 1942, beleaguered Malta was within weeks of surrender to the Axis, because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. 

A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism.

In this remarkable, ground-breaking new book Sean McMeekin marks a generational shift in our view of Stalin as an ally in the Second World War.