From 1933 during the Nazi era when Hitler refashioned the German judicial system in line with his oppressive regime, many crimes became capital offences which led to a drastic increase in the number of executions. In 1936, the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gurtner, acting upon Hitler’s direction, ordered that the fallbeil, a variation on the guillotine, replace the hand axe as the official method for all civil executions throughout Germany. To meet this new demand for ‘justice’, many prisons were designated as execution sites and equipped with a ‘Tegel Fallbeil’, named after the inmates of the Tegal prison in Berlin who first built these atrocious contraptions. Beheaded by Hitler: Cruelty of the Nazis, Judicial Terror and Civilian Executions 1933-1945 provides the reader with a chilling insight into the judicial terror that took place and the harrowing stories of execution by fallbeil of civilians who were convicted of domestic resistance to the Nazi regime, treason and other offences after so called ‘trials’ by the Volksgerichtshof or People’s Court. This exceptionally well researched book also explains the Nazi judicial system, the prisons selected for central execution sites and the Nazi officials and executioners that carried out Hitler’s cleansing. Illustrations: 55 black-and-white photographs

SELECTED AS A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six and living in Germany when she witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. She began holding secret meetings in her apartment, forming a small band of political activists set on helping Jews escape, denouncing Hitler and calling for revolution. When the Second World War began, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. In this astonishing work of non-fiction, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on extensive archival research, fusing elements of biography, political thriller and scholarly detective story to tell a powerful, epic tale of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

This gripping and heartbreaking narrative is the first full account of an American woman who gave her life in the struggle against the Nazi regime. As members of a key resistance group, Mildred Harnack and her husband, Arvid, assisted in the escape of German Jews and political dissidents, and for years provided vital economic and military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. But in 1942, following a Soviet blunder, the Gestapo arrested, tortured, and tried some four score members of the Harnacks' group, which the Nazis dubbed the Red Orchestra. Mildred Fish-Harnack was guillotined in Berlin on February 16, 1943, on the personal instruction of Adolf Hitler--she was the only American woman to be executed as an underground conspirator during World War II. Yet as the war ended and the Cold War began, her courage, idealism, and self-sacrifice went largely unacknowledged in America and the democratic West, and were distorted and sanitized in the Communist East. Only now, with the opening of long-sealed archives from Germany, the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI, can the full story be told. In this superbly told life of an unjustly forgotten woman, Shareen Blair Brysac depicts the human side of a controversial resistance group that for too long has been portrayed as merely a Soviet espionage network.

Originally published in 1947, this book chronicles the assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, both of which Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a major leader in the resistance against Hitler, played a direct role. The first attempt took place on 13 March 1943: During a visit by Adolf Hitler to Army Group Center Headquarters in Smolensk, Schlabrendorff smuggled a time bomb, disguised as bottles of cognac, onto the aircraft which carried Hitler back to Germany. The bomb detonator failed to go off, however, most likely due of the cold in the aircraft luggage compartment. Schlabrendorff managed to retrieve the bomb the next day and elude detection. A further attempt followed on 20 July 1944: Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators, including Schlabrendorff, attempted to kill Hitler inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia, in what would become known as Operation Valkyrie. The plot was the culmination of the efforts by several groups in the German resistance to overthrow the Nazi German government. The failure of the assassination and the military coup d’état which was planned to follow led to the arrest of at least 7,000 people by the Gestapo—including Schlabrendorff—of whom 4,980 were executed.

Thanks to the city's large industrial base, factories quickly retooled and mobilized for wartime production. Locals sacrificed their lives for the cause. Through past interviews and archival materials, author Meg Jones reveals these and other patriotic stories.

A Newbery Honor Book author has written a powerful and gripping novel about a youth in Nazi Germany who tells the truth about Hitler. Susan Campbell Bartoletti has taken one episode from her Newbery Honor Book, Hitler Youth, and fleshed it out into thought-provoking novel. When 16-year-old Helmut Hubner listens to the BBC news on an illegal short-wave radio, he quickly discovers Germany is lying to the people. But when he tries to expose the truth with leaflets, he's tried for treason. Sentenced to death and waiting in a jail cell, Helmut's story emerges in a series of flashbacks that show his growth from a naive child caught up in the patriotism of the times , to a sensitive and mature young man who thinks for himself.

Nazi Germany is remembered as a nation of willing fanatics, but countless Germans actively resisted Hitler. No matter how small the act, the danger was the same: any display of defiance was met with arrest, interrogation, torture, and even death. Thomas and Lewis follow the underground network of Germans who believed standing against the Fuhrer to be more important than their own survival. Their bravery is astonishing, and the authors illuminate their struggles, yielding an accessible narrative history with the pace and excitement of a thriller. -- adapted from jacket.