A cyanide capsule and a bullet to the head. This is how Adolf Hitler is about to kill himself. The date is the 30th of April, the year is 1945. Hitler and his wife of less than two days, Eva Braun, are together in the F???hrerbunker, an underground complex near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Berlin itself is not yet under siege, but it is apparent to all that it soon will be. For the Allies have defeated the Wehrmacht in the Belgian Ardennes and have already crossed the Rhine into Germany. While at the same time, the Red ...
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A cyanide capsule and a bullet to the head. This is how Adolf Hitler is about to kill himself. The date is the 30th of April, the year is 1945. Hitler and his wife of less than two days, Eva Braun, are together in the F???hrerbunker, an underground complex near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Berlin itself is not yet under siege, but it is apparent to all that it soon will be. For the Allies have defeated the Wehrmacht in the Belgian Ardennes and have already crossed the Rhine into Germany. While at the same time, the Red Army are advancing westwards towards the German capital, unstoppable since their decisive victory at Stalingrad. As a result, SS generals are now refusing to obey Hitler's orders. Stuck down in his bunker and feeling powerless, Hitler has begun to suffer a mental breakdown. The war is lost and he knows it now. Germany surrendered, unconditionally, a week after Hitler's death, on the 7th of May, 1945. The following day was declared Victory in Europe Day. The Second World War on the European continent was formally confirmed over. The war would continue in Asia for another three months, eventually ending on the 15th of August, 1945 - just over a week after the dropping of the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Germany was in utter ruins and occupied by the armies of the Soviet Union, France, America, and Britain and her Commonwealth. Meanwhile the world had witnessed the utterly destructive power of atomic weapons. This was how the Second World War ended; it was also how the Cold War began. The Cold War would last nearly half a century, with flashpoints occurring in locations all across the globe; from Afghanistan to Vietnam, Korea to Cuba. The real Cold War battlefront, though, was in Germany. It was here where the militaries of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries faced off against the militaries of America and her European NATO allies. It was here where the bulk of the nuclear missiles were located, where the troops were based. Germany - then Germanies - was the true frontier of the Cold War. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union shortly after in 1991, the militaries that had based themselves in Germany for the past 50 years started to slowly return to their respective home countries. The military bases, and all the infrastructure that went along with sustaining them, were stripped bare and left behind. The purpose of this book is to document these Cold War sites as they are today, in 2016. They will not be around for much longer; most face imminent demolition, and the ones that don't are decaying and succumbing to nature. The hope is that by documenting how these bases currently are, as well as providing a short history on each of the sites, an audience unable to visit them themselves will learn something new about the Cold War. It was a military stand-off on a scale of which the world has never seen before. We have history books that communicate that scale; that communicate the dangers faced; the close calls and near misses; the fallibility of all those involved. Perhaps this book, and the pictures it contains, can help to communicate some of these things too, but in a different way.
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Add this copy of Abandoned Cold War Germany to cart. $55.37, new condition, Sold by Revaluation Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Exeter, DEVON, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2017 by Createspace Independent Pub.
Add this copy of Abandoned Cold War Germany to cart. $65.55, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2017 by CreateSpace Independent Publis.
Add this copy of Abandoned Cold War Germany to cart. $101.91, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2017 by CreateSpace Independent Publis.
