prisoners and prisons, german

"The story of a group of Allied POWs in WWI who dared to escape from Germany's most notorious prison camp, Holzminden"--Provided by publisher.

In 1945 Moritz Nachstern sat down in his Oslo apartment to tell the story of how he survived the Holocaust. Seven hundred and seventy-one Jews from Norway were taken during the German occupation of 1940-45. He was one of only thirty-four who came back. He nearly died in Auschwitz before he was selected for the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the isolated Block 19. The SS watched the occupants of Block 19 carefully for it was these men who produced perfect counterfeit British and American money for the Nazis.

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.

Only a week after joining the 8th Durhams in April 1915 Private Herbert Tustin was captured at the Battle of Ypres. He describes the horror of trench warfare, his treatment on being taken a prisoner of war (POW) and the three day train journey into Germany. There followed sixteen months captivity at Rennbahn POW Camp with its hunger, hardships, brutality, work regime, friendships, humor and the different national characteristics of fellow POWs. In late summer 1916 together with Canadian, Gerrie Burk, the author escaped over the wire. For the next 10 days traveling by night, sleeping rough and stealing basic food they headed for Holland. Somehow they miraculously managed to avoid recapture despite the closest of calls. Once on the Dutch coast they found a boat, the SS Grenadier, to carry them across the mine-strewn, submarine infested North Sea to England, arriving on 18 September. This amazing story of war, imprisonment, escape and survival concludes with the author's wife recalling the hero's welcome home, the joyful reunion and his proposal of marriage.

During World War II, when the men in Gerda's family go to war, the German government sends them three French prisoners of war to work on their farm. Although they are under orders to treat the men as enemies, Gerda and her family manage to find ways to show them kindness and friendship. Based on a true story.

Lieutenant Tommy Hart, a prisoner at the fiercely guarded Stalag Luft 13 in Bavaria in 1942, faces a moral dilemma when he is called upon to defend African-American Tuskegee airman Lincoln Scott, who has been accused of the brutal murder of a fellow prisoner.

In 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers were trapped in POW camps in occupied France. The odds of their survival were not good. The odds of escaping, even worse. But one man had the courage to fight the odds and figure out how to negotiate the release of an unprecedented 149 prisoners.

"This absorbing and captivating nonfiction account (with never-before-published photographs) offers readers an in-depth anthropological and historical look into the lives of those who suffered and survived Breendonk concentration camp during the Holocaust of World War II"--.

When young American pilot Rose Justice is captured by Nazis and sent to Ravensbruck, the notorious women's concentration camp, she finds hope in the impossible through the loyalty, bravery, and friendship of her fellow prisoners.

"Wachsmann offers an ... integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945"--Amazon.com.