Hitler's War

Crucial moments

In Hitler's War, Heinz Magenheimer examines in detail the options that were open to the Germans as the war progressed. Heinz Magenheimer identifies the crucial moments at which fateful decisions needed to be taken and considers how decisions different from those actually taken could have propelled the conflict in entirely different directions.

Reconstructing the scenarios

In reconstructing the scenarios available at each stage of the war, Heinz Magenheimer is careful to take into account all the factors - political, military, economic and technological - affecting the decision-makers at Fuhrer Headquarters, the Foreign Ministry, the supreme commands of the three arms of the Wehrmacht and, in specific instances, those responsible for armament. For from being just another 'what-if?' speculation, this is a closely argued and wide-ranging assessment of just how, with so many alternatives open, the German High Command chose the path that led, ultimately, to its own destruction.
Hitler's War: Germany's Key Strategic Decisions 1940-1945 by Heinz Magenheimer
ISBN: 076073531X

The Last Days of Adolf Hitler

In the last year of World War II, German defeat was inevitable. Yet rather than reinforcing his troops and focusing his efforts on battle, Adolf Hitler chose to renew his campaign to eliminate the Jews of Europe. Hungary, which had remained mostly untouched during the war, found her Jews being rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps where they were systematically and brutally killed during these last days. This documentary, directed by James Moll and produced through the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, whose goal is to document the memories of those who lived through the Holocaust, records the stories of five Hungarian Jews who managed to survive.

Tragedies

The five survivors, all now living in the United States, movingly tell how they made it and recount the tragedies they witnessed: Tom Lantos, a Congressman from California, whose 17 grandchildren are a gift from his two daughters to try to make up for the families Tom Lantos and his wife lost; Alice Lok Cahana, an artist who uses her painting to testify to what she saw and to grieve for the meaningless death of her sister Edith; Bill Basch, who while working for the resistance escaped from Hungarian police by joining a group of Jews that were, unknowingly, being led to Buchenwald; Renee Firestone, an educator at Simon Wiesenthal Center's Educational Outreach Program, whose touching connection to the past is discovered in the simple gift of a bathing suit given to her by her father; and Irene Zisblatt, a grandmother who smuggled out, at tremendous risk, a few precious diamonds in order to buy bread when there was no more food to be had. Other interviewees include American liberators, a superkommando, and a Nazi doctor who performed experiments on camp inmates.