Hitler's Naval War
Place_Pub: Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974. Hardcover. 400, illus., endpaper illus., maps, appendices, bibliography, index, some darkening to text, some wear to DJ edges. The author was formerly an intelligence officer in Hitler's Navy. The book contains revelations about the conflict of strategic ideas, both within the German Admiralty and between its head and Hitler; about the failure of the Navy under Raeder and the Luftwaffe under Goering to cooperate; and about the feuds between the Naval staff on shore and the Fleet Commanders at sea. Strange as it may seem, no reliable and yet popular history of the German Navy during the Second World War has appeared since the German war records were returned from London and became available to German historians and journalists. With such records now to hand, this book can report the highlights and decisive phases of the war at sea from the German point of view. Germany's defeat at sea was the one which irretrievably lost her the war. Efforts to suppress or forget our mistakes, though originally understandable, have succeeded only in cloaking personalities in a veil of "taboo'' quite contrary to German naval tradition. Erich Raeder, architect of the fleet that in 1939 had to be sent out to fight a war that it did not expect, once pronounced: "The deeds of the German Navy must be subjected to the full light of day." Cajus Bekker (born August 12, 1924 in Düsseldorf; † March 10, 1975; actually Hans Dieter Berenbrok) was a German journalist and naval writer. Hans Dieter Berenbrok grew up in Hamburg and joined the Navy in 1943, where he served as a naval intelligence officer (radio officer) and at the end of the war held the rank of senior ensign. After the war, Berenbrok worked as a news editor and reporter for various newspapers and magazines. In 1953 he published his first book, Kampf und Untergang der Kriegsmarine, under the pseudonym Cajus Bekker. A documentary report in words and pictures, the content of which he had compiled from numerous private records and innumerable personal interviews, since German files were still in the custody of the victorious powers at the time. The book was distributed free of charge to 460 youth villages and youth homes in 1956 as part of a propaganda campaign by the Adenauer government, together with other works, in order to “promote the spirit of defense among young people and make them understand how the new German armed forces were included in the defense alliance of the Atlantic Community. " From 1955 Berenbrok was lecturer and editor for the marine program of Gerhard Stalling-Verlag, where he also remained active as the author Cajus Bekker. Berenbrok also used his reserve exercises (as Korvettenkapitän d. Res.) In the Federal Navy to deal with the German naval files returned by Great Britain in the Military History Research Office and in the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg. According to Jürgen Rohwer, Bekker saw his task in “making the achievements of our seafarers and aviators in the Second World War in front of the largest possible group of readers”. Condition: good, good / Good.
Keywords: WWII, Naval, German Navy, Adolf Hitler, Erich Raeder, Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, U-Boats, Karl Doenitz
ISBN: 0385020228
[Book #52495]
Price: $45.00