Austria Books

I purchased this book as a gift for my Oma's 99th Birthday! It made her cry tears of joy to see her native city again, new and old!

The culmination of my father's 20+ years of research into previously unattributed and/or untranslated coinage. 56 pages of painstakingly hand-illustrated coinage. My father first published this guide in 1970 and made two printings.

An interesting and easy to understand book on the history of Austria. This is the kind of book I've been looking for.

After reading all the books about Mozart, finally a book about Constanze Mozart and her life after Moz's death. The affair with the Requiem is frustrating and strange, but the author tries as much as he can with historical accuracy to solve the mystery. Of course, there is no solution. Mozart's Requiem and who really wrote it and why still remains unknown. Gartner persuades that perhaps Constanze had a secret reason for keeping a cover on the real reason behind the Requiem's origin and purpose. Her odd behavior after Mozart's death, and dealings with Sussmayer and others involved at the end, as well as the story behind the "Gray Messenger" are revealed in fascinating detail in this book. The story is rich in detail, at times a little confusing because of all the people involved, such as Moz's publisher,and Count Stuppach (who commissioned the Requiem in secret) and other interesting personalities with whom Constanze Mozart interacted in a secret mission involving the Requiem. If you think that you've read all the books about Mozart that are available, read this one. It adds a new dimension to the fact that Mozart's death may have been untimely and unnatural.

From the famous Time-Life series, includes dishes from soup to dessert. Some of the recipes are: Cold sour cherry soup, liver dumplings, fish Dalmation style, Anchovy butter sauce, Hunter's stew, Transylvanian goulash (Okay, where's my copy of Dracula?), Lemon and sour cream salad dressing, and of course desserts like Emperor's pancake, Chocolate cream slices, and Spanish Wind cake.
With spiral binding, to lay perfectly flat. Yum.

Odilo Globocnik was of partial Slovenian ancestry. Like Hitler, he grew up with the belief that the Slavic and Jewish elements were corrupting and weakening the Germanic element of his native Austria. Globocnik set up the death camps of Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Settling in Lublin in German-occupied Poland, he was also responsible for the deportation (and frequent murder) of over 100,000 Poles of the Zamosc region and the terror-pacification of Polish guerilla resistance. Like Himmler, Globocnik carried cyanide in his mouth after Germany's defeat, and used it the moment that his cover had been blown.

For all the emphasis nowadays upon Jews and Poles being unequal victims, the Nazi opinion of the two peoples wasn't all that different. Konrad Meyer, an agrarian economist who worked for Globocnik, assigned the following scores for "racial worth": Jews--zero percent, Poles and Lithuanians--15%, Latvians--50%, and Estonians-->50% (p. 105).

The German-speaking peoples follow this north/south division: "Bavarians--and most Austrians also subscribe to this self-image--are thought of as soft-spoken, beer-swilling, sausage-eating Catholics of dark complexion, while Prussians are for the most part harsh and haughty, blond and blue-eyed Hanseatic Protestants. This division runs along the Main [Mainz?] River. The Prussians (or `fish heads') are considered to be power-hungry, stuffy, and morally rigid; Bavarians are sloppy, lazy, and inept. Hitler, who rose from the `Bavarian' camp to the position of Fuehrer by declaring the `Prussians' as an Aryan ideal, nevertheless preferred to surround himself with `Bavarians'..." (p. 88).

Nazi official sometimes attempted to topple their rivals through accusations of partial Jewish ancestry. Henning von Winterfeld's wife had such ancestry, but it had been pardoned by the Fuehrer, hopefully making it a non-issue (pp. 68-69).

In refutation of the Holocaust deniers, who had argued that diesel engines produce insufficient carbon monoxide for gassing, Rieger showed that Soviet tank engines actually used a combination of petrol and diesel (p. 204). Moreover, diesel engines, when run in near-throttle mode, produce more CO.

Is the European Union a backdoor attempt by present-day Germany to do what she had failed in two world wars--rule over Europe? Dr. Karl Schnurer, a nonagenarian unrepentant Nazi and onetime acquaintance of Globocnik, obviously thinks so: "In his eyes, the German and Italian cultures were all that mattered with regard to civilization, and Slavic countries did not figure. Schnurer felt that the European Union's expansion of our day represented the finalization of the German `Lebensraum' programme for the east." (p. 18)

Mr Arnold combines good Historical accuracy with a very pleasant writing style. The narrative provides a good balance between strategic/grand tactics events, and small unit combat details.

On the large picture, Mr Arnold tries to analyse the decisions taken by the commanders with the information they had at the moment, not with the hindsight historians usually use to criticise great commanders. This is a refreshing way of seing the command-decision aspect that fascinates so many.

On the detail side, the book provides several minor actions taken by units from both opponent armies. For once, one does not feel that the author based his book exclusively on sources from one side.

There is only a little fault, probably a lapse: the maps are not numbered, although all text references made to them are! A minor problem, that I solved quickly with a pencil.

The book is a pleasure to read and highly recommended. Maybe somewhat less biased that Petre's, and much easier to read. With Scott-Bowden's book (for the organisation details) and Esposito's book (for the maps), you'll have everything you'll ever need to reproduce a full wargame of the campaign.

One of the very best day trip books I have ever purchased. We started our Nov. 2008 Germany / Bavaria trip in our base town of Munich. Would strongly suggest using this town as a base camp because the rail system is superb. We took 3 day trips on our own using exactly ever recommendation in this book for 2 of those trips (Regensburg & Garmisch/Zugspitze) the Regensburg trip was awe-inspiring in detail and wish we would have had more time to tour the older areas of the town. Wish there had been a section on Landsberg in the book, so we would have had the same support as the other 2 day trips. We also used the book, when we took guided tours to Salzburg, Fussen and during our stay in Munich. I will only purchase this line of day trip books from this point on. Wish we had London's book in late May, and I do not see an Ireland version for our upcoming May 2008 trip.

The absorbing true story of the experiences of Freddie Knoller, a Jew born in Vienna in 1921.

The story follows Freddie's childhood and the worsening situation and threats surrounding the growth of the Nazi regime in Europe. Eventually the situation becoming untenable and resulting in the break-up of his family following Kristallnacht when the Nazis invaded his family's appartment block and threw a neighbour to his death from a window.

At his parents' behest, Freddie fled alone with directions to take him to friends in Belgium. Here he was eventually caught and interned, with a period of imprisonment in Southern France. His experiences throughout this time are documented. Freddie was able to escape from his captors and made his way to Paris where he forsook his Jewish identity and adopted a German/Alsace identity, beginning a rather dubious lifestyle during which he would meet German soldiers at a railway station and escort them to venues of ill-repute/brothels in the Paris sidestreets.

It was at this time, during May 1941, that he witnessed the beginnings of the brutal round-ups in Paris of his fellow Jewish civilians. He was chilled as he stood back and watched with revulsion at the zeal and almost religious enthusiasm that Jews were brutally and ferociously rounded up, irrespective of their age, sex, health, age or frailty. What sickened him most was the revelation that those doing the dirty work here were not Germans. There was not any SS or Gestapo personnel to be seen. It was the ordinary French gendarmes that were doing the dirty work of the Third Reich here in Paris, just like others did throughout Eastern Europe, the Ukraine etc.. The French gendarmes were the `flesh and blood' part of the Nazi killing machine in Paris, wilfully and enthusiastically arresting their own people, for no other reason than that they were Jewish. Knowing full well what end awaited their victims.

Freddie eventually came to the attention of the Gestapo himself and fled once more, joining the Resistance where he served until he was betrayed to the Germans, probably due to his intimate confessions to a French girl.

He then describes his journey in a cattle-car to Auschwitz, where the horrors of daily existence are examined in some detail.

As the Russian forces approached Auschwitz from the East, Freddie and his co-prisoners began a death march in the opposite direction. His comrades who stumbled and fell, and even those who stopped and bent to tie their laces, were shot in the head and thrown into the ditch alongside the road.

During a brief rest stop on the march, Freddie discovered that the prisoner next to him had died or frozen to death during the interlude. He noticed that the prisoner wore the red `F' triangle patch on his rags, which denoted him to be a Frenchman, probably a communist.

Knowing that ANY class or category of prisoner received better treatment than those wearing the Jewish `Yellow Star/Shield of David', Freddie replaced it with the red triangle which he tore from his dead companions rags. Freddie believed that this patch might ultimately save his own life.

Indeed Freddie's treatment by his captors and fellow prisoners did improve as he again forsook his Jewish identity. The death march was followed by periods in Nordhausen and Bergen Belsen concentration camps. Freddie witnessed countless episodes of brutal and sadistic treatment of his fellow inmates. Callous public executions being commonplace. As the Nazi regime crumbled with the approach of Allied Forces, Freddie witnessed the lowest ebb of humanity when cannibalism occurred in front of his own eyes. Two prisoners tracked another who was staggering in a `drunken-like' stupor which preceded death. As this person fellow to the ground in death, his `fellow' inmates pounced on his body, cutting away lumps of flesh with a knife. They then cooked the `hacked-off meat' over a fire behind a barrack block

Not long afterwards the camp of Bergen Belsen was liberated by British Forces. However, the prisoners were too weak to celebrate being on the verge of starvation. Dead bodies were everywhere and the British soldiers made the SS dig mass graves for the prisoners who had died in their `care'.

Having restored his Jewish identity and then interviewed by a British Reverend Freddie revealed that he was from Vienna. The shocking reply informed Freddie that the Germans had declared Vienna to be `Judenfrei'...free from Jews and that the city was now occupied by the Russians. Freddie's parents, who had refused to see the personal threat to them from the Nazis in Vienna, had been gassed at Auschwitz during Freddie's own imprisonment there, unknown to him.

Kernecker and Flippo's collection of folk tales from German-speaking Europe is wonderful material for students of the language with a basic proficiency in German grammar and vocabulary. It is comprised of seventeen legends, varying in length between one and three pages, each preceeded by a paragraph of background material and followed by a page of review questions. The book includes a small but invaluable German-English glossary, owing to the out-of-the-way nature of some of the vocabulary. Aside from the preface and glossary, this book is written entirely in German. While it is not appropriate for the beginner, it is a highly entertaining and helpful book for more experienced students of German.