During World War II around 50,000 German soldiers deserted from their units, of whom around 20,000 were executed by shooting, beheading or hanging. The British Army in World War I had executed 306 deserters, some as young as 16, young boys who panicked in the face of fire, and the author traces a direct link between this barbarity and the German judicial executions for desertion in World War II. He tells the poignant stories of many young men who were executed, but principal sources are the experiences of three who survived and suffered ostracism and discrimination for the whole of the rest of their lives. Their legal position remained equivocal because although the Nazi party was defeated and condemned, the execution of deserters had happened under the rule of law, even though these were the increasingly paranoid laws enacted by Hitler. Those who were unfit to serve through illness were executed as being a burden on the state, and the law did not allow for conscientious objection. 270 Jehovah's Witnesses were executed on account of their religious beliefs. In 1938 the statutes were tightened to allow no appeal. Only a handful survived to see the half-hearted rehabilitation law passed by the Bundestag more than half a century later. Peter Schilling, who at first embraced Nazi ideology, escaped to Switzerland over the border and was relegated to a refugee camp. Ludwig Baumann deserted from the French navy base in Bordeaux in June 1942 with his friend Kurt, stealing weapons and ammunition, but a border patrol picked them up. Tortured during interrogation they were condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted and Ludwig spent the war in military prison, suffering from diphtheria and forced to watch daily executions. Objector Helmut Kober was shocked by Hitler's book-burning and the complicity of the Nazi bishops. Following the war, former Nazis were elevated to high positions while those who had resisted faced a continuing stigma. 173 pp, case histories, photos.

A heartbreaking, inspirational and uplifting true story of hope and bravery. Only those who have been prisoners have any concept of the horrors of incarceration or the ineffable joy of release. In mid-1943, a British PoW in Germany began cryptic communication back to England with one goal in mind - to establish a secret trust fund that prisoners of war could use in order to purchase their very own Spitfire to soar above them in the skies over occupied Europe. It was to be named Unshackled Spirit, and this aircraft, along with this one man's selfless act, epitomised the courage and strength of thousands of men. The accounts compiled are from a collection of original YMCA personal wartime logs as issued to RAF prisoners of war in 1944. The book draws out the story of each aviator, how they became a prisoner and life in the various camps. Extensive and amazingly detailed pieces of artwork are taken from the logs and illustrated in the book. An important aspect is how agencies helped by supplying all manner of equipment to the thousands of men behind barbed wire. The role of MI9 is revealed and how it participated in those agencies exploring efforts taken to smuggle escape material into camps without breeching the Geneva Convention and finally the extraordinary measures taken to secure intelligence during the process of prisoner repatriation. Shoot the proofreader for some glaring errors in an otherwise interesting book with chapters on Wing Commander Douglas Bader and Warrant Officer Sydney Eric Hamblin and Bernard Howard Nutt among them, the RAF in Buchenwald and Stalag XII. 320pp, well illus.

Here we present 54 quizzes and more than 1,000 questions covering events, films, music, celebrities, fads, fashions, comedians, actors, inventions, advertisements, toys, novels, sporting greats and scientific achievements that made a 40s childhood unique. This special decade witnessed the first long-playing phonograph record, the last execution at the Tower of London, and did you know that in 1943 a pint of beer cost the equivalent of just 5p today? You could hear Anne Shelon, Duke Ellington and Vera Lynn on the radio, and watch Audie Murphy, Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart on the big screen. Wolverhampton Wanderers won the FA Cup, Hitler was defeated, and penicillin went into mass production. George Formby, Dunkirk, Bing Crosby, famous film quotes, you will be hooked. Line art, nice design, 128 colourful pages.

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, sub-titled 'The Women Who Ran Britain's Trailblazing Military Hospital', Moore is superb at describing the medical advances that resulted in seven research papers by Endell Street doctors being published in The Lancet, among the first ever by women. It is impossible not to love the Suffragette surgeons as they fought the wounded abroad and for women's rights at home, and luckily for us this spectacular story fell into the hands of one of our finest biographers. She tells the forgotten and inspiring story of a London hospital during the First World War which was staffed entirely by women. At this time, the Suffragettes suspended their campaigning and joined the war effort. For pioneering Suffragette doctors and life partners Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson that meant moving to France, where they set up two small hospitals amidst fierce opposition. Their medical and organisational skills were so impressive that in 1915 Flora and Louisa were asked by the War Ministry to return to London and establish a new military hospital in a vast and derelict old workhouse in Covent Garden's Endell Street. There they created a 573-bed hospital staffed from top to bottom by female surgeons, doctors and nurses, which received 26,000 wounded men over the next four years. The book celebrates an extraordinary group of groundbreaking women who challenged and changed Britain's medical establishment and this is an extraordinary story, beautifully told. 376pp, colour and archive photos. Paperback.

'Personal Encounters With An Architect of Genocide', this is a chilling portrait of Radovan Karadzic, giving us an eye-opening new context not only for the Bosnian War, but also how fear can be harnessed and diverted to violent political ends. A remarkable blend of biography, history and psychiatry, the book is based on extraordinary access to a notorious Serbian leader and is scrupulously researched by this skilled interviewer. Stern explores the boundaries of good and evil through hours of interviews with the convicted mass murderer and complex emotions are unleashed on both sides as the interviewer circles a wily subject charmed at skill, obfuscation, misdirection and intimidation. It is an investigation into the nature of violence, terror and trauma. Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held this series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with the Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes. The encounter would alter her understandings of the mechanics of fear, motivations of violence and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities on a state level who target non-combatants in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbours? What happens when an ethnic or racial group loses its dominant position in society? How do leaders harness fear and weaponize it and target minorities with violence? What is the 'eco system' that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders and could anything about their personal histories, personalities or exposure to historical trauma shed light on their behaviour? Karadzic was once a brilliant and often charming psychiatrist and poet who spent 12 years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer. A deeply insightful and chilling book. 304pp.

'A beautiful, poignant book about the darkest period in modern Dutch history.' - David de Jong. Nina Siegal gives us a day-to-day narrative of the Holocaust in the Netherlands by splicing together excerpts from a few of the hundreds of diaries stored in an Amsterdam archive. She helps us understand how 75% of the 140,000 Jews in Holland, a prosperous and cultivated Western European country, could have been murdered 'posing a warning for our own deeply fractured country.' - Joseph Berger. The diary journals of collaborators, resisters and the persecuted - a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at the Westerbork Transit Camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives - are made into a non-fictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust. Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while trying to make sense of her own relationship to this past. As a 'second generation survivor' born and raised in New York, she attempts to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam those questions came up again. Why did 75% of the Jewish community perish and how did this square with the narratives of Dutch Resistance she had heard so much about? She takes us into the lives of seven diary writers and follows their pasts into the present through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. The past is rewritten. Rigorous research and intimate storytelling. 527pp, photos and colour images.

OVER THE OCEAN

From the Wars of the Roses and the Earl of Essex losing his head, London turning against Charles I, Wellington and Nelson crossing paths, Russell's despatches from the Crimean War, spies in World War One, women wearing the trousers in industry and services, World War Two and queueing becoming a pastime, weekly allowances, nylons, whiskey, knicker elastic, digging for victory, eating out, bombing casualties, Ian Fleming taking his naval role with zeal, hospitals, the BBC, over five million books destroyed in the Paternoster Row hit, Penguin revolutionising paperbacks, tensions developing between US troops and Londoners, the ATS and the Home Guards, here are stories of mighty battles, heroic deeds and staunch determination in the face of adversity. A rich history of our remarkable capital city in times of war, an absorbing collection of stories and trivia. 142pp, well illus. with line art and photos.

Michael Morpurgo writes about a Brodie helmet, A. L. Kennedy about a Verners Pattern compass, Tracy Chevalier about the Princess Mary Gift Fund Box, and others about a zeppelin bomb, a recruitment poster, a soldier's writing case, sheet music, a wartime butter dish, a Victoria Cross, school magazines and a little French toy soldier. It is a powerful collection of stories by bestselling authors, each inspired by a different object encompassing both world wars, the home front and the trenches, realism and imaginary friends. Morpurgo triggers tears, others write in blank verse, in the rhythm of jazz to relate the experience of a horn player from Harlem and Jim Kay's angular illustrations convey both atmosphere and fact. A big hardback heavyweight publication, 304pp, well illus. Designed for ages 9-12 years or for all interested in military matters. 21.5 x 17cm.

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. If This Is A Man describes his deportation to Poland and the 20 months he spent working in Auschwitz. The Truce covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. He never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame, but by telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language, he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writings, work, love, power, the nature of things and what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated and apprehensive. This is clearly one of the most focussed Holocaust testimonies, written before the genre existed and with no bitterness or self-pity. This slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out to systematically remember the German hell on earth which he recounts in lucid, unpretentious prose. A must-read with the situation today in Israel and the Gaza Strip. 457pp, paperback.