Showing results for "the escape" in History

In April 1944, a teenager named Rudolf Vrba was planning a daring and unprecedented escape from Auschwitz. After hiding in a pile of timber planks for three days while 3,000 SS men and their bloodhounds searched for him, Vrba and his fellow escapee Fred Wetzler would eventually cross Nazi-occupied Poland on foot, as penniless fugitives. Their mission: to tell the world the truth of the Final Solution.

Dutch law school graduate Philip Winckel manages to escape Nazi-occupied Holland in February 1944. Germany still had the Country in its deadly grip, its long coastline included. Joined by a radio engineer plus three geology students, Philip miraculously slips through the enemy’s Atlantic Wall fortifications by sailing away in a small, repurposed fishing vessel. Powered by a Chevy truck engine, the five men crossed the perilous North Sea to reach England. Many had tried before but failed resulting in their imprisonment and execution.

One of the most famous true stories from the last war, The Great Escape tells how more than 600 men in a German prisoner-of-war camp worked together to achieve an extraordinary break-out. Every night for a year, they dug tunnels, and those who weren't digging forged passports, drew maps, faked weapons and tailored German uniforms and civilian clothes to wear once they had escaped. All of this was conducted under the very noses of their prison guards.

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton - one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty - tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world.

The finest fighting force in the world. Escape. Evade. Survive. Repeat. Seven gripping tales of overcoming the impossible. Arguably the finest special forces troops of the Second World War, the SAS was the jewel in the British military crown. But the near-impossible nature of their heroic missions sometimes left them trapped behind enemy lines, the enemy closing and forced to endure the unendurable. But the unendurable is all in a day’s work for these magnificent seven. Incredible odds. Outstanding bravery. Real adventure.

Between dusk and dawn on the night of March 24-25, 1944, a small army of Allied soldiers crawled through tunnels in Germany in a covert operation the likes of which the Third Reich had never seen. The prison break from Stalag Luft III in Eastern Germany was the largest of its kind in the Second World War. Seventy-nine Allied soldiers and airmen made it outside the wire - but only three made it outside Nazi Germany. Fifty were executed by the Gestapo.

When Truman asked Stalin in 1945 whether Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, "No." As late as 1952, Eisenhower declared: "We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death." What really happened? Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams have compiled extensive evidence - some recently declassified - that Hitler actually fled Berlin and took refuge in a remote Nazi enclave in Argentina.

Lieutenant Bill Fraser and the six SAS men he led were listed as Missing in Action (MIA) after their failure to return from a raid. Nine weeks later they emerged from a death-defying sojourn across the Sahara Desert, after evading and confounding the enemy.

On a rainy night in December 1938, former Nazi official Max Immanuel climbed into his car in Berlin and set out on a harrowing mission. Over the course of a single night, he planned to travel to the gates of Dachau—Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp—to rescue a Jewish prisoner. Max’s mission was profoundly dangerous, and unusual, because this former Third Reich official was a Jew himself. Born Imanuel Rosenfeld, Max had changed his name and his religion, living in fear that his truth would be discovered.

SAS Great Escapes Four recounts how soldiers of the world's most famous fighting force, the SAS, carried out some of the most daring escapes of World War Two. Ranging from the infamous desert campaign of 1944 to the unforgiving terrain of the Vosges Mountains, these inspirational narratives include the tale of three Captains escaping an Italian Prisoner of War Camp in 1943; a perilous escape across Europe aided by the Resistance networks of Holland, Belgium; and a death-defying return to Britain via boat, tunnel and train.

SAS Great Escapes Three recounts the untold stories of six of the most daring escapes pulled off by warriors of the world's most famous fighting force in WWII. Ranging from the birth of the SAS, to the post D-day battles for Nazi-occupied Europe, they cover some of the most iconic operations of the Regiment, and its key characters, while also including untold tales of courage and endurance beyond measure.

Following his mother's death, in 2004, Tyler Trafford discovers an album of old letters and creased photographs that reveal a mother he never knew, a man he's never heard of, and a love affair doomed by class and circumstance. The letters are from Jens Mller, a Norwegian pilot who trained in Canada during the early days of World War II, one of only three prisoners who would make it home after The Great Escape.

Erik Ronningen was on the 71st floor of the North Tower on September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building. After an incredible, near miraculous journey down through the acrid, smoke-filled building, Erik tried to get to the security command center in the South Tower. Unable to do so, he was the last person to make it out of the South Tower alive. Here is the story of his harrowing escape, interwoven with the accounts of 14 others who were lucky enough to be able to recount them.

A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world?

Twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-Soviet partition of Poland and sent to the Siberian Gulag. In the spring of 1941, he escaped with six of his fellow prisoners, including one American. Thus began their astonishing trek to freedom.

Neal Bascomb, a New York Times best-selling author, delivers the spellbinding story of the downed Allied airmen who masterminded the remarkably courageous - and ingenious - breakout from Germany's most devilish POW camp.

In early 1942 the Germans opened a top-security prisoner-of-war camp. Called Stalag Luft III, it soon contained some of the most inventive escapers ever known. They were led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell who masterminded an attempt to smugglehundreds of POWs down a tunnel built under the noses of their guards. The escape would come to be immortalised in the famous film The Great Escape, but in this book Guy Walters takes a fresh look at this remarkable event and asks what was the true story?

Escape is a fascinating exploration of the rise and demise of the internet. It's a look back on the platforms, the people and the online places. It's an analysis of the lessons being online has taught us, how the internet has changed us—and a celebration of the tools it gives us to feel less alone. The online generation have forever altered the world we live in, but is the internet still a place for the people that shaped it?

The thrilling true story of a British Army soldier who was determined to break free from Japanese captivity in World War II. Corporal Roy Pagani staged a daring escape from the Burma-Thailand Railway of Death, after already escaping twice from captivity, and set out to walk 1,000 miles to freedom in India through some of the most challenging landscape in the world. Along to way he endures great hardships, joins a guerrilla force, launches daring raids against the Japanese and faces betrayal and torture at every step. Can he make it to freedom where none have yet succeeded?