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  • Published: 26 September 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141924281
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 184
Categories:

Luck of the Devil

The Story of Operation Valkyrie



The story behind Bryan Singer's major new film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, out in February 2009, from one of Britain's best historians

'It is now time that something was done. But the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience' Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, July 1944

The July 1944 Plot to kill Adolf Hitler was a desperate attempt by a group of senior officers to redeem Germany's honour and end the Second World War. They were heroic because they knew their chances of success were slight and that the result of their failure would undoubtedly be a terrible death. They wanted to leave a message for later generations: that there were Germans who understood the evils of Nazism and were willing to act against it.

This extraordinary story is the basis for Bryan Singer's major new film Valkyrie, due to be released in February 2009. Published for the first time as a separate book, Luck of the Devil is taken from Ian Kershaw's bestselling Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis and is a brilliant account of just what happened in those fateful days at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters, when his opponents came so astonishingly close to assassinating what is one of the modern era's most terrible figures.

  • Published: 26 September 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141924281
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 184
Categories:

About the author

Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw is Professor of Modern history at the University of Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. he was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004.
He was historical advisor to three BBC series: The Nazis: A Warning From History, War of the Century and Auschwitz.
His most recent books are Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and 1936-1945: Nemesis, which received the Wolfson Literary Award for History and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugural British Academy Book Prize; Making Friends with hitler: Lord Londonberry and Britain's Road to War, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2005; and, most recently, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941.

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