Ocean State Libraries

Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, thirty years later, she learned the shocking reason why.

Helga's mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a "correction" unit and responsible for untold acts of torture.

Nearly thirty more years would pass before their second and

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Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death." From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious...

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the landmark biography that tells the full-scale, riveting, and untold story of Marlene Dietrich. Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds...

After more than sixty years, the nightmarish sufferings of so many victims of Germany's Nazi regime have been documented extensively. Rarely, however, does one hear about the experiences of German children during World War II. Coming of age amidst the chaos, brutality, and destruction of war in their homeland, they had no understanding of what was happening around them and often suffered severe trauma and physical abuse. This haunting memoir tells...

Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's compelling autobiography, written in 1888, just weeks before he succumbed to madness.

“Ben Macintyre’s rollicking, spellbinding Agent Zigzag blends the spy-versus-spy machinations of John le Carré with the high farce of Evelyn Waugh.”—William Grimes, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

“Wildly improbable but entirely true . . . [a] compellingly cinematic spy thriller with verve.”—Entertainment Weekly
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS...

Marlene Dietrich began her career in her native Berlin as a model, then as a stage and screen actress during the silent era, and became a star with the international success "The Blue Angel." Then, under the watchful eye of director and mentor Josef von Sternberg, she became one of the brightest stars in Hollywood. Charlotte Chandler, who spoke with Dietrich in her Paris apartment in the mid-1970s, relies extensively on the star's own words to reveal...

Before Darwin, before Audubon, there was Maria Sibylla Merian. An artist turned naturalist known for her botanical illustrations, Merian was born just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty, she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis-an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less a woman. When she returned, she...