Clare Mulley Boeken

A riveting double biography of Nazi Germany's most highly decorated women test pilots - Hitler's personal Valkyries.

"Despite Hitler's dictates on women's place being in the home, two fiercely defiant female pilots were awarded the Iron Cross during the Second World War. Other than this unique distinction and a passion for flying that bordered on addiction, these women could not have been less alike. One was Aryan Nazi poster-girl Hanna Reitsch, an unsurpassed pilot, who is now best-known for being the last person to fly into Berlin-under-siege in April 1945, in order to beg Hitler to let her save him. He refused and killed himself two days later. The other pilot was her antithesis, a brilliant aeronautical engineer and test-pilot Melitta Schenk Grafin von Stauffenberg who was part Jewish. She used her value to the Luftwaffe as a means to protect her family. When her brother-in-law, Claus von Stauffenberg, planned the Valkyrie attack to assassinate the Fuehrer, she agreed to provide the transport. Both women repeatedly risked their lives to change the history of the Third Reich--one in support of and the other in opposition. Mulley shows, through dazzling film-like scenes suffused in glamour and danger, that their interwoven dramas are a powerful forgotten story of conformity and resistance and the very strength of women at the heart of the Second World War"--

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: HISTORICAL, POLITICAL & MILITARY. In June 1952, a woman was murdered by an obsessive colleague in a hotel in South Kensington. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising, but that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocratic and his wealthy Jewish wife, she would become one of Britain's most daring and highly decorated secret agents. Having fled Poland on the outbreak of war, she was recruited by the intelligence services long before the establishment of the SOE, and took on mission after mission. She skied over the hazardous High Tatras into Poland, served in Egypt and North Africa and was later parachuted into Occupied France, where an agent's life expectancy was only six weeks. Her courage, quick wit and determination won her release from arrest more than once, and saved the lives of several fellow officers, including one of her many lovers, just hours before their execution by the Gestapo.

Presents the adventures and tribulations of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children.

This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. Agent Zo was the only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and then in Britain she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the 'Silent Unseen'. She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then the only female member of these SOE affiliated forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, whilst being hunted by the Gestapo who arrested her entire family, she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland.After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women's agency in the Second World War.

The first book to tell the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka a WW2 Polish resistance fighter who was secretly trained by the special forces in the British countryside and then became the only woman to be parachuted back behind enemy lines, where she played a vital role in the liberation of Poland

Hana Reitsch a Melitta von Staufenberg byly talentované, odvážné a navíc atraktivní ženy, které musely bojovat s konvencemi, aby si získaly jméno v oblasti letectví, jež v Německu 30. let 20. století ovládali výhradně muži. S příchodem války se obě staly průkopnicemi mezi zkušebními piloty a obě obdržely Železný kříž za službu Třetí říši. Na světě však neexistovaly dvě ženy s odlišnějšími názory a jedna pro druhou neměla jediné dobré slovo. Hanna pocházela ze střední třídy, byla temperamentní a vyloženě árijský typ, zatímco tmavší a spíše plachá Melitta, měla za předky pruskou šlechtickou rodinu. Obě pohánělo hluboké přesvědčení o cti a vlastenectví. Jenomže zatímco Hanna v dubnu 1945 žádala Hitlera, aby jí dovolil odvézt ho do bezpečí, Melitta tajně podporovala nejznámější pokus o atentát na vůdce. Jejich propletené životní příběhy poskytují barvitý pohled na nacistické Německo zevnitř a na jeho přístup k ženám, třídám a rasám. Uznávaná autorka životopisů Clare Mulley se dostává oběma výrazným a nekonvenčním ženám pod kůži a podává obšírný – až dosud z velké části nepoznaný – obraz jejich odlišných, ale přitom podivně souběžných životů na pozadí Olympiády v roce 1936, východní fronty, berlínského aeroklubu a Hitlerova bunkru. Osudy Žen, které létaly pro Hitlera, podává s velkým vypravěčským nadáním. Ve skutečnosti jde o výjimečně pravdivý příběh, vzrušující a barvitý. Téměř jako nejlepší fikce.