The perfect follow-up for readers of Dunkirk, Hidden Britain, Finest Hour and other gripping, personal accounts of life during the Second World War.In late summer 1940, Hitler told his army to prepare to invade England. The nation waited, breathless with tension, for the Nazi threat to become real.Acclaimed author Midge Gillies gathers together the personal accounts of those who still remember this time, with written sources from contemporary press reports, to diaries and letters, to illustrate...
This volume in the Problems in European Civilization series features a collection of secondary-source essays focusing on aspects of the Holocaust. The essays in this book debate the origins of the Holocaust, the motivations of the killers, the experience of the victims, and the various possibilities for intervention or rescue.
Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.
"The dramatic story of the Third Reich--how Adolf Hitler and a core group of Nazis rose to power and plunged the world into a horrific war, perpetrating the genocidal Holocaust while sacrificing the lives of millions of ordinary Germans. In The Third Reich, Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended the Great War, he found his voice and...
Historian McKale challenges the view that the Holocaust was the result of the violence of World War II, arguing that genocide was Hitler's main objective, and that he used the war in Europe to veil his actions.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Elizabeth Wajnberg was born in postwar Poland. Evoking the past from the present, she gathers her family's history as it moves from the prewar years through the war to their arrival in Montreal. She traces through their own voices the memories that echo and have shaped their lives to present a portrait of a family whose bonds were both soldered and sundered by their wartime experiences. The people in this book are living sheymes - fragments of a holy book tha...
Did you know that Winston Churchill narrowly avoided assassination in the Second World War? Or that Prince Albert helped Britain avoid war with the United States in the nineteenth century from his deathbed? In this riveting read, James Moore and Paul Nero reveal fifty of history's most dramatic narrow escapes. From wars that were averted to invasions, revolutions and apocalyptic scenarios that we avoided by the skin of our teeth, History's Narrowest Escapes chronicles such stories as how a Sovi...
Seven years after the death of his mother, Malka, Stanley A. Goldman traveled to Israel to visit her best friend during the Holocaust. The best friend's daughter showed Goldman a pamphlet she had acquired from the Israeli Holocaust Museum that documented activities of one man's negotiations with the Nazi's interior minister and SS head, Heinrich Himmler, for the release of the Jewish women from the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. While looking through the pamphlet, the two discovered a pictur...
The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust (New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History, #7)
by Zohar Segev
Drawing on hitherto neglected archival materials, Zohar Segev sheds new light on the policy of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) during the Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, he can show that there was an impressive system of previously unknown rescue efforts. Even more so, there is evidence for an alternative pattern for modern Jewish existence in the thinking and policy of the World Jewish Congress. WJC leaders supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but did not see it as...
A Community under Siege (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)
by Abraham Ascher
This is a study of how the Jewish community of Breslau-the third largest and one of the most affluent in Germany-coped with Nazi persecution. Ascher has included the experiences of his immediate family, although the book is based mainly on archival sources, numerous personal reminiscences, as well as publications by the Jewish community in the 1930s. It is the first comprehensive study of a local Jewish community in Germany under Nazi rule. Until the very end, the Breslau Jews maintained a stanc...
A lyrical literary memoir that explores the exhilarating, discomforting, and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation taking place in Poland today “I’d grown up with the phrase ‘Never forget’ imprinted on my psyche. Its corollary was more elusive. Was it possible to remember—at least to recall—a world that existed before the calamity?” In the winter of 2000, Louise Steinman set out to attend an international Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the invitation...
"History & Memory, Volume 9", numbers 1 and 2 - more than a decade has passed since the Historians' Debate erupted in Germany. The themes that were at the heart of that impassioned controversy continue to pulsate in historical thinking about the National Socialist era. As a result of the Historikerstreit, increased credence is being lent to the issues of historicization, national identity, historical consciousness, the 'guilt question,' and collective memory, which heretofore had been considered...
For 40 years, Swiss banks denied the existence of thousands of accounts opened by Jewish families during World War II as a haven for their savings, until forced into admission in July 1997. Told in the words of the families and lawyer Henry Burnsteyner - who brought the first successful case against the banks - this text reveals how events unfolded. The process opened to question Switzerland's neutrality during the war and focused attention on the everyday crimes of omission and comission which...