Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane,...

It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did, or that it would even end well. 1944 was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler's waning power. Instead, it saved those democracies -- but with a fateful cost. 1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion...

Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia, a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay, she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto of Riga and its southern forest where tens of...

How did Berlin's Jewish Hospital, in the middle of the Nazi capital, survive as an institution where Jewish doctors and nurses cared for Jewish patients throughout World War II? How could it happen that when Soviet troops liberated the hospital in April 1945, they found some eight hundred Jews still on the premises? Daniel Silver carefully uncovers the often-surprising answers to these questions and, through the skillful use of primary source materials...

In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In "FDR and the Jews," they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician--compassionate but also pragmatic--struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions.

The remarkable rise and shameful fall of one of the twentieth century's greatest conglomerates At its peak in the 1930s, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. To this day, companies formerly part of the Farben cartel-the aspirin-maker Bayer, the graphics supplier Agfa, the plastics giant BASF-continue to play key roles in the global market. IG Farben itself, however, is remembered mostly...

Traces the history and purpose of a small steamer that survived U-boat attacks during World War II, describing how it was renamed "Exodus 1947" to be better suited to its purpose of ferrying Holocaust survivors to Palestine, and detailing the incident between the "Exodus 1947" and the British Royal Navy in international waters.

"From an award-winning historian, the first full depiction of the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution and how they laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Includes illustrations and maps"--

In “Hitler's Shadow War”, World War II scholar Donald M. McKale contends that the persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was Hitler's primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered on the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this "shadow...