A landmark account of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, based on award-winning research, and recently discovered archival material.

In the 1930s, Germany was at a turning point, with many looking to the Nazi phenomenon as part of widespread resentment towards cosmopolitan liberal democracy and capitalism. This was a global situation that pushed Germany to embrace authoritarianism, nationalism and economic self-sufficiency, kick-starting a revolution founded on new media technologies, and the formidable political and self-promotional skills of its leader.

Based on award-winning research and recently discovered archival material, The Death Of Democracy is a panoramic new survey of one of the most important periods in modern history, and a book with a resounding message for the world today.

A revelatory account of the racist conspiracy theory that now pervades global politics – from the prize-winning author of the million-copy bestseller How To Be an Antiracist.

Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies ‘great replacement theory’, which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities.

In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age.

But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik’s massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today.

NUREMBERG, 1945. The eyes of a world desperate for truth, hope and justice turn to a courtroom where the leaders of the defeated Nazi regime sit in the dock. In this revelatory history, Natalie Livingstone sheds new light on the trial of the century, through the stories of extraordinary women whose importance has long been ignored.

Anti-fascist journalist Erika Mann - daughter of Germany's most famous writer - came to Nuremberg seeking a reckoning with a Germany she had fled more than a decade before, while Hungarian countess Ingeborg Kálnoky found herself presiding over a guest house in which perpetrators and survivors of the Nazi's worst crimes lived side by side. Russian interpreter Tatiana Stupnikova would be forced to confront terrifying revelations about her country's recent history, and German writer Ursula von Kardorff, reporting on the trials for domestic audiences, found herself torn between the evidence of the courtroom and a selective memory of her work for the Third Reich. Although she was barred from speaking in court on account of her gender, American lawyer Harriet Zetterberg assembled some of the most important prosecution cases, while British painter Laura Knight produced the most famous image of the courtroom. Rebecca West, the celebrated writer, arrived feeling lost and depleted and hoped the proceedings at Nuremberg might somehow shock her back to life. And Auschwitz survivor and French Resistance fighter Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier's defiant, devastating testimony laid the foundations for the world's awareness of the Holocaust.

Seen through the eyes of these astonishing women, the story of Nuremberg is a monumental human drama full of hope and romance, terror and conflict. It is the story of a search for truth among misinformation, love among ruins and light in overwhelming darkness. Eighty years after the trials, The Nuremberg Women offers a gripping new account of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.

For a brief time in a Europe threatened and then occupied by Nazi Germany, jazz was heard as ubiquitously as rock ' n' roll is today. In a personal search for the story of that time, Mike Zwerin spent two years traveling across Europe talking with individuals who performed and enjoyed jazz in Hitler's dark shadow, including the Ghetto Swingers, a Jewish jazz band that "toured" Auschwitz and Theresienstadt; the Luftwaffe pilot who listened to Glenn Miller while bombing London; Django Reinhardt, the brilliant guitarist who refused to flee Nazi-controlled France; and many others.

The essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of distinguished scholars, combine to explore the way in which fascism is understood by contemporary scholarship, as well as pointing to areas of continuing dispute and discussion.
From a focus on Italy as, chronologically at least, the 'first Fascist nation', the contributors cover a wide range of countries, from Nazi Germany and the comparison with Soviet Communism to fascism in Yugoslavia and its successor states. The book also examines the roots of fascism before 1914 and its survival, whether in practice or in memory, after 1945. The analysis looks at both fascist ideas and practice, and at the often uneasy relationship between the two.
The book is not designed to provide any final answers to the fascist problem and no quick definition emerges from its pages. Readers will rather find there historical debate. On appropriate occasions, the authors disagree with each other and have not been forced into any artificial "consensus," offering readers the chance to engage with the debates over a phenomenon that, more than any other single factor, led humankind into the catastrophe of the Second World War.

Published during the heyday of fascism in Europe, It Can't Happen Here is a chilling cautionary tale by one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, which is still startlingly relevant almost a century later. Charting the rise to power of Berzelius 'Buzz' Windrip, who whips his supporters into a frenzy while promising drastic reform under a banner of patriotism and traditional values, It Can't Happen Here decries the tactics used by politicians to mobilise voters, and exposes the danger of authoritarianism arising from populist platforms, and the chaos such regimes can leave in their wake.

What are you willing to do to survive? What are you willing to endure if it means you might live? 'Achingly moving, gives much-needed hope . . . Deserves the status both as a valuable historical source and as a stand-out memoir' Daily Express 'A story that needs to be heard' 5***** Reader Review Entering Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp, Franci was expected to die. She refused. In the summer of 1942, twenty-two-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labour camps in Hamburg, and finally to Bergen Belsen. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. Having endured the transportation of her parents, she never forgot her mother's parting words: 'Your only duty to us is to stay alive'. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele, and claim to be an electrician. A split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life. Unpublished for 50 years, Franci's War is an astonishing account of one woman's attempt to survive. Heartbreaking and candid, Franci finds the light in her darkest years and the horrors she faces instill in her, strength and resilience to survive and to live again. She gives a voice to the women prisoners in her tight-knit circle of friends. Her testimony sheds new light on the alliances, love affairs, and sexual barter that took place during the Holocaust, offering a compelling insight into the resilience and courage of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Above all, Franci's War asks us to explore what it takes to survive, and what it means to truly live. 'A candid account of shocking events. Franci is someone many women today will be able to identify with' 5***** Reader Review 'First-hand accounts of life in Nazi death camps never lose their terrible power but few are as extraordinary as Franci's War' Mail on Sunday 'Fascinating and traumatic. Well worth a read' 5***** Reader Review

George Bell was one of the most significant British church leaders of the mid-20th century and in many ways he came to define the involvement of British church people with the issues which arose from the Third Reich. The George Bell-Alphons Koechlin Correspondence, 1933-54 presents the extensive correspondence between Bell and a leading Swiss pastor and President of the Basel Church Council, Alphons Koechlin. The letters of Bell and Koechlin make an important contribution to our understanding of ways in which the unfolding history of the Hitler regime was interpreted in an international context from its earliest months in 1933 to its final destruction in 1945. In presenting the letters, this book captures a sustained meeting of European minds, thinking together in the midst of a crisis that was altering the conventional perimeters of politics and religion, and by degrees changing the life of the whole European continent - and drawing British politics into its vortex. This volume provides for the first time all the letters exchanged between Bell and Koechlin in their original English, with full scholarly apparatus and connected material. It contributes valuably to the historiography of the Third Reich and develops our understanding of Nazism not simply as an episode in German history, but as a fundamental crisis in international politics, religion and society.

What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism, Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires. Historians have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. To date, this scholarship has largely employed an "inside-out" methodology that examines the imperial discourses that pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While effective, such approaches tend to ignore the ways in which these places and their inhabitants understood European fascisms. Addressing this imbalance, Anti-Colonialism adopts an "outside-in" approach that analyses fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, and Mohandas Gandhi. Seen from India, the crises of Interwar fascism-the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement, and the outbreak of the Second World War-were yet another eruption of imperial expansion analogous (although not identical) to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles. Whether fascist, democratic, or imperialist, Europe's great powers collectively negotiated the fate of smaller nations.

This interdisciplinary volume revisits Adorno's lesser-known work, Minima Moralia, and makes the case for its application to the most urgent concerns of the 21st century. Contributing authors situate Adorno at the heart of contemporary debates on the ecological crisis, the changing nature of work, the idea of utopia, and the rise of fascism. Exploring the role of critical pedagogy in shaping responses to fascistic regimes, alongside discussions of extractive economies and the need for leisure under increasingly precarious working conditions, this volume makes new connections between Minima Moralia and critical theory today. Another line of focus is the aphoristic style of Minima Moralia and its connection to Adorno's wider commitment to small and minor literary forms, which enable capitalist critique to be both subversive and poetic. This critique is further located in Adorno's discussion of a utopia that is reliant on complete rejection of the totalising system of capitalism. The distinctive feature of such a utopia for Adorno is dependent upon individual suffering and subsequent survival, an argument this book connects to the mutually constitutive relationship between ecological destruction and right-wing authoritarianism. These timely readings of Adorno's Minima Moralia teach us to adapt through our survival, and to pursue a utopia based on his central ideas. In the process, opening up theoretical spaces and collapsing the physical borders between us in the spirit of Adorno's lifelong project.

At least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of the famine, the physical and social consequences, the ways Spaniards tried to survive, the regime's reluctance to accept international relief, the politics of cooking at a time of famine, and the memory of the famine. The volume challenges the silence and misrepresentation that still surround the famine. It reveals the reality of how people perished in Spain because the Francoist authorities instituted a policy of food self-sufficiency (or autarky): a system of price regulation which placed restrictions on transport as well as food sales. The contributors trace the massive decline in food production which followed, the hoarding which took place on an enormous scale and the vast and deeply iniquitous black market that subsequently flourished at a time when salaries plunged to 50% below their levels in 1936: all contributing factors in the large-scale atrocity explored fully here for the first time.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin-enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future. For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power. Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko's kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet's torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi's systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump's relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos. No other type of leader is so transparent about prioritizing self-interest over the public good. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst when true guidance is most needed by his country. Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is-and by valuing one another as he is unable to do-can we stop him, now and in the future.

'A REMARKABLE BOOK... AN AMAZINGLY AUDACIOUS AND COMPLETELY INNOVATIVE WAY OF WRITING HISTORY... IMMEDIATE AND GRIPPING' - WILLIAM BOYD In Petrograd a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to the Urals. A rancorous Russian exile crosses war-torn Europe to make his triumphal entry into the capital. 'Peace now!' the crowds cry... German soldiers return from the war to quash a Communist rising in Berlin. A former field-runner trained by the army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews... A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk from Switzerland into a celebrity, shaking the foundations of human understanding with his revolutionary theories of time and space... In Paris an American reporter in search of himself writes ever shorter sentences and discovers a new literary style... Lenin and Hitler, Einstein and Hemingway, Sigmund Freud and Andre Breton, Emmaline Pankhurst and Mustafa Kemal - these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Emperors, kings and generals depart furtively on midnight trains and submarines. Women are given the vote. Artistic experiments flourish. The real becomes surreal. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. Civilisation is loosed from its pre-war moorings. People search for meaning in the wreckage. Even as the ink is drying on the armistice that ends the war in the west in 1918, fresh conflicts and upheavals erupt elsewhere. It takes six years for Europe to find uneasy peace. Crucible is the collective diary of an era: filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, grubby ambitions and the absurdities of chance. Encompassing both tragedy and humour, it brings immediacy and intimacy to a moment of deep historical transformation - with consequences which echo down to today.

For years, the history of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany was hidden and distorted by Cold War politics. Providing a much-needed corrective, Red Orchestra presents the dramatic story of a circle of German citizens who opposed Hitler from the start, choosing to stay in Germany to resist Nazism and help its victims. The book shines a light on this critical movement which was made up of academics, theatre people, and factory workers; Protestants, Catholics and Jews; around 150 Germans all told and from all walks of life. Drawing on archives, memoirs, and interviews with survivors, award-winning scholar and journalist Anne Nelson presents a compelling portrait of the men and women involved, and the terrifying day-to-day decisions in their lives, from the Nazi takeover in 1933 to their Gestapo arrest in 1942. Nelson traces the story of the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) resistance movement within the context of German history, showing the stages of the Nazi movement and regime from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War. She also constructs the narrative around the life of Greta Kuckhoff and other female figures whose role in the anti-Nazi resistance fight is too-often unrecognised or under appreciated. This revised edition includes: * A new introduction which explores elements of the Red Orchestra’s experience that resonate with our times, including: the impact of new media technologies; the dangers of political polarization; and the way the judiciary can be shaped to further the ends of autocracy. The introduction will also address the long-standing misconception that the German Resistance only took action when it was clear that Germany was losing the war. * Historiographic updates throughout the book which take account of recent literature and additional archival sources