The 'racial state' has become a familiar shorthand for the Third Reich, encapsulating its raison d'etre, ambitions, and the underlying logic of its genocidal violence. The Nazi racial state's agenda is generally understood as a fundamental reshaping of society based on a new hierarchy of racial value. However, this volume argues that it is time to reappraise what race really meant under Nazism, and to question and complicate its relationship to the Nazis' agenda, actions, and appeal. Based on a wealth of new research, the contributors show that racial knowledge and racial discourse in Nazi Germany were far more contradictory and disparate than we have come to assume. They shed new light on the ways that racial policy worked and was understood, and consider race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag. Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions-a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.

An urgent challenge to the prevailing moral order from one of the freshest, most compelling voices in radical politics today Being Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha Lennard explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalization of political dissent, the myths of radical sex, and the ghosts in our lives. At once politically committed and philosophically capacious, Being Numerous is a revaluation of the idea that the personal is political, and situates as the central question of our time - How can we live a non-fascist life?

It is one of the great ironies of the history of fascism that, despite their fascination with ultra-nationalism, its adherents understood themselves as members of a transnational political movement. While a true "Fascist International" has never been established, European fascists shared common goals and sentiments as well as similar worldviews. They also drew on each other for support and motivation, even though relations among them were not free from misunderstandings and conflicts. Through a series of fascinating case studies, this expansive collection examines fascism's transnational dimension, from the movements inspired by the early example of Fascist Italy to the international antifascist organizations that emerged in subsequent years.

In the 1930s, anarchists and socialists among Spanish immigrants living in the United States created Espana Libre (Free Spain) as a response to the Nationalist takeover in their homeland. Worker-oriented and avowedly antifascist, the grassroots periodical raised money for refugees and political prisoners while advancing left-wing culture and politics. Espana Libre proved both visionary and durable, charting an alternate path toward a modern Spain and enduring until democracy's return to the country in 1977. Montse Feu merges Espana Libre's story with the drama of the Spanish immigrant community's fight against fascism. The periodical emerged as part of a transnational effort to link migrants and new exiles living in the United States to antifascist networks abroad. In addition to showing how workers' culture and politics shaped their antifascism, Feu brings to light creative works that ranged from literature to satire to cartoons to theater. As Espana Libre opened up radical practices, it encouraged allies to reject violence in favor of social revolution's potential for joy and inclusion.

A free-spirited rebel from the start, Unity will do and say just about anything to get herself in trouble. She's different, an outsider. In Adolf Hitler, she finds her idol of nonconformity. But soon her mind is also brainwashed by his racist ideology. She becomes obsessed with seeking to win his love, and she wants to make her native England and his Germany become as one to prevent another world war. If she can achieve these goals, she will be the happiest woman in the world. If not, she plans to end her life. Basing his account on the known facts, David Rehak tells the shocking story of Unity Mitford, an English girl who turned into Hitler's most beloved groupie and most unlikely intimate friend. Through Rehak's compelling narrative, we learn about a truly strange and fascinating young girl and her extraordinary relationship with perhaps the most evil and mysterious man in world history.

Millions passionately desire a viable alternative to austerity and neoliberalism, but they are sceptical of traditional leftist top-down state solutions. In this urgent polemic, Hilary Wainwright argues that this requires a new politics for the left that comes from the bottom up, based on participatory democracy and the everyday knowledge and creativity of each individual. Political leadership should be about facilitation and partnership, not expert domination or paternalistic rule. Wainwright uses lessons from recent movements and experiments to build a radical future vision that will be an inspiration for activists and radicals everywhere.

Hitler versus Hindenburg provides the first in-depth study of the titanic struggle between the two most dominant figures on the German Right in the last year before the establishment of the Third Reich. Although Hindenburg was reelected as Reich president by a comfortable margin, his authority was severely weakened by the fact that the vast majority of those who had supported his candidacy seven years earlier had switched their support to Hitler in 1932. What the two candidates shared in common, however, was that they both relied upon charisma to legitimate their claim to the leadership of the German nation. The increasing reliance upon charisma in the 1932 presidential elections greatly accelerated the delegitimation of the Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler's appointment as chancellor nine months later.

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text. Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust.

The Third Reich's legacy is in flux. For much of the post-war period, the Nazi era has been viewed moralistically as an exceptional period of history intrinsically different from all others. Since the turn of the millennium, however, this view has been challenged by a powerful wave of normalization. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld charts this important international trend by examining the shifting representation of the Nazi past in contemporary western intellectual and cultural life. Focusing on works of historical scholarship, popular novels, counterfactual histories, feature films, and Internet websites, he identifies notable changes in the depiction of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the figure of Adolf Hitler himself. By exploring the origins of these works and assessing the controversies they have sparked in the United States and Europe, Hi Hitler! offers a fascinating and timely analysis of the shifting status of the Nazi past in western memory.

In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler's troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia--the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German.

Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as "good Czechs."

By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia's three million Germans and for the Communists' rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.

Oswald Mosley decided he could carry on where Hitler and Mussolini had left off. On street corners his fascist speakers would proclaim 'not enough Jews were burned at Belsen'. Enter the 43 Group. In a ferocious, bloody and brilliantly covert five-year campaign, they destroyed the Mosleyites. The membership of the Group was almost entirely made up of British servicemen, the original 43 members quickly swelling to more than 300 and including a Battle of Britain ace, a VC winner - and Vidal Sasson! The Groups philosophy of the '3 D's' - Discuss, Decide and Do it - were quickly manifested on the streets of London, with thousands of fascist meetings and rallies sent packing. The Group was organised in 'wedges' of a dozen or so. These wedges would attend a BUF rally and at a given signal would storm the speaker's platform, attacking BUF stewards and speaker. The members' military background ensured tight discipline and brutally effective actions. This, combined with a number of spies within the fascist ranks, ensured the 43 Group almost always came out on top, closing down two-thirds of all fascist activity in the UK until its simultaneous demise with organised fascism in Britain in 1950. As capitalism falters, fascism is gathering strength in Europe today. This book is a timely reminder of how it gathers that strength - and one way of stopping it.

The White Rose tells the story of Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, who in 1942 led a small underground organization of German students and professors to oppose the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazi Party. They named their group the White Rose, and they distributed leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime. Sophie, Hans, and a third student were caught and executed.
Written by Inge Scholl (Han's and Sophie's sister), The White Rose features letters, diary excerpts, photographs of Hans and Sophie, transcriptions of the leaflets, and accounts of the trial and execution. This is a gripping account of courage and morality.
CONTRIBUTORS: Dorthe Solle.

From 1938 until 1943 before the German occupation and accompanying Holocaust Fascist Italy drafted and enforced a comprehensive set of anti-Semitic laws. Notwithstanding later rationalizations, the laws were enforced and administered with a high degree of severity and resulted in serious, and in some cases permanent, damage to the Italian Jewish community. Written from the perspective of an American legal scholar, this book constitutes the first truly comprehensive survey of the Race Laws in the English language. Based on an exhaustive review of Italian legal, administrative, and judicial sources, together with archives of the Italian Jewish community, Professor Michael A. Livingston demonstrates the zeal but also the occasional ambivalence and contradictions with which the Race Laws were applied and assimilated by the Italian legal order and ordinary citizens. Although frequently depressing, the history of the Race Laws also involves numerous examples of personal courage and idealism, and provides a useful and timely study of what happens when otherwise decent people are confronted with an evil and unjust legal order."

How have digital tools and networks transformed the far right's strategies and transnational prospects? This volume presents a unique critical survey of the online and offline tactics, symbols and platforms that are strategically remixed by contemporary far-right groups in Europe and the US. It features thirteen accessible essays by an international range of expert scholars, policy advisors and activists who offer informed answers to a number of urgent practical and theoretical questions: How and why has the internet emboldened extreme nationalisms? What counter-cultural approaches should civil societies develop in response?

Between 1926 and 1943, the Fascist regime arrested thousands of Italians and deported them to island internment colonies and small villages in southern Italy. Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy analyses this system of political confinement and, more broadly, its effects on Italian society, revealing the centrality of political violence to Fascist rule. In doing so, the book shatters the widely accepted view that the Mussolini regime ruled without a system of mass repression. The Fascist state ruled Italy violently, projecting its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination and other quotidian forms of coercion. Moreover, by promoting denunciatory practices, the regime cemented the loyalties of 'upstanding' citizens while suppressing opponents, dissenters and social outsiders. Fascist repression was thus more intense and ideological than previously thought and even shared some important similarities with Nazi and Soviet terror.

Selected as a Book of the Year by the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement and The Times Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Fuhrer had no private life. Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Fuhrer. While charting in detail Hitler's life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Fuhrer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile - and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the cliched image of the monster. This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.

In 1934 Theodore Abel went to Germany and offered a prize, under the auspices of Columbia University, for autobiographies of members of the National Socialist movement. The six hundred essays he received constitute the single best source on grassroots opinion within the Nazi Party, and they form the empirical foundation for Abel's fascinating yet curiously neglected 1938 book. Although a number of scholars have drawn on these reports, Abel's own treatment has never been surpassed. Of particular value is his presentation of the life histories of a worker, a soldier, an anti-Semite, a middle-class youth, a farmer, and a bank clerk, all of whom explain in their own words why they joined the NSDAP. In the vast literature on National Socialism, no more useful or revealing testimony exists.

In a new Foreword, Thomas Childers discusses how the past half-century of research and writing on Nazi Germany has uphold Abel's original insights into the broad appeal of the National Socialist movement, thereby reaffirming this work's enduring value for students of the topic.

The cult of the Duce is the first book to explore systematically the personality cult of Benito Mussolini. It examines practices that began before Mussolini's rise to power and which multiplied as Fascism consolidated its support among the Italian population. By approaching the subject from many different angles, including those of the visual arts and the media as well as social and political history, this book makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of Fascism and modern leadership. The conviction that Mussolini was an exceptional individual first became dogma among Fascists and then was communicated to the people at large. Intellectuals and artists helped fashion the idea of the Duce as a new Caesar while the modern media of press, photography, cinema and radio aggrandised his every public act. Mussolini's image was ubiquitous and varied; he adopted the guises of bourgeois politician, man of culture, sportsman, family man and warrior as he appealed to different audiences. The book explores in detail many manifestations of the cult and the way in which Italians experienced it. It also considers its controversial resonances in the postwar period. The founder of Fascism was the prototype dictator of the twentieth century. As such his cult is a crucial topic in the study of a century that produced many examples of dictators, some of them explicitly modelling themselves on Mussolini. Academics and students with interests in Italian and European history and politics will find the volume indispensable to an understanding of the modern era. Among the contributions is an Afterword by Mussolini's leading biographer, R.J.B. Bosworth.

Right-wing violence is undergoing a revival on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, much of this violence has been a backlash against migrants and their offspring carried out by 'lone wolves' and organized groups. In the United States, race, gender, and religious hatreds have triggered far more than 'normal' levels of violence, including a resurgence of attacks on Jews and other anti-Semitic behavior. Examining the contours of the current violence, this book traces the development of the right-wing in the decades following the end of World War II.Right-Wing Violence in the Western World Since World War II considers right-wing violence during the postwar era, from the collapse of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to the mid-1950s alongside the right-wing sociological and political influences inherited before WWII. This chapter is followed by an overview of the right-wing in North America and Europe from the '60s onwards into the digital age. The book concludes with a timely and balanced assessment of 'the canary in the coal mine' for liberal democracy.

What drives politics in dictatorships? Milan W. Svolik argues authoritarian regimes must resolve two fundamental conflicts. Dictators face threats from the masses over which they rule - the problem of authoritarian control. Secondly from the elites with whom dictators rule - the problem of authoritarian power-sharing. Using the tools of game theory, Svolik explains why some dictators establish personal autocracy and stay in power for decades; why elsewhere leadership changes are regular and institutionalized, as in contemporary China; why some dictatorships are ruled by soldiers, as Uganda was under Idi Amin; why many authoritarian regimes, such as PRI-era Mexico, maintain regime-sanctioned political parties; and why a country's authoritarian past casts a long shadow over its prospects for democracy, as the unfolding events of the Arab Spring reveal. Svolik complements these and other historical case studies with the statistical analysis on institutions, leaders and ruling coalitions across dictatorships from 1946 to 2008.