In 2007, the Pontine Marshes, are very much part of the Italian national landscape. A traveller who takes a Eurostar train from Rome to Naples will pass through the marshes, which are a marshland only in name (Agro Pontino in Italian). It is hard to see the landscape of the Pontine Marshes and to simultaneously cast a historical eye back eighty years to when the area was avoided by people. It is hard to realize, today, that the Pontine Marshes were the focus for an extraordinary national land reclamation and urbanization project during Mussolini's fascist regime. Between 1930 and 1939, the marshes became the target of massive national investment, internal migration (often non-voluntary) and engineering work. In the 1930s, the Pontine Marshes became key protagonists in national culture: featured in newsreels, newspapers and propaganda, they became a metaphor for the regime's modernizing drive and ambition to create a new Italy where one had not been able to exist before. In particular, the regime's planners clamored to create New Towns in the reclaimed marshes; these were to be planned along fascist lines, and populated with selected colonists from the north. Written by an Oxford University professor Federico Caprotti, this book is about the Pontine Marshes project and brings together cohesive strands of research which have not appeared alongside one another before. For example, the book explores the architectural and urban planning aspects of the totalitarian minds which devised and built the New Towns; the lived experience of the 'colonists' who were forced to populate the new cities; the technological aspects which made the project possible, such as the fight against malaria, seen by fascism to be a 'non-totalitarian' disease; and finally, the promotion of the Pontine Marshes project through the press and film. Mussolini Cities will be a welcome addition for collections in Geography and Italian Studies.

Many of the foremost experts in the study of European fascism unite to provide a contemporary analysis of the theories and historiography of fascism. Essays discuss the most recent debates on the subject and how changes in the social sciences over the past forty years have impacted on the study of fascism from various perspectives.

The United States of Lyncherdom, as Mark Twain labeled America. Lincoln versus Douglas. The Chinese Exclusion Act. The Trail of Tears. The internment of Japanese-American. The Palmer Raids. McCarthyism. The Surveillance State. At turning points throughout history, as we aspired towards great things, we also witnessed the authoritarian impulse drive policy and win public support. Only by confronting and reconciling this past, can America move forward into a future rooted in the motto of our Republic since 1782: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). But this book isn't simply an indictment. It is also a celebration of our spirit, perseverance, and commitment to the values at the heart of the American project. Along the way, we learn about many American heroes - like Ida B. Wells, who dedicated her life to documenting the horrors of lynching throughout the nation, or the young Jewish-American who took a beating for protesting a Nazi rally in New York City in 1939. Men and women who embodied the soaring, revolutionary proclamations set forth in the Declaration of Independence and Preamble to the Constitution. On Fascism is both an honest reckoning and a call for reconciliation. Denial and division will not save the Republic, but coming to terms with our history might.

This book explores the day-to-day 'lived experience' of fascism in Venice during the 1930s, charting the attempts of the fascist regime to infiltrate and reshape Venetians' everyday lives and their responses to the intrusions of the fascist state.

How did Italians living in Britain respond to Mussolini's fascism? What links did ex-pat fascists forge with the British Right? To what extent did Italophilia exist in Britain during the Mussolini years?"Exporting Fascism" addresses these questions, which have long been ignored by historians. While there is much material available about Nazi sympathizers in the United Kingdom, there is comparatively very little about Italophile fascist sympathizers. The author uncovers the policy of Mussolini's government to transform Italian communities abroad into 'little Fascist Italies'. Ambassador Dino Grandi had great success in the fascistization campaign of Italian emigrants through such means as Italian community newspapers and fascist summer camps and schools.The author also examines the links forged between Italian fascism and the British Right. Specifically, she uncovers the Italophilia that dominated the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the first half of the 1930s, later to be replaced with an admiration for National Socialism. She also examines the BUF's activities within Italy, which have thus far remained almost entirely unknown."Exporting Fascism "sheds new light on a neglected aspect of the international fascist movement at the dawn of the Second World War.

Greta Kuckhoff belonged to the anti-Nazi resistance group 'The Red Orchestra' and was condemned to death in 1943. Her sentence was later commuted to imprisonment and she was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. She spent the next thirty years working to commemorate the group's antifascist resistance. Through radio broadcasts, letters, exhibitions, journal articles, film, and autobiography, she fought against Cold War narratives which condemned the group as traitors or hailed them as Soviet spies. Using previously unpublished archival sources, this book traces the fascinating life writings of this key figure from the GDR. It draws attention to gendered politics of remembering, to the role of memories of the Holocaust, and to the political identities offered by these diverse forms of commemoration. In doing so, it provocatively intervenes in the contentious debates about remembering antifascism in contemporary Germany.

Birken challenges the conventional wisdom that Hitlerism was a revolt against Western values. Utilizing Adolph Hitler's major writings, speeches, and recorded conversations, this path-breaking study in intellectual history delineates the relationship of Nazism to other European ideologies, both past and present. National Socialism, Birken maintains, was nothing less than an attempt to create a metaphysical foundation for the German nation-state after both the Frankfurt Assembly and the Bismarckian pseudo-Reich had failed to do so. In this context, Hitler can be seen as the last great exponent of the Enlightenment tradition that glorified fraternity. However, by grounding German nationalism in race, Hitler sent his country on a path toward destruction in the Second World War. Birken closes with the warning that our current failure to provide a post-modern substitute for nationalism invites the reassertion of the Enlightenment obsessions of nation and race. Speculative and far-reaching, this book will stimulate the current debate over nationalism and will be of interest to students of politics and the social sciences as well as German history buffs.

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee's Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945 is the English translation of Catherine Collomp's award-winning book on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Formed in New York City in 1934 by the leaders of the Jewish Labor Movement, the JLC came to the forefront of American labor's reaction to Nazism and antisemitism. Situated at the crossroads of several fields of inquiry-Jewish history, immigration and exile studies, American and international labor history, World War II in France and in Poland-the history of the JLC is by nature transnational. It brings to the fore the strength of ties between the Yiddish-speaking Jewish worlds across the globe. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance contains six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the political origin of the JLC, whose founders had been Bundist militants in the Russian empire before their emigration to the United States, and asserts its roots in the American Jewish Labor movement of the 1930s. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss how the JLC established formal links with the European non-communist labor movement, especially through the Labor and Socialist International and the International Federation of Trade Unions. Chapter 4 focuses on the approximately 1,500 European labor and socialist leaders and left-wing intellectuals, including their families, rescued from certain arrest and deportation by the Gestapo. Chapter 5 deals with the special relationship the JLC established with currents in the Resistance in France, partly financing its underground labor and socialist networks and operations. Chapter 6 is devoted to the JLC's support of Jews in Poland during the war: humanitarian relief for those in the occupied territory under Soviet domination and political and financial support of the combatants of the Warsaw ghetto in their last stand against annihilation by the Wermacht. The JLC has never commemorated its rescue operations and other political activities on behalf of opponents of fascism and Nazism, nor its contributions to the reconstruction of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Historians to this day have not traced its history in a substantial way. Students and scholars of Holocaust and American studies will find this text vital to their continued studies.

The Nazis put a remarkable amount of effort into anti-Semitic propaganda, intending to bring ordinary Germans around to the destructive ideology of the Nazi party. Julius Streicher (1885-1946) spearheaded many of these efforts, publishing anti-Semitic articles and cartoons in his weekly newspaper, Der Sturmer, the most widely read paper in the Third Reich. Streicher won the close personal friendship of Hitler and Himmler, and drew deserved attacks from the world press. Bytwerk's biography examines Streicher's use of propaganda techniques, and the hate literature towards Jews that continued to appear after his death, bearing his influence.

The Krupp industrial empire was one of Germany's wealthiest and most powerful corporations, and it contributed to the armaments used in several of its country's wars. British journalist Peter Batty tells the story of the Krupp family and the company they started during the industrial revolution, and how subsequent Krupps produced cannons used in the Franco-Prussian War, U-boats and shells for World War I, and the countless weapons and vehicles, including the biggest cannon ever made, for Hitler's army. The House of Krupp recounts the trial at Nuremberg of magnate Alfried Krupp, and the rebirth and astounding success of his company in the years after the war years that saw Alfried become one of the richest men in the world."

Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis' genocidal vision of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the "Final Solution," Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: "How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?" This book explores the question by analyzing the victims' experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Burgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Burgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE 2009

..".an essential book. It provides precise facts and figures for many issues that have heretofore been presented in impressionistic terms." . The International History Review

Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht's triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration, the author concentrates on the complex problems of occupying a foreign territory after a surprisingly swift conquest. By exploring in detail such topics as the regulation of public comportment, economic policy, forced labor, culture and propaganda, police activity, persecution and deportation of Jews, assassinations, executions, and torture, this study supersedes earlier attempts to investigate the German domination and exploitation of wartime France. In doing so, these findings provide an invaluable complement to the work of scholars who have viewed those dark years exclusively or mainly from the French perspective.

Professor Hans Mommsen, one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Third Reich, has gathered together a group of historians who are engaged in pioneering research into national socialism. This book covers such topics as the Viennese background to Hitler's career; the development of fascist tendencies amongst the German population during the Weimar period; the nature of popular support for national socialism; the myth of the Nazi economic boom and the ideological concepts and political developments which culminated in the mass murder of European Jews. It makes accessible to a wider public controversial arguments which have resulted from recent reassessments of Hitler's movement and his Nazi regime.

Is the nation an 'imagined community' centered on culture or rather a biological community determined by heredity? "Modernism and Eugenics" examines this question from a bifocal perspective. On the one hand, it looks at technologies through which the individual body was re-defined eugenically by a diverse range of European scientists and politicians between 1870 and 1940; on the other, it illuminates how the national community was represented by eugenic discourses that strove to battle a perceived process of cultural decay and biological degeneration. In the wake of a renewed interest in the history of science and fascism, "Modernism and Eugenics" treats the history of eugenics not as distorted version of crude social Darwinism that found its culmination in the Nazi policies of genocide but as an integral part of European modernity, one in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest to renew an idealized national community.

On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan-Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which-alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility-Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.

Was France fascist in the interwar period? This comprehensive historical, political and sociological account follows the rise of engineers and political "non-conformists" in the first half of the twentieth century, examining the French technocracy's relationship with the rise of fascism in France and later the establishment of the Fourth Republic.

This is the amazing story of Hanna Reitsch, one of the most celebrated women of the Third Reich. As a decorated test pilot for the Luftwaffe and a protege of Hitler, Reitsch was one of a handful of women who achieved personal success by breaking from the traditionally defined role of wife and mother in Nazi Germany. Reitsch's skills and accomplishments ultimately earned her an Iron Cross and celebrity status. A witness to the last days of the Third Reich, Reitsch visited Hitler's Berlin bunker where she received orders to deliver letters designed to rally the Luftwaffe. She left on this futile mission only minutes before Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun. This is the amazing story of Hanna Reitsch, a woman who excelled in an environment that for most was extremely repressive—Germany before and during World War II. She achieved personal success when she escaped the culturally defined role of wife and mother in Nazi Germany to live her passion for flying. Reitsch began her career flying gliders, setting both distance and endurance records in the 1930s. As the war approached she became a test pilot for new and dangerous aircraft for the Luftwaffe. The aircraft she flew included a large number of gliders and military aircraft, including Focke-Achgelis FW 61 Hubschrauber (the first practical helicopter), the jet-powered piloted version of the V-1 buzz bomb, and the rocket-powered Messerschmitt 163. Her achievements as a test pilot made her a celebrity in Nazi Germany and earned her an Iron Cross and the friendship of Hitler. As a friend of the Fuehrer, she became an eyewitness to the fall of the Third Reich. In the final days of World War II, she flew with her friend and lover, Luftwaffe General Robert Ritter von Greim—to join Hitler in his bunker. Minutes before Hitler was to marry Eva Braun, Reitsch and von Greim—on Hitler's orders—flew from Berlin to Rechlin in a desperate attempt to rally the Luftwaffe and save the Reich. After the war, Reitsch was interviewed as a potential witness for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Her interviewer stated that [Hanna's] account of the flight into Berlin to report to Hitler and of her stay in the Fuehrer's bunker is probably as accurate a one as will be obtained of those last days. It has remained so for half a century. This book also recounts a vivid and remarkable encounter in a cemetery in Kitzbuehel, Austria, in June of 1945, between Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker, perhaps the only other woman to be so successful in the Third Reich, and Hanna Reitsch. During this chance encounter, Hanna shows the letters of Josef and Magda Goebbels to Riefenstahl and the reader shares their shocking contents. Hanna Reitsch found in the Nazi establishment opportunities and rewards for her achievements. Consorting with the devil paid well; yet, in the end, she was called on to pay back more than she had received. Her story shows how hard it is for a woman to excel in a repressive society, and how that success can lead to defeat and misery.

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Burgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Burgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

Nazi Germany and Southern Europe, 1933-45 is about transnational fascist discourse. It addresses the cultural and scientific links between Nazi Germany and Southern Europe focusing on a hybrid international environment and an intricate set of objects that include individual, social, cultural or scientific networks and events.

Through a unique collection of essays drawn from rich case studies, Authoritarianism in the Middle East provides important insights into the ongoing instabilities of the Middle East, and the authoritarianism and democratisation processes that have led to dramatic socio-political transformations.