Focusing on Marburg, a contentious university town where voters demonstrated strong electoral support for Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party, this imaginative study discusses the political role of small-town organizational life and painstakingly reconstructs the full range of Nazi sympathizers' cross-affiliations with local voluntary groups.

The Broken House is a rediscovered coming-of-age story that provides an unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. In 1965, journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men, women and children. The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand 'how it really was, that incomprehensible time'. He had grown up in a Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God and obeyed the law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. This world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Step by step, a family that had fallen under the spell of Nazism was destroyed by it. Originally published in Germany in 1966 but out of print for decades, this moving and tragic portrait of family life under the Nazis is now available for the first time to UK readers. 'The book that broke the silence... the writing glowers from the page - sorrowful, disbelieving, chastened and yet not without hope' Observer 'Extraordinary... compelling' Mail on Sunday 'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken forever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times

In The Fascist Effect, Reto Hofmann uncovers the ideological links that tied Japan to Italy, drawing on extensive materials from Japanese and Italian archives to shed light on the formation of fascist history and practice in Japan and beyond. Moving between personal experiences, diplomatic and cultural relations, and geopolitical considerations, Hofmann shows that interwar Japan found in fascism a resource to develop a new order at a time of capitalist crisis. Hofmann demonstrates that fascism in Japan was neither a European import nor a domestic product; it was, rather, the result of a complex process of global transmission and reformulation. Far from being a vague term, as postwar historiography has so often claimed, for Japanese of all backgrounds who came of age from the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism conjured up a set of concrete associations, including nationalism, leadership, economics, and a drive toward empire and a new world order.

Unlikely Allies offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full understanding of the Ukrainian Committee's ties with the occupation authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and Jews, in occupied Poland. Ukrainian nationalists' collaboration created an opportunity to neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian region within the borders of the General Government or an ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich. This led to his partnership with the Third Reich to create a new European order after the war. Through their occupational policy of divide to conquer, German concessions raised Ukrainians to the position of a full-fledged ethnic group, giving them the respect they sought throughout the interwar period. Yet collaboration also contributed to the eruption of a bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict. Kubiiovych's wartime experiences with Nazi politicians and administrators-greatly overlooked and only partially referenced today-not only illustrate the history of German-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian relations, but also supply a missing piece to the larger, more controversial puzzle of collaboration during World War II.

Prague, 1940-1942. The Nazi-occupied city is locked in a reign of terror under Reinhard Heydrich. The Jewish community experience increasing levels of persecution, as rumours start to swirl of deportation and an unknown, but widely feared, fate. Amidst the chaos and devastation, Marie Bader, a widow age 56, has found love again with a widower, her cousin Ernst Loewy. Ernst has fled to Greece and the two correspond in a series of deeply heartfelt letters which provide a unique perspective on this period of heightening tension and anguish for the Jewish community. The letters paint a vivid, moving and often dramatic picture of Jewish life in occupied Prague, the way Nazi persecution affected Marie, her increasingly strained family relationships, as well as the effect on the wider Jewish community whilst Heydrich, one of the key architects and executioners of the Holocaust and Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, established the Theresienstadt ghetto and began to organize the deportation of Jews. Through this deeply personal and moving account, the realities of Jewish life in Heydrich's Prague are dramatically revealed.

6th September, 1942: a middle-aged Jewish refugee stands on the Swiss side of the Franco-Swiss border above Geneva. He has been living in Switzerland since he fled Vienna in November 1938, as the Nazi persecution of the city's Jewish population intensified. He is now waiting for the arrival of the wife he has not seen for nearly four years. Against all odds he has managed to get an entry permit for her to join him in Switzerland. She appears on the French side. They see each other. Call out. She begins to cross the few yards of no-mans-land that separate them. An official calls her back. She hesitates, turns, goes back - and is lost forever. This book tells the story of the wartime journey of Toni Schiff, as she ventured across Europe to the this fateful near-meeting at the Franco-Swiss border - and what happened next. Based on the extensive research of her daughter, Kindertransportee Hilda Schiff, and told by Sheila Rosenberg, who shared much of the later research and many of the research journeys, this book sheds light on the lives of one family - caught up in, and ultimately separated by, the tragic and tumultuous events of World War II.

"Immersive, nuanced, impeccably researched" IAN RANKIN "Beautifully written and moving" ALLAN MASSIE "Poignant, nostalgic and redolent of the smell of France" SIMON BRETT Family history has always been a mystery to Will Latymer. His father flatly refused to talk about it, and with no other relatives to consult, it seems that a mystery it shall always remain. Until of course, Will meets Ghislaine, his beautiful French cousin, in a chance encounter that introduces him to his grandmother, Madeleine, shut away in a quiet Breton manor with her memories and secrets. Before long, Will has been plunged headlong into the life of Madeleine's great love, his longlost grandfather, Henry Latymer. Reading Henry's old letters and diaries for the first time, Will discovers an idealistic young man, full of hopes and optimism - an optimism that will gradually be crushed as the realities of life under the Vichy regime become glaringly clear. But the more Will delves into Madeleine and Henry's past, and into France's troubled history, the darker the secrets he discovers become, and the more he has cause to wonder if sometimes, the past should remain buried.

Fifty years after the war Dagmar Ostermann, a former prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Hans Wilhelm Muinch, former Nazi and SS physician, talk face to face. In this rare interview Muinch-the only SS member acquitted during the 1947 Cracow war crimes trial refers to himself as a "victim," claiming that because he had to follow orders he was "no less a victim than his prisoners." The Meeting grew out of a documentary film in which Muinch was first interviewed by Viennese filmmaker Bernhard Frankfurter. As head of the Waffen SS Hygiene Institute Mi.inch had controlled hundreds of lives. Intrigued by Muinch's responses, Frankfurter arranged for Ostermann, whose mother was German and her father Jewish, to conduct a book-length interview, for which he provided a concluding essay. The dramatic structure of the discussion follows the events of the Nazi occupation chronologically. As Ostermann initiates questions regarding reasons for Muinch's involvement (Was it a conscious endeavor? Did he participate willingly?), the book adds important new information to the testimonial literature of the Holocaust.

In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.

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.

'Trust me, this is a great true story' - Ken Follett 'It deserves to be ranked among the great survival stories of the Second World War' - The Jewish Chronicle ~~~~~ The captivating true story of one boy's flight across Europe to escape the Nazis. A tale of extraordinary courage, incredible adventure, and the relentless pursuit of life in the face of impossible challenges. In early 1940 Chaim Herszman was locked in to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. Hungry, fearless and determined, he goes on scavenging missions outside the wire limits, until he is forced to kill a Nazi guard. That moment changes the course of his life, and sets him on an unbelievable adventure across enemy lines. Chaim avoids grenade and rifle fire on the Russian border, shelters with a German family in Berlin, falls in love in occupied France, is captured on a mountain pass in Spain, gets interrogated as a potential Nazi spy in Britain, and eventually fights for everything he believes in as part of the British Army. He protects his life by posing as an Aryan boy with a crucifix around his neck, and fights for his life through terrible and astonishing circumstances. Escape from the Ghetto is about a normal boy who faced extermination by the Nazis in the ghetto or a Nazi deathcamp, and the extraordinary life he led in avoiding that fate. It's a bittersweet story about epic hope, beauty amidst horror, and the triumph of the human spirit. John Carr is Henry Carr's eldest son, and in Escape From the Ghetto he has recreated his father's incredible adventure, through recordings and transcribed conversations in later life. For fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Saboteur of Auschwitz and The Volunteer, this is the incredible true story of escape from the Nazis during World War II. REVIEWS 'John Carr deserves our gratitude for rescuing this World War Two story, among the most dramatic and vivid I've read.' - Edward Stourton, author of Cruel Crossing 'A truly breathtaking story - the dramatic account of 13 year old Chaim's four year journey from the Lodz ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, through Germany, France, Spain and Gibraltar to London. Written with the pace and tension of a thriller, all the more gripping because it is a true story.' - Alex Gerlis, author of Agent in Berlin 'This is an unbelievable story that is all completely true. The life described is astonishing. John Carr has done an extraordinary and riveting job uncovering the real father behind the dad he thought he knew.' - Lord Tony Hall 'Utterly Compelling. It is an extraordinary tale, brilliantly written' - Alastair Stewart 'Extraordinary.'- Fiona MacTaggart 'The remarkable story of a Jewish boy who killed a Nazi guard and escaped the Holocaust aged 13' - The Times 'Unputdownable. A gripping, life affirming story of survival against seemingly impossible odds.' - Deborah Cadbury, author of Princes at War 'This is a book you cannot put down... Passionate and spellbinding, and an absolute must read.' - Julia Neuberger "John Carr's book gives a truly riveting account of his teenage Dad's life on the run in Nazi-occupied Europe. It serves as a reminder of the cruel and arbitrary realities of the refugee experience. It won't be on Priti Patel's reading list but it should be on yours." - Jon Bloomfield "An eloquent tribute to courage and resourcefulness, Escape from the Ghetto, is a gripping page turner." - Esther Safran Foer "One of the most extraordinary books I have ever read" - Michael Dobbs, author of House of Cards

At age thirty in 1919, Adolf Hitler had no accomplishments. He was a rootless loner, a corporal in a shattered army, without money or prospects. A little more than twenty years later, in autumn 1941, he directed his dynamic forces against the Soviet Union, and in December, the Germans were at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. At that moment, Hitler appeared - however briefly - to be the most powerful ruler on the planet. Given this dramatic turn of events, it is little wonder that since 1945 generations of historians keep trying to explain how it all happened. This richly illustrated history provides a readable and fresh approach to the complex history of the Third Reich, from the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 to the final collapse in 1945. Using photographs, paintings, propaganda images, and a host of other such materials from a wide range of sources, including official documents, cinema, and the photography of contemporary amateurs, foreigners, and the Allied armies, it distils our ideas about the period and provides a balanced and accessible account of the whole era.