The heroic story of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet at the outbreak of World War II and their disastrous encounter with vastly superior Japanese forces.

History Flows through Us introduces a new dialogue between leading historians and psychoanalysts and provides essential insights into the nature of historical trauma. The contributors - German historians, historians of the Holocaust and psychoanalysts of different disciplinary backgrounds - address the synergy between history and psychoanalysis in an engaging and accessible manner. Together they develop a response to German history and the Holocaust that is future-oriented and timely in the presence of today's ethnic hatreds. In the process, they help us to appreciate the emotional and political legacy of history's collective crimes. This book illustrates how history and the psyche shape one another and the degree to which history flows through all of us as human beings. Its innovative cross-disciplinary approach draws on the work of the historian and psychoanalyst Thomas Kohut. The volume includes an extended dialogue with Kohut in which he reflects on the study of German history and the Holocaust at the intersection of history and psychoanalysis. This book demonstrates that the fields of history and psychoanalysis are each concerned with the role of empathy and with the study of memory and narrative. History Flows through Us will appeal to general readers, students and professionals in cultural history, Holocaust and trauma studies, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychology.

Although there is an immense amount of literature on the "final solution" - the Nazis' attempt to exterminate European Jews during the Second World War - many critical questions about the Holocaust still remain unaddressed. These collected essays set out to clarify the reasons for the attempted genocide of the Jews, and to provide new answers to this period of history which often seems inexplicable. The book draws on important new evidence, much of it from archives in Eastern Europe which have only recently become accessible. Contributors are among the leading experts in the field. The essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the "final solution" and the immediate origins of the decision to murder Europe's Jewish population. They consider, too, the impact of the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 on the evolution of a genocidal policy and the response of the peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the free world and the Jewish communities under the Nazis and in the West. The results of this study are often controversial, and challenge many accepted views.

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima explores the way in which the main combatant societies of the World War II have interpreted and related that experience. Since 1945, debates in Germany about the past that would not fade away have been reasonably well-known.

In this volume, scholars from the United States, Israel and Eastern Europe examine the history of the Holocaust on Soviet territory and its treatment in Soviet politics and literature from 1945 to 1991. Of special interest to researchers will be chapters on some of the major research sources for historical study, including census materials, memorial books, archives and recently released documents.

This unique research bibliography is offered in honor of Leo Eitinger of Oslo, Norway. Dr. Eitinger fled to Norway in 1939, at the start of the World War II. He was caught and deported to Auschwitz, where, among others, he operated on Elie Wiesel who has written the foreword to this volume. After the war, Eitinger became a pioneering researcher on a subject from which many shied away. His contributions to understanding of the experience of massive psychological trauma have inspired others to do similar work. His many books and papers are listed in this special volume of the acclaimed bibliographic series edited by Israel W. Charny of The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. In order to acquaint users of this bibliography with the topic, two introductory articles are offered. The first is titled "Survivors and Their Families" and deals with the impact of the Holocaust on individuals. The second, "Psychiatry and the Holocaust," examines the general impact of the Holocaust on the field of psychiatry. Robert Krell writes that in general the psychiatric literature has reflected critically on the survivor due to preconceived notions held by many mental health professionals. For many years, the exploration of victims' psychopathology obscured the remarkable adaptation made by some survivors. The problems experienced by survivors and possible approaches to treatment were entirely absent from mainstream psychiatric textbooks such as the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Fifty years of observations about survivors of the concentration camps and other survivors of the Holocaust (in hiding, as partisans, in slave labor camps) has provided a new body of medical and psychiatric literature. This comprehensive bibliography contains a plethora of references to significant pieces of literature regarding the Holocaust and its effects on survivors. It will be of inestimable value to physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, along with historians, sociologists, and Holocaust studies specialists.

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The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and Oscar-winning film. 'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday 'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer 'A book so fresh and vivid, so heartbreaking, and so simply and beautifully written, that it manages to tell us the story of horrendous events as if for the first time' Daily Telegraph

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans - many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal - to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it - as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book - more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure? Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a team, not to shirk responsibility that would otherwise fall on the shoulders of comrades, and a willingness to obey authority. Browning's ability to explore the strengths and weaknesses of arguments - both the survivors' and other historians' - is what sets his work apart from other studies that have attempted to get to the root of the motivations for the Holocaust, and it is also what marks Ordinary Men as one of the most important works of its generation.

From the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II, many poets around the world felt an obligation to write about the wars of their time. Famed poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor Gurney had earned their literary authority because of their experience fighting in the trenches during World War I, but civilian poets who wished to write about warfare doubted their own authority to write about the battles from afar. In News of War, Professor Rachel Galvin argues that this standard is a strongly gendered norm that is problematic for women writers, who were much less likely to have firsthand experience with war. Galvin indicates that the predicament of writing war without witnessing war is exemplified by six of the most prominent poets of the time: a Spanish-language poet, Cesar Vallejo; a French-language poet, Raymond Queneau; and four English-language poets, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. Although scholars have previously observed the anxieties of civilian poets writing about war, especially in the literature of World War I, Galvin gives the topic a new emphasis by developing the idea that the poets are in dialogue with journalism of the time and developing a framework within which to see their formal patterns for grappling with war at a distance. Expanding on the work of previous scholars who have written on poetry's relation to the news, News of War develops the idea of a strong tendency toward aesthetic self-reflexivity and ethical self-scrutiny in the poetry of the war.

This volume brings together new interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of the Spanish Republic and the course of the Civil War, the authors have chosen to range in turn over cinematic, literary and historical depictions of the era. In addition, reactions elsewhere in Europe to the Spanish conflict are examined; the role of the International Brigades is looked at afresh; the fate of children displaced during the Civil War is explored; and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement is revisited. The volume shows that to be any kind of soldier in the armies of the Republic, or even to be seen as a Republican sympathiser, was to become a "non-person" in the new order in Spain under Franco, and sets what supporters of the Republic had to endure within the wider European and international context of the period. This book offers timely fresh insights into the failure of the Spanish Republic and into a society that tried in vain to unite its divided people during what was a seismic era in Spain's history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

An exploration of the development of Holocaust research in Israel, this book ranges from the consolidation of Holocaust research as an academic subject in the late 1940s to the establishment of Yad Vashem and beyond. Research on the story of historiography is often a work on books, on the "final products" that fill academic bookshelves yet, in Israeli Holocaust Research, Boaz Cohen illustrates that the evolution of holocaust research in Israel has a more human element to it. Drawing on knowledge gained through seven years of work in ten major archives in Israel, the author reveals a previously unseen picture of the development of Israeli Holocaust research "from below," and of the social and cultural forces influencing its character. In doing so, a new facet to the picture emerges, of the story beyond the archive and the people who see Holocaust research as their mission and responsibility. This book will be a fascinating addition to the study of Holocaust research and will be of particular interest to students of history, historiography and Jewish studies

In recent news coverage of the dramatic political events in Eastern Europe, Gypsies have been a favourite sidebar topic. Some of the stories have been truly horrifying, others are written condescendingly and to amuse; but what has become clear is how little we really know about this people. In a concerted effort to uncover the modern history of the Rom in Eastern Europe, the authors examine the Gypsy experience in Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, with special attention to the Nazi Holocaust as well as to the record of the forced settlement and education programmes instituted by communist regimes.

In recent news coverage of the dramatic political events in Eastern Europe, Gypsies have been a favourite sidebar topic. Some of the stories have been truly horrifying, others are written condescendingly and to amuse; but what has become clear is how little we really know about this people. In a concerted effort to uncover the modern history of the Rom in Eastern Europe, the authors examine the Gypsy experience in Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, with special attention to the Nazi Holocaust as well as to the record of the forced settlement and education programmes instituted by communist regimes.

Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust has been amply documented, debunking the stereotypical view of the Jews as passive victims of Hitler and the Nazis. The stories of the revolts in a number of ghettos and camps have been told and retold. Jewish participation in partisan activities has been fully recorded. There is another form of resistance, spiritual in nature, which has yet to be fully documented. Spiritual resistance was expressed on an organized communal level, maintained to thwart the Nazi intention of dehumanizing their Jewish victims. The victims responded by initiating religious, educational, and cultural activities in an organized manner. These activities were both open and clandestine. In addition, many individuals expressed themselves through their writings. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, based principally on materials created and activities conducted in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Kovno, during the Holocaust, concerns itself with this particular aspect of the Holocaust tragedy.

This book deals with the work of fifteen young Jewish poets who were killed, died of wounds, or were executed in captivity while serving in the Red Army in the Second World War. All were young, all were poets, most were thoroughly assimilated into Soviet society whilst at the same time being rooted in Jewish culture and traditions. Their poetry, written mostly in Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian, was coloured by their backgrounds, by the literary and cultural climate that prevailed in the Soviet Union, and was deeply concerned with their expectation of impending death at the hands of the Nazis. The book examines the poets' backgrounds, their lives, their poetry and their deaths. Like the experiences and poetry of the British First World War poets, the lives and poems of these young Jewish poets are extremely interesting and deeply moving.

Between 1941 and 1945, in one of the more curious episodes of racial politics during the Second World War, a small number of Jews were granted the rights of Aryan citizens in the Independent State of Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain how these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, and in particular how they were justified by the race theory of the time. Author Nevenko Bartulin explores these questions within the broader histories of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and race in Croatia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tracing Croatian Jews' troubled journey from "Croats of the Mosaic faith" before World War II to their eventual rejection as racial aliens by the Utasha movement.

"Testimony" examines the nature and function of testimony, witnessing and memory, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and of reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. This book takes in the texts of Dostoevsky, Freud, Mallarme, Camus and de Man, videotaped testimonial life accounts of Holocaust survivors and also the film "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann. "Testimony" defines the uniquely devastating aspect of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing an "unprecendented historical occurrence of ...an event eliminating its own witness". Drawing on their personal experience of receiving survivors' accounts, Felman and Laub present the first "theory of testimony": a radically new conception of the relationship between art and culture and the witnessing of historical events. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of literary criticism, literary theory, film theory, psychoanalysis and modern history.

The Hollandsche Schouwburg is a former theatre in Amsterdam where, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, tens of thousands of Jews were assembled before being deported to transit and concentration camps. Before the war, the theatre had been an example of Jewish integration in the Netherlands, and after the war it became a memorial for the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. This book is the first international publication to address all the historical aspects of the site, putting it in a broader European and historical context.

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."

Historians have only recently established the scale of the violence carried out by the supporters of General Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. An estimated 88,000 unidentified victims of Francoist violence remain to be exhumed from mass graves and given a dignified burial, and for decades, the history of these victims has also been buried. This volume brings together a range of Spanish and British specialists who offer an original and challenging overview of this violence. Contributors not only examine the mass killings and incarcerations, but also carefully consider how the repression carried out in the government zone during the Civil War - long misrepresented in Francoist accounts - seeped into everyday life. A final section explores ways of facing Spain's recent violent past.

Praise for The Perfect Nazi: 'Absorbing, highly readable and painstakingly researched' NIALL FERGUSON 'Unforgettable, haunting reading' SIMON SCHAMA 'A fascinating and extraordinary journey into the banality of evil at the heart of Nazism' BEN MACINTYRE 'Riveting' THE TIMES 'Fascinating, scrupulously researched, compelling' SUNDAY TIMES In this radical new perspective on the Holocaust, Davidson challenges popular understanding and existing histories of the Holocaust. He does this in three main ways. Firstly, he describes the way in which German policy developed and was enacted in new and compelling detail, providing a road map to the 'long and twisting road to Auschwitz', skilfully dramatising those twists and turns, many of which are not generally included in conventional narratives. Secondly, he allows us to hear from new voices, notably female perpetrators, resisters and victims. These provide individual human perspectives on the unfolding events, without which true understanding is impossible; from planning and implementation, to knowledge - and its opposite, denial - all the way to its final reckoning, then and now. And finally, he provides a reappraisal of the moral perspective that drove the Holocaust, getting beyond the conventional notion of 'evil' as a catch-all rationale, to examine why anti-Jewish vitriol was such a powerful motivator for so many Germans, who used arguments and self-justifications that are more resonant today than they have been for decades. Never more so than in the use of the idea of suffering - how 'our' supposed suffering justifies 'theirs'. His focus is very much on the mindset that brought about the Holocaust, the desire to 'make Germany great again' and to make Germany's perceived enemies suffer. Again, this story of dreams of national greatness, and racially-targeted redemptive malevolence could not be more resonant today. Davidson foregrounds the stories of women, in part to illustrate the mindset of Nazi true believers - the German wife stationed in Poland, for example, who found a group of Jewish children who had escaped a mass execution, and shot them herself. He also describes the particular horror experienced by female inmates of the camps, who, as mothers, were the first to be killed alongside their children, and who were among the bravest of German resisters to the crimes being committed in their name - like twenty-one-year-old Sophie Scholl, whose leaflets listing and denouncing Nazi crimes resulted in her execution, in October 1943. The Holocaust forces us to understand that it wasn't the power of a single malevolent leader who made it happen; it was something altogether more alarming. A system of a thousand moving parts, the genocidal logic of which was willed into being, before being planned, mobilised - and submitted to - by millions of different people, acting via different agencies, under different jurisdictions, like iron filings held in the pull of a particular magnetic field which they were happy to replicate and reinforce. The resulting feedback loop would help shape-shift the Final Solution throughout the years of its existence, its direction of travel only ever from bad to worse. That is why the story has to be understood not just in the form of a fast-moving narrative - step after step after step, taken by myriad different people acting out their very different roles - but in the round, held up to the light and rotated through 360 degrees, drawing in not just war and politics, ideology and delusion, geography and economics, but accident, contingency, intention, sadism, innocence, self-justification, resistance, denial and ultimately, meaninglessness too.

Born in 1904, Brandt played a major role in the first mass killing programme of the Third Reich, the so called 'euthanasia' programme. As Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became the highest medical authority in the Nazi regime; he initiated experiments on concentration camps inmates and was eventually put in charge of biological and chemical warfare. How was it that a rational, highly cultured, literate, young professional could come to be responsible for mass murder and criminal human experiments on a previously unimaginable scale? In this riveting biography, Ulf Schmidt explores in detail that Brandt belonged to a generation of a young 'expert elite', who in the 1930s and 1940s were willing, and empowered, to support and conceive an oppressive, militarist, and racist government policy, and ultimately turn its exterminatory potential into reality. Through a critical biography of Brandt, Schmidt re-evaluates the system of communication at the centre of Hitler's regime. The book extends our understanding of the culture of detachment between a regime that was geared towards total destruction, and a government that was almost totally removed from its people.