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Books > Humanities > History > European history > From 1900
In August 1945 Great Britain, France, the USSR, and the United
States established a tribunal at Nuremberg to try military and
civilian leaders of the Nazi regime. G. M. Gilbert, the prison
psychologist, had an unrivaled firsthand opportunity to watch and
question the Nazi war criminals. With scientific dispassion he
encouraged Goeering, Speer, Hess, Ribbentrop, Frank, Jodl, Keitel,
Streicher, and the others to reveal their innermost thoughts. In
the process Gilbert exposed what motivated them to create the
distorted Aryan utopia and the nightmarish worlds of Auschwitz,
Dachau, and Buchenwald. Here are their day-to-day reactions to the
trial proceedings their off-the-record opinions of Hitler, the
Third Reich, and each other their views on slave labour, death
camps, and the Jews their testimony, feuds, and desperate
maneuverings to dissociate themselves from the Third Reich's defeat
and Nazi guilt. Dr. Gilbert's thorough knowledge of German,
deliberately informal approach, and complete freedom of access at
all times to the defendants give his spellbinding, chilling study
an intimacy and insight that remains unequaled.
A leading Yugoslav dissident offers valuable insights into the
demise of communism and the bloody mayhem that followed in its
wake.
The collapse of communism in Europe liberated Yugoslavia only to
see it plunge into a brutal civil war between religious, ethnic,
and nationalist factions. Why did communism's nonviolent end ignite
a nationalist war that has exacted such a high price in human
suffering?
International affairs scholar Svetozar Stojanovi? a member of the
famous Praxis group that resisted the communists has studied the
developments in his war-torn homeland. He examines the internal and
external factors that forced the transition from communist rule to
democracy and a free-market economy. His insider's,
behind-the-scenes look at the internal power struggles that pull
factions in various directions, examines the cultural weaknesses of
communism, the "capitalist encirclement" of Marxist-socialist
economies, communism's ideological decay, and the roles played by
Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The Fall of Yugoslavia also examines the
international reaction to these historic developments. Stojanovi?
urges the West not to fall victim to a "triumphalistic temptation,"
with as yet unforeseen consequences, but to anticipate and face the
problems in this volatile Yugoslav region.
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Journal
(Paperback)
Helene Berr; Translated by David Bellos
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R314
Discovery Miles 3 140
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of
the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving,
intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing
literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and
she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish
magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under
the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes
the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She
tries to remain calm and rational, keeping to what routine she can:
studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris. Yet always there
is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Helene and
her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent
to Auschwitz. She went - as is later discovered - on the death
march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only five days
before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal
she had left behind in Paris were "Horror! Horror! Horror!", a
hideous and poignant echo of her English studies. Helene Berr's
story is almost too painful to read, foreshadowing horror as it
does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for
literature, for all that lasts.
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