Although we associate the Third Reich above all with suffering, pain and fear, pleasure played a central role in its social and cultural dynamics. This book explores the relationship between the rationing of pleasures as a means of political stabilization and the pressure on the Nazi regime to cater to popular cultural expectations.

James Crossland's work traces the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross' struggle to bring humanitarianism to the Second World War, by focusing on its tumultuous relationship with one of the conflict's key belligerents and masters of the blockade of the Third Reich, Great Britain.

What was life like for ordinary Germans under Hitler? Hitler's Home Front paints a picture of life in Wurttemberg, a region in south-west Germany, during the rise to power and rule of the Nazis. It concentrates in particular on life in the countryside. Many Wurttembergers, while not actively opposing Hitler, carried on their normal lives before 1939, with their traditional loyalties, to region, village, church and family, balancing the claims of Nazism. The Nazis did not kill its own citizens (other than the Jews) in the way that Stalinist Russia did, and there were limits to the numbers and power of the Gestapo and to the reach of the Nazi state. Yet the region could not escape the catastrophic effect of the war, as conscription, labour shortages, migrant labour, bombing, hunger and defeat overwhelmed the lives of everyone.

The author's WWII experiences were unique, sometimes interesting and often humorous. These experiences were unique because his outfit was the only one in the Army involved in D-day assaults, on their soil, against all four nations we fought in WWII.

This study offers a fresh perspective on the 'comfort women' debates. It argues that the system can be understood as the mechanism of the intersectional oppression of gender, race, class and colonialism, while illuminating the importance of testimonies of victim-survivors as the site where women recover and gain their voices and agencies.

From September 1939 until the last days of the war in 1945 Ireland was host to a constant flow of casualties from the Battle of the Atlantic. Ireland's unique location, situated near the vital shipping lanes of the Western Approaches, placed the country in the immediate conflict zone once the war at sea began with the sinking of the British merchant liner Athenia on 3 September 1939, when 449 survivors were landed in Galway city. 'Neutral Shores' follows the story of how many merchant navy ships during the war were attacked and sunk by German U-boats and FW200 bombers, and their surviving crews left adrift on the hostile Atlantic Ocean in a desperate struggle for survival. For the fortunate ones sanctuary was found along Ireland's rugged Atlantic shores, where the local people took these men from the sea into their homes and cared for them without any consideration of their nationality or allegiances

Henry Schogt met his wife, Corrie, in 1954 in Amsterdam. Each knew the other had grown up in the Netherlands during World War II, but for years they barely spoke of their experiences. This was true for many people -- the memories were just too painful. Years later, Henry and Corrie began to piece their memories together, to untangle reality from dreams. Their intent was to help others understand what had happened then, and how it influenced and affected not only their lives but those of all who survived.

The seven stories in "The Curtain" reveal how two families -- one Jewish, one non-Jewish -- fared in the Netherlands during the German occupation in World War II. Each vignette highlights a specific aspect of life; all show how life changed for everyone, and forever.

Four stories are based on the author's memories of his own non-Jewish family: Henry's friendship with a Jewish teenager; the conflict of personal antipathy with the realization that help must be provided; the Schogt parents' determination to do the right thing; the difficulties of coping with an aunt with Nazi sympathies. These are stories about the randomness of survival and the elusive nature of memory.

For the Jewish family, three stories drawn from the memories of the author's wife and family demonstrate the bewildering situation of trying to make impossible life-determining decisions when faced with confusing and deceitful decrees. The family must struggle with the luck -- or absence thereof -- of finding refuge when forced from their homes, and with the perplexing inconsistencies of the collaboration of Dutch authorities and police with the Nazis.

"The Curtain" emphasizes the difference between the options that were open to non-Jews and Jews in the Netherlands. Non-Jews could freely choose whether to actively resist the Germans, collaborate with the Nazis, or just to do nothing, and try to live a normal life in spite of wartime restrictions.

Dutch Jews, on the other hand, did not have a choice -- whatever they did, whatever decisions they made, they were doomed, and it often seemed, when someone survived, just simple luck. A short introduction about the war years and an appendix with a chronology of decrees, events, and statistics, provide background information for this haunting memoir of those disturbing years during the German Occupation in the Netherlands.

The battle for control over the National Guard began with passage of the National Defense Act of 1933. The National Guard Association's insistence on a federal role for the Guard prompted the creation of dual status for Guardsmen. After 1933 they were not only soldiers of the state, but of the nation as well. The first test of the Guard's new status came as the world plunged into the Second World War. The compromises, conflicts, emotions, and legal precedents involved in the 1940-41 mobilization were to affect the National Guard and national defense strategy for many years to come. Yet, this important aspect of American history has been largely ignored. In most works on the Roosevelt era the federalization of 18 Guard divisions--which doubled the size of the Army--is given one or two lines. Guard historians have paid close attention to Guardsmen entering federal camps, but gloss over the politics of Army-Guard maneuvering prior to mobilization. This study demonstrates the importance of the political situation between these two defense establishments and their consequences for later defense policy and legislation.

Robert Bruce Sligh shows how the mobilization in 1940-41 spurred increased federal control over the Guard. Although the Army was hesitant to take the Guard into active service, once mobilized the Guard was rapidly co-opted. The Guard's dual goals of increased federal money while staying aloof from federal control were doomed to fail. This book will be of interest to those interested in American military history, national defense policy, National Guard history, and selective service legislation.

Showing how gender history contributes to existing understandings of the Second World War, this book offers detail and context on the national and transnational experiences of men and women during the war. Following a general introduction, the essays shed new light on the field and illustrate methods of working with a wide range of primary sources.

Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. In this exhaustive study, Stephan Lehnstaedt provides a nuanced, eye-opening portrait of the lives of these men and women, who constituted a surprisingly diverse population-including everyone from SS officers to civil servants, as well as ethnically German city residents-united in its self-conception as a "master race." Even as they acclimated to the daily routines and tedium of life in the East, many Germans engaged in acts of shocking brutality against Poles, Belarusians, and Jews, while social conditions became increasingly conducive to systematic mass murder.

Women are all too easily forgotten when it comes to war. In this unique volume, Cindy Weigand tells the individual stories of female WWII veterans now living in Texas. These courageious women reveal their war experiences detailing physical exams, troop train rides, and coping with the reactions of their families. They describe the trials of seeing fiances one day and losing them the next, healing the emotional and mental as well as the physical wounds, and enduring extreme conditions in service to their country.

Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the "long" Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe's Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

The battlefields of the USSR witnessed the most devastating confrontations of World War II. In every one of those battles, Communist dictator Josef Stalin exercised his influence, meddling with (and executing) his generals, hurling unprepared armies into pure chaos, and meeting with his Western allies to divide the world up into zones of influence that would soon be embroiled in a new war. World War II scholar Hoyt describes the war from Stalin's vantage point and shows how his decisions, especially his early refusal to go to war with Germany even after they attacked, led to the historic battles for Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow. Hoyt also explains how Stalin's bloody purges before the war left a military bereft of leadership, yet opened the doors for Zhukov, Chuikov, Rokossovsky, and other crucial commanders to spearhead a Soviet victory. Stalin's War also examines Stalin's use of propaganda to vilify the German army and blame Soviet war crimes and human rights violations on the Nazis.

This volume presents a study of the Second World War as a period of crisis which brought about significant changes in the relationship between business and the state. The requirements of the war economy increased the power of the state but also showed the limits of such power. The comparative approach of this volume permits the exploration of such questions as the extent to which corporatist forms of cooperation between business and the state were created in wartime conditions; the effectiveness of the control exerted by such institutions; how far conditions of crisis affected the forms of economic organisation that emerged; and the long-term consequences of the emergence of new forms of economic organisation.

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.