Despite the Second World War and the Holocaust, post-war Britain was not immune to fascism. By 1948, a large and confident fascist movement had been established, with a strong network of local organizers and public speakers, and an audience of thousands. However, within two years the fascists had collapsed under the pressure of a successful anti-fascist campaign. This book explains how it was that fascism could grow so fast, and how it then went into decline.

Casting new light on a controversial aspect of wartime British foreign policy, this book traces the process by which the British authorities came to offer their backing to Colonel Draza Mihailovic, leader of the non-Communist resistance movement which emerged after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. It also examines why British confidence in Mihailovic was subsequently eroded, to the point where serious consideration was given to transferring support to his avowed enemies, the Communist-led Partisans.

Drinking the Water While Thinking of Its Source: The Life of a Scholar

This collection of diaries gives readers a powerful, firsthand look at the effects of the Pacific War on eight ordinary Japanese. Immediate, vivid, and at times surprisingly frank, the diaries chronicle the last years of the war and its aftermath as experienced by a navy kamikaze pilot, an army straggler on Okinawa, an elderly Kyoto businessman, a Tokyo housewife, a young working woman in Tokyo, a teenage girl mobilized for war work, and two school-children evacuated to the countryside. Samuel Yamashita's introduction provides a helpful overview of the historiography on wartime Japan and offers valuable insights into the important, everyday issues that concerned Japanese during a different and disastrously difficult time.

A remarkable and compelling story about a Jewish boys coming of age during World War II, his survival, and ultimately, the transformation of his life as an American. Joseph Garays life story is an object lesson about perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles -- from the loss of his entire family in the concentration camps, to his survival in the Jewish Underground in Bratislava and elsewhere; from his joining the partisan underground and his enlistment in the Czechoslovakian division of the Romanian Red Army to fight the Nazis, to his meeting and marrying his wife. It is also a lesson about the remarkable acts of a single individual, Joseph Paserin, who protected Garay during those tumultuous war years despite grave risk to his own and his familys safety. The actions of Paserin ultimately enabled Garay to start anew in New York City -- to build a new family and to enjoy the safety and security of American freedom.

During WWII the mission of the Navy was, first and foremost, 'holding the line' against the German surface fleet, preventing it from disrupting the vital transatlantic sea-lanes or escorting an invasion force to Britain. The importance of holding the line cannot be over-emphasised but it is often overlooked as there was no decisive battle on the seas surrounding Britain in WWII. This work is a strategic and operational history of the Home Fleet. It examines the role of the home fleet in allied strategy and how well the home fleet carried out the missions assigned to it within the framework of that strategy.

This is the first serious analysis of the combat capability of the British army in the Second World War. It sweeps away the myth that the army suffered from poor morale, and that it only won its battles through the use of 'brute force' and by reverting to the techniques of the First World War. Few soldiers were actively eager to close with the enemy, but the morale of the army never collapsed and its combat capability steadily improved from 1942 onwards.

On 7 November 1938, an impoverished seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, obsessed with Nazi persecution of his family in Germany, brooding on revenge - and his own insignificance - bought a handgun, carried it on the Metro to the German Embassy in Paris and, never before having fired a weapon, shot down the first German diplomat he saw. When the official died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels used the event as their pretext for the state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic violence and terror known as Kristallnacht, the pogrom that was the initiating event of the Holocaust. Overnight this obscure young man, Herschel Grynszpan, found himself world-famous, his face on front pages everywhere, and a pawn in the machinations of power. Instead of being executed, he found himself a privileged prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels prepared a show-trial. The trial, planned to the last detail, was intended to prove that the Jews had started the Second World War. Alone in his cell, Herschel soon grasped how the Nazis planned to use him, and set out to wage a battle of wits against Hitler and Goebbels, knowing perfectly well that if he succeeded in stopping the trial, he would certainly be murdered. Until very recently, what really happened has remained hazy. Hitler's Scapegoat, based on the most recent research - including access to a heretofore untapped archive compiled by a Nuremberg rapporteur - tells Herschel's extraordinary story in full for the first time.

Although millions of Russians lived as serfs until the middle of the nineteenth century, little is known about their lives. Identifying and documenting the conditions of Russian serfs has proven difficult because the Russian state discouraged literacy among the serfs and censored public expressions of dissent. To date scholars have identified only twenty known Russian serf narratives. Four Russian Serf Narratives contains four of these accounts and is the first translated collection of autobiographies by serfs. Scholar and translator John MacKay brings to light for an English-language audience a diverse sampling of Russian serf narratives, ranging from an autobiographical poem to stories of adventure and escape. Autobiography (1785) recounts a highly educated serf s attempt to escape to Europe, where he hoped to study architecture. The long testimonial poem News About Russia (ca. 1849) laments the conditions under which the author and his fellow serfs lived. In The Story of My Life and Wanderings (1881) a serf tradesman tells of his attempt to simultaneously escape serfdom and captivity from Chechen mountaineers. The fragmentary Notes of a Serf Woman (1911) testifies to the harshness of peasant life with extraordinary acuity and descriptive power. These accounts offer readers a glimpse, from the point of view of the serfs themselves, into the realities of one of the largest systems of unfree labor in history. The volume also allows comparison with slave narratives produced in the United States and elsewhere, adding an important dimension to knowledge of the institution of slavery and the experience of enslavement in modern times."

In September 1945 the circumstances surrounding Hitler's death were dark and mysterious. Hugh Trevor-Roper, an intelligence officer, was given the task of uncovering the last few weeks of Hitler's life. His brilliant piece of detective work proved finally that Hitler had killed himself and also tells the story of the last days of the Thousand Year Reich in the Berlin Bunker.

Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support the bereaved and to dispose of bodies amidst the confusion of conflict. It matters to the state, which has to find ways of coping with mass death that convey a sense of gratitude and respect for the sacrifice of both the victims of war, and those that mourn in their wake. This social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War places death at the heart of our understanding of the British experience of conflict. Drawing on a range of material, Dying for the nation demonstrates just how much death matters in wartime and examines the experience, management and memory of death. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War. -- .

The attack on Pearl Harbor was arguably the single most important event of our century. In one stroke, the Japanese offensive brought together the war in Europe between Britain and Russia on the one hand and Germany on the other with the ongoing conflict between Japan and China, turning it into the global struggle between two great coalitions we know as the Second World War. By bringing America into the war, Japan assured not only the destruction of her Asian empire, but also the end of American isolationism, the survival of Soviet communism, and the ultimate bankruptcy of the great European colonial systems. In Pearl Harbor Revisited, eleven distinguished writers consider the action as an international event, providing remarkably lucid and impressive interpretations of the attack's causes and consequences.

This book focuses on a central notion in Theodor. W. Adorno's philosophy: the nonidentical. The nonidentical is what our conceptual framework cannot grasp and must therefore silence, the unexpressed other of our rational engagement with the world. This study presents the nonidentical as the multidimensional centerpiece of Adorno's reflections on subjectivity, truth, suffering, history, art, morality and politics, revealing the intimate relationship between how and what we think. Adorno's work, written in the shadow of Auschwitz, is a quest for a different way of thinking, one that would give the nonidentical a voice - as the somatic in reasoning, the ephemeral in truth, the aesthetic in cognition, the other in society. Adorno's philosophy of the nonidentical reveals itself not only as a powerful hermeneutics of the past, but also as an important tool for the understanding of modern phenomena such as xenophobia, populism, political polarization, identity politics, and systemic racism.

"We will be judged in our own time and in the future by measuring the aid that we, inhabitants of a free and fortunate country, gave to our brethren in this time of greatest disaster." This declaration, made shortly after the pogroms of November 1938 by the Jewish communities in Sweden, was truer than anyone could have forecast at the time. Pontus Rudberg focuses on this sensitive issue - Jewish responses to the Nazi persecutions and mass murder of Jews. What actions did Swedish Jews take to aid the Jews in Europe during the years 1933-45 and what determined their policies and actions? Specific attention is given to the aid efforts of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, including the range of activities in which the community engaged and the challenges and opportunities presented by official refugee policy in Sweden.

This book explores the contributions of Italian Americans employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Italian Americans fluent in Italian language and customs became integral parts of intelligence operations working behind enemy lines. These units obtained priceless military information that significantly helped defeat the Axis. They parachuted into frozen mountains tops to link up with Italian guerilla units in northern Italy or hovered in small patrol torpedo boats and row boats across the Mediterranean Sea in pitch black darkness to destroy railroad junctions.

Between Resistance and Collaboration explores the various means by which the local population both protested the hardships brought about by the Nazi occupation of Northern France, often forcing the authorities to do something about them, and evaded the plethora of regulations, political and economic, when the authorities were unable or unwilling to act.

More than a million American G.I.s were crammed into the UK prior to the invasion of France during World War II. Wherever they landed, the G.I.s took the British population by surprise. Very few people had ever met a real American before. In those days, the U.S. was more remote than Siberia is to the present generation. All anyone knew about Americans had been learned from the silver screen. How could they be resisted? We can only guess at the total number of children that the G.I.s left behind. Figures quoted have varied from 10,000 to 100,000 but there are no official sources on which to base these numbers. Not surprisingly, these children today represent as much of a social cross section as the women who dated the G.I.s. But regardless of background, they all share the common goal of wanting to find the American father who holds the other half of their personal history. This book relates the social history of the military situation of World War II in Europe. It records how many British were dazzled by and fell in love with American G.I.s who arrived in the U.K. to train for the Invasion of France. Although some married their sweethearts, many more did not. Meanwhile, on the Continent, young women who became pregnant ended up in dire social straits. What is important now is that the children of these liaisons should have the opportunity to learn about the missing half of their heritage. Pamela Winfield, president of TRACE, a nonprofit group that helps these children find missing parents, tells us their stories.