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.

Journalist Ken Anderson analyzes claims made by historian Trevor Ravenscroft and others that the Holy Lance, which is said to have pierced the side of Jesus Christ, took center stage in Hitler's life and was the focal point of Hitler's ambitions to conquer the world. In addition to pointing out the flaws in this theory, Anderson questions the veracity of the biblical story of the lance. Was there some meaning behind the flight of Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess to Britain, Hitler's supposed extrasensory perception, his choice of the swastika as the Nazi symbol, the "superman" who haunted the Fuhrer, the use of Nostradamus in propaganda, the way Americans were taken in by the astrological propaganda war, and strange similarities between Hitler and Charlie Chaplin? Anderson offers rational explanations for these alleged strange events and powers, demonstrating that they cannot be attributed to Hitler.

The incredible true story of a Japanese American captured by the enemy while working as a U.S. Army spy during World War II reveals unspeakable torture, narrow escape from death, and acquisition of valuable military information for MacArthur. IP.

Monday, June 5, had long been planned for launching D-day, the start of the campaign to liberate Nazi-held Western Europe. Yet the fine weather leading up to the greatest invasion the world would ever see was deteriorating rapidly. Would it hold long enough for the bombers, the massed armada, and the soldiers to secure beachheads in Normandy? That was the question, and it was up to Ike's chief meteorologist, James Martin Stagg, to give him the answer."" On the night of June 4, the weather hung on a knife's edge. The three weather bureaus advising Stagg--the US Army Air Force, the Royal Navy, and the British Met Office--each provided differing forecasts. Worse, leading meteorologists in the USAAF and Met Office argued stormily. Stagg had only one chance to get it right. Were he wrong, thousands of men would perish, secrecy about when and where the Allies would land would be lost, victory in Europe would be delayed for a year, and the Communists might well take control of the continent.

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

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.

For many years, the history of Byelorussia under Nazi occupation was written primarily from the perspective of the resistance movement. This movement, a reaction to the brutal occupation policies, was very strong indeed. Still, as the author shows, there existed in Byelorussia a whole web of local institutions and organizations which, some willingly, others with reservations, participated in the implementation of various aspects of occupation policies. The very sensitivity of the topic of collaboration has prevented researchers from approaching it for many years, not least because in the former Soviet territories ideological considerations have played an important role in preserving the topic's "untouchable" status. Focusing on the attitude of German authorities toward the Byelorussians, marked by their anti-Slavic and particularly anti-Byelorussian prejudices on the one hand and the motives of Byelorussian collaborators on the other, the author clearly shows that notwithstanding the postwar trend to marginalize the phenomenon of collaboration or to silence it altogether, the local collaboration in Byelorussia was clearly visible and pervaded all spheres of life under the occupation.

On 18 July 1943, one-hundred and twenty Jews were transported from the concentration camp at Drancy to the Levitan furniture store building in the middle of Paris. These were the first detainees of three satellite camps (Levitan, Austerlitz, Bassano) in Paris. Between July 1943 and August 1944, nearly eight hundred prisoners spent a few weeks to a year in one of these buildings, previously been used to store furniture, and were subjected to forced labor. Although the history of the persecution and deportation of France's Jews is well known, the three Parisian satellite camps have been subjected to the silence of both memory and history. This lack of attention by the most authoritative voices on the subject can perhaps be explained by the absence of a collective memory or by the marginal status of the Parisian detainees - the spouses of Aryans, wives of prisoners of war, half-Jews. Still, the Parisian camps did, and continue to this day, lack simple and straightforward descriptions. This book is a much needed study of these camps and is witness to how, sixty years after the events, expressing this memory remains a complex, sometimes painful process, and speaking about it a struggle.

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 history of the discipline of public law in Germany covers three dramatic decades of the twentieth century. It opens with the First World War, analyses the highly creative years of the Weimar Republic, and recounts the decline of German public law that began in 1933 and extended to the downfall of the Third Reich. The author examines the dialectic of scholarship and politics against the background of long-term developments in industrial societies, the rise of the interventionist state, the shift of state law and administrative law theory, and the emergence of new disciplines (tax law, social law, labour law, business administration law). Almost all the issues and questions that preoccupy state law and administrative law theory at the dawn of the twenty-first century were first pondered and debated during this period. Stolleis begins by emphasizing the long farewell to the nineteenth century and then moves on to examine the doctrine of state law and administrative law during the First World War. The impact of the Weimar Constitution and the of the Versailles Treaty on the discipline is discussed. Here the famous 'quarrel of direction' that occurred in the field of state law doctrine (1926-1929) played a central role. But equally important was the development of state law and administrative law theory (in both the Reich and its constituent states), administrative doctrine, and the jurisprudence of international law. Part two of the book is devoted to the impact of National Socialism. The displacement of Jewish scholars, the change of direction in the professional journals, and the shutdown of the Association of State Law Teachers form one aspect of the story. The other aspect is manifested in the erosion of public law and in the growing sense of depression that gripped its practitioners. In the end, it was not only state law that was destroyed by the Nazi experience, but the scholarly discipline that went with it. The author tackles questions about the co-responsibility of scholars for the Holocaust, and the reasons fwhy academic teachers of public law were all but absent in the opposition to the Nazi regime.

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.

This book examines the everyday operations of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. The Gestapo were able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines, especially "crimes" pertaining to the private spheres of social, family, and sexual life. One of the key factors in the enforcement of Nazi policies was the willingness of German citizens to provide the authorities with information about suspected "criminality". This book examines women denouncers in Nazi Germany through close examination of the Gestapo files. The author seeks to answer questions about how women in particular used denunciation and why so many ordinary women denounced 'deviants and dissenters' to the Gestapo.

Modern military history, inspired by social and cultural historical approaches, increasingly puts the national histories of the Second World War to the test. New questions and methods are focusing on aspects of war and violence that have long been neglected. What shaped people's experiences and memories? What differences and what similarities existed in Eastern and Western Europe? How did the political framework influence the individual and the collective interpretations of the war? Finally, what are the benefits of Europeanizing the history of the Second World War? Experts from Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, and Russia discuss these and other questions in this comprehensive volume.

Jorg Echternkamp is a Senior Fellow of the Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam, and co-editor of the journal "Militargeschichtliche Zeitschrift." He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, Visiting Scholar at the German Historical Institute in Paris, and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne- Pantheon) and Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg. His major publications include "Der Aufstieg des deutschen Nationalismus 1770-1840" (1998), "Nach dem Krieg" (2003), "Kriegsschauplatz Deutschland 1945" (2006) and "Germany and the Second World War: German Wartime Society 1939-1945, vols IX/1-2" (2008-2011, ed.).

Stefan Martens is Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute, Paris and coeditor of the journal "Francia - Forschungen zur westeuropaischen Geschichte." He has been a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne-Pantheon) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. His major publications include "Gorings Reich. Selbstinszenierung in Carinhall" (2009, with Volker Knopf); "Frankreich und Belgien unter deutscher Besatzung 1940-1944. Die Bestande des Bundesarchiv-Militararchivs in Freiburg" (2002, with Sebastian Remus); "Occupation et repression militaire allemandes 1939-1945: La politique de maintien de l'ordre en Europe occupee" (2007, with Gael Eismann).

Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall (1900-1977) was a chief U.S. Army combat historian during World War II and the Korean War. He authored some 30 books about warfare, including Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, which was made into a film of the same name. Island Victory is the "story of the combat experiences of certain units of the 7th Infantry Division in the battle for the capture of Kwajalein the southernmost and largest island in the Marshall Islands]" written from "the words of all men who fought and were not killed or badly wounded in the action."

During the Second World War, the United States benefited greatly from the espionage collaboration between a well-connected ex-professor of economics, Erwin Respondek, and his contact at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Sam Woods. The intelligence gathered by Respondek and passed on to the U.S. government included the first detailed and accurate warning about the Germans' plans to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. It also included valuable information about German atomic research, military operations, and secret weapons. This espionage work--here described for the first time--forms an intriguing chapter in the history of U.S. intelligence operations during the war and is distinctive for the personalities of the principal figures, their web of high-level connections, and the impact of their achievements.

Among the important revelations of this book, which set it apart from previous, passing references to this espionage collaboration, are that Erwin Respondek was one of the United States's most valuable wartime informants in Hitler's Germany, responsible for the famed Barbarossa warning sent to the State Department; that Franz Halder, the German army's chief of staff, was a major source of Respondek's information on the Germans' invasion plan for the Soviet Union; that Du Pont and the German chemical firm IG Farben maintained a secret wartime exchange of scientific findings, up until 1945; that during 1943 and 1944 the German Armaments Ministry supported research leading toward the construction of a new kind of cyclotron; that Sam Woods received from Respondek a tip-off on Japanese war plans in the Pacific; and that Pope Pius XII was peripherally involved in the resistance activities of Respondek and his Berlin-based circle. This book should appeal to students and scholars interested in Nazi Germany and World War II espionage and to a wider, nonspecialist audience as well.

In this collection of essays, leading scholars analyze the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America. With the nation mired in economic depression and the threat of war looming across the Atlantic, in 1932 Catholics had to weigh political allegiance versus religious affiliation. Many chose party over religion, electing FDR, a Protestant. This book, a complex blend of religion and politics with the added ingredients of economics and war, grew out of an international conference in 1998 held at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York. From the multiplicity of Catholic responses to the New Deal, through FDR’s diplomatic relationship with the Vatican during World War II, and on to the response of the US and the Vatican to the Holocaust, this book expands our understanding of a fascinating and largely unexplored aspect of FDR’s presidency.

Based on archival research in Germany, Great Britain, the USA and Canada, this study provides the first complete examination of the relationship between the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces High Command), and Anglo-American prisoners of war. German military policy is compared with reports of almost one thousand visits by Red Cross and Protecting Power inspectors to the camps, allowing the reader to judge how well the policies were actually put into practice, and what their impact was on the lives of the captured soldiers, sailors and airmen.

A vast amount of literature-both scholarly and popular-now exists on the subject of historical memory, but there is remarkably little available that is written from an African perspective. This volume explores the inner dynamics of memory in all its variations, from its most destructive and divisive impact to its remarkable potential to heal and reconcile. It addresses issues on both the conceptual and the pragmatic level and its theoretical observations and reflections are informed by first-hand experiences and comparative reflections from a German, Indian, and Korean perspective. Historical memory in an African context provides a rich kaleidoscope of the diverse experiences and perspectives-and yet there are recurring themes and similar conclusions, connecting it to a global dialogue to which it has much to contribute, but from which it also has much to receive.

Mamadou Diawara received his PhD from Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris and is Professor at the University of Frankfurt/Main. He specializes in anthropology and African history (oral history and the history of development).

Bernard C. Lategan is the founding Director of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. He studied classical languages, linguistics, literary theory, and theology at the Universities of the Free State, Stellenbosch and Kampen.

Jorn Rusen was President of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut in Essen (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen) and is now Senior Fellow there and Professor emeritus of History and Historical Culture at the University of Witten-Herdecke.

First-hand testimony of survivors and eyewitnesses is compiled in this shocking and graphic account of the crimes committed during World War II at the largest death camp in Yugoslavia. At the small Croatian town of Jasenovac, the fascist "Independent State of Croatia" (a satellite state of the Nazi Third Reich) constructed a concentration camp where more than 200,000 people, mostly Orthodox Serbs, were systematically murdered. Among the participants in this genocide were members of the Roman Catholic clergy, from the Franciscan monk who became the camp commandant to the infamous Archbishop Stepinac, the spiritual advisor to the fascist state appointed by Pope Pius XII. Vladimir Dedijer, a close associate of Tito, has collected irrefutable documentary and photographic evidence, attesting to thousands of atrocities and the complicity of the Catholic Church in these crimes. The events described in this important volume provide a historical context to the current conflict in Yugoslavia and shed light on the motivations behind the apparently senseless ethnic and religious strife which is tearing Yugoslavia apart. The massacre at Jasenovac was the terrible culmination of centuries-old animosities between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and a dark episode in the history of the Catholic Church, one that the Church has attempted to hush up for fifty years.

A vivid recount of the little known exploits of 17 courageous Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers in Italy during World War II In this inspiring new study of the SOE and Italian Resistance, 17 extraordinary stories of individual SOE officers illustrate the many and varied tasks of SOE missions throughout the different regions of Italy from 1943-1945. Through their gallantry, ingenuity, and determination, a small handful of SOE missions were able to arm and inspire thousands of Italians to fight the occupying German army after 1943 and in the process give invaluable support to the advancing Allied armies as they pushed north towards Austria.