'A profoundly significant exploration of how Europeans--both Germans and those under German occupation--struggled to make sense of the conflict.' - Richard Overy, Wall Street Journal In An Iron Wind, historian Peter Fritzsche draws on first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand the terrifying chaos of World War II. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews, confusion and mistrust reigned. Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response? And where was God? Piecing together the broken words of the war's witnesses and victims, Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.

A Hundred Days of Carnage, Twenty-Five Years of Rebirth In the space of a hundred days, a million Tutsi in Rwanda were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors. At the height of the genocide, as men with bloody machetes ransacked her home, Denise Uwimana gave birth to her third son. With the unlikely help of Hutu Good Samaritans, she and her children survived. Her husband and other family members were not as lucky. If this were only a memoir of those chilling days and the long, hard road to personal healing and freedom from her past, it would be remarkable enough. But Uwimana didn't stop there. Leaving a secure job in business, she devoted the rest of her life to restoring her country by empowering other genocide widows to band together, tell their stories, find healing, and rebuild their lives. The stories she has uncovered through her work and recounted here illustrate the complex and unfinished work of truth-telling, recovery, and reconciliation that may be Rwanda's lasting legacy. Rising above their nation's past, Rwanda's genocide survivors are teaching the world the secret to healing the wound of war and ethnic conflict. Includes 16 pages of color photographs.

In recent years, no modern democracy has taken more aggressive steps to come to terms with a legacy of dictatorship than has the Federal Republic of Germany with the crimes and injustices of Communist East Germany. In this book, A. James McAdams provides a comprehensive and engaging examination of the four most prominent instances of this policy: criminal trials for the killings at the Berlin Wall; the disqualification of administrative personnel for secret-police ties; parliamentary truth-telling commissions; and private property restitution. On the basis of extensive interviews in Bonn and Berlin over the 1990s, McAdams gives new insight into the difficulties German politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and public officials faced sitting in judgment on the affairs of another state. He argues provocatively that the success of their policies must be measured in terms of the way they used East German history to justify their actions. In 1997, A. James McAdams was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at University of Notre Dame, in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of East Germany and Détente (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton University Press, 1992), and co-author of Rebirth: A Political History of Europe Since World War II (Westview Press, 1999). McAdams is also editor of Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

In recent years, no modern democracy has taken more aggressive steps to come to terms with a legacy of dictatorship than has the Federal Republic of Germany with the crimes and injustices of Communist East Germany. In this book, A. James McAdams provides a comprehensive and engaging examination of the four most prominent instances of this policy: criminal trials for the killings at the Berlin Wall; the disqualification of administrative personnel for secret-police ties; parliamentary truth-telling commissions; and private property restitution. On the basis of extensive interviews in Bonn and Berlin over the 1990s, McAdams gives new insight into the difficulties German politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and public officials faced sitting in judgment on the affairs of another state. He argues provocatively that the success of their policies must be measured in terms of the way they used East German history to justify their actions. In 1997, A. James McAdams was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at University of Notre Dame, in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of East Germany and Détente (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton University Press, 1992), and co-author of Rebirth: A Political History of Europe Since World War II (Westview Press, 1999). McAdams is also editor of Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

In myriad ways, each narrator's life has been shaped by loss, injustice, and resilience-and by the struggle of how to share space with settler nations whose essential aim is to take all that is Indigenous. Hear from Jasilyn Charger, one of the first five people to set up camp at Standing Rock, which kickstarted a movement of Water Protectors that roused the world; Gladys Radek, a survivor of sexual violence whose niece disappeared along Canada's Highway of Tears, who became a family advocate for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Marian Naranjo, herself the subject of a secret radiation test while in high school, who went on to drive Santa Clara Pueblo toward compiling an environmental impact statement on the consequences of living next to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Theirs are stories among many of the ongoing contemporary struggles to preserve Native lands and lives-and of how we go home.

On August 30, 1999, in a United Nations-sponsored ballot, East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia and for an end to a brutal military occupation. Upon the announcement of the result, Indonesian troops and their paramilitary proxies launched a wave of terror that, over three weeks, resulted in the murder of more than 1,000 people, the rape of untold numbers of women and girls, the razing of 70 percent of the country's buildings and infrastructure, and the forcible deportation of 250,000 people. In recounting these horrible acts and the preceding events, Joseph Nevins shows that what took place was only the final scene in more than two decades of atrocities. More than 200,000 people, about a third of the population, lost their lives due to Indonesia's 1975 invasion and subsequent occupation, making the East Timorese case proportionately one of the worst episodes of genocide since World War II. In A Not-So-Distant Horror, Nevins reveals the international complicity at the center of the East Timor tragedy. In his view, much if not all of the horror that plagued East Timor in 1999 and in the 24 preceding years could have been avoided had countries like Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and especially the United States, not provided Indonesia with valuable political, economic, and military assistance, as well as diplomatic cover. The author explores issues of accountability for East Timor's plight and probes the meaning of what took place in terms of international institutions and law. Examining issues such as violence, the geography of memory, and social power, Nevins makes clear that the case of East Timor has much to tell us about the contemporary world order.

On the night of 14 July, 1976 - Bastille Day - an elderly German was brutally murdered in a little French village where he had taken refuge from the evil shadow which had dogged him for the past thirty-two years. His killers were never brought to justice; indeed, no real attempt was ever made to track them down, the affair being politically embarrassing to both the French and the German governments. The murdered man was Jochen Peiper, once the dashing leader of one of the most renowned units in the German Army. The shadow which hung over him was his alleged complicity in the murder of over seventy unarmed American soldiers during the Ardennes offensive in the winter of 1944/45. It is certain that Peiper was not at the fateful crossroads near Malmedy at the time the men died, but that is not to say that they were not killed on his orders. Guilty or not, Peiper was tried and imprisoned after the war and on his release might have been said to have paid his debt for his supposed part in what had become known as the Malmedy Massacre. But there were those who thought otherwise.After exhaustive research, this classic work sees Charles Whiting tell the story of this enigmatic man, regarded by some as a brilliant and dashing leader of men, by others as a Nazi war criminal, with the vividness and punch which characterized Peiper's military career. All the facts may never be uncovered but all that are known are recorded here. What is certain is that Jochen Peiper remains one of the most controversial miltary figures to emerge from the maelstrom of the Second World War.

Sophie Knab's parents were Polish forced labourers in Germany during World War II. For years her mother was unable to discuss or answer questions about this period of her life. Compelled to learn more about her mothers experience and that of other Polish women, Knab began a personal and emotional quest. Over the course of 14 years, she conducted extensive research of post-war trial testimonies housed in archives in the U.S., London, and in Warsaw to piece together facts and individual stories from this singular and often-overlooked aspect of World War II history. As mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, female Polish forced labourers faced a unique set of challenges and often unspeakable conditions because of their gender. Required to sew a large letter "P" onto their jackets, thousands of women, some as young as age 12, were taken from their homes in Poland and forced to work for the Reich for months and years on end. In this important contribution to World War II history, Knab explains how it all happened, from the beginning of occupation in Poland to liberation: the roundups; the horrors of transit camps; the living and working conditions of Polish women in agriculture and industry; and the anguish of sexual exploitation and forced abortions -- all under the constant threat of concentration camps. Knab draws from documents, government and family records, rare photos, and most importantly, numerous victim accounts -- diaries, letters and trial testimonies -- to present an unflinching, detailed portrait of the lives of female Polish labourers, finally giving these women a voice and bringing to light to the atrocities that they endured.

After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. In this thoroughly updated edition, Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Drawing on a wealth of oral testimonies, recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, and newly available material from the government archives of Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and Germany, Ioanid follows Israel's long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. He uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. The book sheds new light on Romania's pre-fascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. Ioanid explores in greater detail the physical destruction of Romania's Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iasi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade and its origins.

In this viscerally intense, ethnographically based work, Claudia Seymour relates the heart-wrenching stories of young people in the Democratic Republic of Congo-young people who live on the front lines of conflict, in neighborhoods and villages destroyed by war, and on the streets in conditions of poverty and destitution. Seymour, a former child protection adviser and human rights investigator for the United Nations, chronicles her personal journey, which begins with the will to do good yet ends with the realization of how international aid can contribute to greater harm than good. The idea of protection and universalized human rights is turned on its head as Seymour uncovers the complicities and hypocrisies of the aid world. In the promotion of "inalienable human rights," aid organizations ignore the complex historical and socioeconomic dynamics that lead to the violations of such rights. Offering a new perspective, The Myth of International Protection reframes how the world sees the DRC and urges global audiences to consider their own roles in fueling the DRC's seemingly endless violence.

Laszlo Bardossy was a wartime prime minister executed for his role in mass murder, but his role remains controversial. His trial was riddled with blunders and some, especially those on the extreme right, now call him a martyr and are demanding a retrial. Was B?rdossy a villain or was he himself a victim of Communist-inspired mass murder?

He was at the helm in 1941--42 when Hungary declared war on Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and he was charged with sending more than 600,00 Jews to Nazi death camps. This book offers readers a balanced interpretation of Bardossy's life. The volume also includes two rare documents: the charges of the prosecution in his post-war trial, and Bardossy's statement in defense of his policies.

This document collection highlights the legal challenges, historical preconceptions, and political undercurrents that had informed the UN Genocide Convention, its form, contents, interpretation, and application. Featuring 436 documents from thirteen repositories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, the collection is an essential resource for students and scholars working in the field of comparative genocide studies. The selected records span the Cold War period and reflect on specific issues relevant to the Genocide Convention, as established at the time by the parties concerned. The types of documents reproduced in the collection include interoffice correspondence, memorandums, whitepapers, guidelines for national delegations, commissioned reports, draft letters, telegrams, meeting minutes, official and unofficial inquiries, formal statements, and newspaper and journal articles. On a classification curve, the featured records range from unrestricted to top secret. Taken in the aggregate, the documents reproduced in this collection suggest primacy of politics over humanitarian and/or legal considerations in the UN Genocide Convention.

The Western world's responses to genocide have been slow, unwieldly and sometimes unfit for purpose. So argues David Patrick in this essential new contribution to the aid and intervention debate. While the UK and US have historically been committed to the ideals of human rights, freedom and equality, their actual material reactions are more usually dictated by geopolitical 'noise', pre-conceived ideas of worth and the media attention-spans of individual elected leaders. Utilizing a wide-ranging quantitative analysis of media reporting across the globe, Patrick argues that an over-reliance on the Holocaust as the framing device we use to try and come to terms with such horrors can lead to slow responses, misinterpretation and category errors - in both Rwanda and Bosnia, much energy was expended trying to ascertain whether these regions qualified for 'genocide' status. The Reporting of Genocide demonstrates how such tragedies are reduced to stereotypes in the media - framed in terms of innocent victims and brutal oppressors - which can over-simplify the situation on the ground. This in turn can lead to mixed and inadequate responses from governments. Reporting on Genocide also seeks to address how responses to genocides across the globe can be improved, and will be essential reading for policy-makers and for scholars of genocide and the media.

Literature and Justice in Mid Twentieth Century Britain: Crime and War Crimes examines how ideas about crime, criminality, and judicial procedure that had developed in a domestic context influenced the representation and understanding of war crimes trials, victims of war crimes, and war criminals in post-Second World War Britain. The representation of Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent British-run trial of its personnel are a particular focal point. Drawing on a range of source material including life-writing, journalism, and detective fiction, as well as criminological and sociological works from this period, this book explains why the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was sometimes brought starkly into focus and sometimes marginalised in public discourse at this period. What remain are glimpses of the events now called the Holocaust, but glimpses that can be as powerful and as meaningful as more direct or explicit representations.

In most societies, courts are where the rubber of government meets the road of the people. If a state cannot settle disputes and ensure that its decisions are carried out, for practical purposes it is no longer in charge. This is why successful rebels put courts and justice at the top of their agendas. Rebel Law examines this key weapon in the armory of insurgent groups, ranging from the Ireland of the 1920s, where the IRA sapped British power using 'Republican Tribunals' to today's 'Caliphate of Law' -- the Islamic State, by way of Algeria in the 1950s and the Afghan Taliban. Frank Ledwidge tells how insurgent courts bleed legitimacy from government, decide cases and enforce judgments on the battlefield itself. Astute counterinsurgents, especially in 'ungoverned space,' can ensure that they retain the initiative. The book describes French, Turkish and British colonial 'judicial strategy' and contrasts their experience with the chaos of more recent 'stabilization operations' in Iraq and Afghanistan, drawing lessons for contemporary counterinsurgents. Rebel Law builds on his insights and shows that the courts themselves can be used as weapons for both sides in highly unconventional warfare.

Pirates and Emperors is a brilliant exploration of the role of the United States in the Middle East that exposes how the media manipulates public opinion about what constitutes terrorism. Chomsky masterfully argues that appreciating the differences between state terror and nongovernmental terror is crucial to stopping terrorism and understanding why atrocities like the bombing of the World Trade Center and the killing of the Charlie Hebdo journalists happen.

Famine is an age-old scourge that almost disappeared in our lifetime. Between 2000 and 2011 there were no famines and deaths in humanitarian emergencies were much reduced. The humanitarian agenda was ascendant. Then, in 2017, the United Nations identified four situations that threatened famine or breached that threshold in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Today, this list is longer. Each of these famines is the result of military actions and exclusionary, authoritarian politics conducted without regard to the wellbeing or even the survival of people. Violations of international law including blockading ports, attacks on health facilities, violence against humanitarian workers, and obstruction of relief aid are carried out with renewed impunity. Yet there is an array of legal offenses, ranging from war crimes and crimes against humanity to genocide, available to a prosecutor to hold individuals to account for the deliberate starvation of civilians. However, there has been a dearth of investigations and accountability for those violating international law. The reasons for this neglect and the gaps between the black-letter law and practice are explored in this timely volume. It provides a comprehensive overview of the key themes and cases required to catalyze a new approach to understanding the law as it relates to starvation. It also illustrates the complications of historical and ongoing situations where starvation is used as a weapon of war, and provides expert analysis on defining starvation, early warning systems, gender and mass starvation, the use of sanctions, journalistic reporting, and memorialization of famine.

Describes the effect on young Jews of Hitler's rise to power and recounts the experiences of those who attended an agricultural emigration training farm.

As communities struggle to make sense of mass atrocities, expectations have increasingly been placed on international criminal courts to render authoritative historical accounts of episodes of mass violence. Taking these expectations as its point of departure, this book seeks to understand international criminal courts through the prism of their historical function. The book critically examines how such courts confront the past by constructing historical narratives concerning both the culpability of the accused on trial and the broader mass atrocity contexts in which they are alleged to have participated. The book argues that international criminal courts are host to struggles for historical justice, discursive contests between different actors vying for judicial acknowledgement of their interpretations of the past. By examining these struggles within different institutional settings, the book uncovers the legitimating qualities of international criminal judgments. In particular, it illuminates what tends to be foregrounded and included within, as well as marginalised and excluded from, the narratives of international criminal courts in practice. What emerges from this account is a sense of the significance of thinking about the emancipatory limits and possibilities of international criminal courts in terms of the historical narratives that are constructed and contested within and beyond the courtroom.

The adage 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' is significantly inaccurate. Ignorance and mistake of law do, under certain circumstances, exclude responsibility both in national and international criminal law. This monograph updates the existing reviews of law and practice on the topic, aiming to go a step further: it takes the analysis of mistake of law as a starting point for systematic observations about international criminal law in general. First, the volume defines the contours of the defence of mistake of law in general theory of criminal law, distinguishing it from cognate defences and highlighting, most notably, its connection with superior orders. Secondly, it gives an overview of the possible approaches to the defence, offering examples from national law as terms of reference for the subsequent analysis of international criminal law. Thirdly, it surveys the relevant law and practice of international criminal tribunals, with a focus on the International Criminal Court, and it contemplates offences for which a defence of mistake of law may potentially succeed. Finally, the author tries to interpret what the rules on mistake of law applicable before international criminal tribunals imply about the purpose of punishing individuals and to the legitimacy of such punishment. Whilst the discourse on international criminal law is more and more concerned with global politics, The Defence of Mistake of Law in International Criminal Law brings back the focus on the appropriateness of imposing a guilty verdict on the individual defendant, a human being constituting the basic unit of each society.

'A chilling glimpse into the minds of Hitler's chief lieutenants' 
J. G. Ballard, New Statesman, Books of the Year

How can we ever understand why those in the Third Reich acted the way they did? What could have led them to commit such atrocities in the name of the Führer?

In 1945, as the Nazi regime collapsed, its remaining leaders were imprisoned and interrogated for months before the Nuremberg Trials. In this searing work Richard Overy reveals the original transcripts of these little-known interviews with key Nazis: the brutal and unrepentant Goering, the selective amnesiac Hess, the deliberately evasive Ribbentrop, the courteous Speer and the suicidal Ley. For the first time, they were forced to examine their actions and speak about the unspeakable. The result is an unprecedented and shocking insight into Hitler's henchmen.

In the 1910s historian Harry Harootunian's parents Ohannes and Vehanush escaped the mass slaughter of the Armenian genocide, making their way to France, where they first met, before settling in suburban Detroit. Although his parents rarely spoke of their families and the horrors they survived, the genocide and their parents' silence about it was a permanent backdrop to the Harootunian children's upbringing. In The Unspoken as Heritage Harootunian-for the first time in his distinguished career-turns to his personal life and family heritage to explore the genocide's multigenerational afterlives that remain at the heart of the Armenian diaspora. Drawing on novels, anecdotes, and reports, Harootunian presents a composite sketch of the everyday life of his parents, from their childhood in East Anatolia to the difficulty of making new lives in the United States. A meditation on loss, inheritance, and survival-in which Harootunian attempts to come to terms with a history that is just beyond his reach-The Unspoken as Heritage demonstrates how the genocidal past never leaves the present, even in its silence.

On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a national story - and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead Awaken - the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in decades - draws these two landmark historical events together. James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey - and the mythology of Anzac Day itself.

For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European "ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world. In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Not Even My Name is a rare eyewitness account of the horrors of a little-known, often denied genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Pontic Greek minorities in Turkey were killed during and after World War I. As told by Sano Halo to her daughter, Thea, this is the story of her survival of the death march at age ten that annihilated her family, and the mother-daughter pilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home seventy years after her exile. Sano, a Pontic Greek from a small village near the Black Sea, also recounts the end of her ancient, pastoral way of life in the Pontic Mountains.

In the spring of 1920, Turkish soldiers arrived in the village and shouted the proclamation issued by General Kemal Attatürk: "You are to leave this place. You are to take with you only what you can carry . . . " After surviving the march, Sano was sold into marriage at age fifteen to a man three times her age who brought her to America. Not Even My Name follows Sano's marriage, the raising of her ten children, and her transformation from an innocent girl who lived an ancient way of life in a remote place to a woman in twentieth-century New York City.

Although Turkey actively suppresses the truth about the murder of almost three million of its Christian minorities--Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian--during and after World War I, and the exile of millions of others, here is a first-hand account of the horrors of that genocide.