This balanced history offers a concise, readable introduction to Nazi Germany. Combining compelling narrative storytelling with analysis, Joseph W. Bendersky offers an authoritative survey of the major political, economic, and social factors that powered the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Now in its fifth edition, the book incorporates significant research of recent years, analysis of the politics of memory, postwar German controversies about World War II and the Nazi era, and more on non-Jewish victims. Delving into the complexity of social life within the Nazi state, it also reemphasizes the crucial role played by racial ideology in determining the policies and practices of the Third Reich. Bendersky paints a fascinating picture of how average citizens negotiated their way through both the threatening power behind certain Nazi policies and the strong enticements to acquiesce or collaborate. His classic treatment provides an invaluable overview of a subject that retains its historical significance and contemporary importance.

This balanced history offers a concise, readable introduction to Nazi Germany. Combining compelling narrative storytelling with analysis, Joseph W. Bendersky offers an authoritative survey of the major political, economic, and social factors that powered the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Now in its fifth edition, the book incorporates significant research of recent years, analysis of the politics of memory, postwar German controversies about World War II and the Nazi era, and more on non-Jewish victims. Delving into the complexity of social life within the Nazi state, it also reemphasizes the crucial role played by racial ideology in determining the policies and practices of the Third Reich. Bendersky paints a fascinating picture of how average citizens negotiated their way through both the threatening power behind certain Nazi policies and the strong enticements to acquiesce or collaborate. His classic treatment provides an invaluable overview of a subject that retains its historical significance and contemporary importance.

Bendersky provides the only English-language translation of one of Carl Schmitt's most controversial works. At the time of its publication in 1934 and during the war and the post-war years, the treatise was seen as a rationalization of the Nazi legal order. With the renaissance of Schmitt studies beginning in the 1980s, the man and his work, and this volume in particular, was reinterpreted. While some maintained that it was a foundation of Nazi legal theory and practice, others see it as a failed attempt at a conservative counterweight to the most extreme tendencies in National Socialism. Most see it in the context of Schmitt's intellectual growth and the challenges of the era.

An extended introduction and notes trace out the development of Schmitt's ideas as well as the various interpretations ehat have emerged to explain his work. Given the importance of Schmitt's ideas in modern political and judicial thought as well as its impact on constitution making, this translation will make this significant volume accessible to a wider readership of students and scholars of twentieth century political and legal theory.

This volume contains revelations of the U.S. Army's history of anti-Semitism throughout the 20th century that exposes pervasive suspicion and hatred of the Jews among the highest levels of the American military. Although pervasive anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans in the first half of the 20th-century has received much attention, little has been written about America's own history of anti-Semitism. In this book, Joseph Bendersky argues that such racism permeated the highest ranks of the U.S. military throughout the past century, having a very real effect on policy decisions. Through 10 years of research in more than 35 archives, the author has uncovered irrefutable evidence of an endemic and virulent anti-Semitism throughout the Army Corps from the turn of the century right up to the 1970s. These sources reveal how the Secret Americans (a group of officers who described themselves as true patriots and who felt silenced by Roosevelt) were convinced of the physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority of Jews and feared that their superior Anglo-Saxon/Nordic culture was threatened by a radical and destabilizing Jewish conspiracy.