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And, who are you? I write the stories I wish I could have read when I was growing up. As the self-conscious first-born daughter of post-war German/German-Russian immigrants, I looked for my reflection in books. My masters’ degree in 20th German literature only whetted my appetite. I needed more and continued to search for my family’s stories. That search included climbing Hitler's mountain, perusing Soviet secret police files, and cycling through old East Prussia searching for amber. Now I write my own stories even as I continue to read, listen, watch and travel. The past is everywhere.
I love all of Marsha Skrypuch’s YA books. Page-turning plots, engaging characters, inspired by real events. Her novels focus on Ukrainian and Polish young people’s experiences under both Hitler and Stalin. This one stands out to me, first because of the cover and secondly, because of the author’s ability to wrench my heart. The novel focuses on a young Polish girl, deemed Aryan enough, so she can be raised in a Nazi family. It was a story that opened my eyes. These horrendous things happened to innocent kids.
A companion to Making Bombs for Hitler and The War Below, this novel follows a Ukrainian girl who was kidnapped as a child to be raised by a Nazi family.
Nadia is haunted by World War II. Her memories of the war are messy, coming back to her in pieces and flashes she can't control. Though her adoptive mother says they are safe now, Nadia's flashbacks keep coming.Sometimes she remembers running, hunger, and isolation. But other times she remembers living with a German family, and attending big rallies where she was praised for her light hair and blue eyes. The…
And, who are you? I write the stories I wish I could have read when I was growing up. As the self-conscious first-born daughter of post-war German/German-Russian immigrants, I looked for my reflection in books. My masters’ degree in 20th German literature only whetted my appetite. I needed more and continued to search for my family’s stories. That search included climbing Hitler's mountain, perusing Soviet secret police files, and cycling through old East Prussia searching for amber. Now I write my own stories even as I continue to read, listen, watch and travel. The past is everywhere.
This fast-paced adventure novel, set in Leipzig after the Second World War, tells the story from a German boy’s point of view. The Bass novel explores German guilt and the strained relationships that young people had with their Nazi-era parents. That includes me and my own relationship with my father who was a pilot for the Luftwaffe. Graffiti Knight is inspired by the author’s real-life friendship with the daughter of German immigrants to Canada.
After a childhood cut short by war and the harsh strictures of Nazi Germany, sixteen-year-old Wilm is finally tasting freedom. In spite of the scars World War II has left on his hometown, Leipzig, and in spite of the oppressive new Soviet regime, Wilm is finding his own voice. It's dangerous, of course, to be sneaking out at night to leave messages on police buildings. But it's exciting, too, and Wilm feels justified, considering his family's suffering. Until one mission goes too far, and Wilm finds he's endangered the very people he most wants to protect.
And, who are you? I write the stories I wish I could have read when I was growing up. As the self-conscious first-born daughter of post-war German/German-Russian immigrants, I looked for my reflection in books. My masters’ degree in 20th German literature only whetted my appetite. I needed more and continued to search for my family’s stories. That search included climbing Hitler's mountain, perusing Soviet secret police files, and cycling through old East Prussia searching for amber. Now I write my own stories even as I continue to read, listen, watch and travel. The past is everywhere.
This book opened the window to my mom and her sisters’ experiences in the last months of the war. I was blown away. It validated my mom’s memories in a way that no other book had up to this point. Growing up on the Canadian prairies I had little patience for my family’s memories filled with pain and suffering. Finally, I understood, that my mom had her own PTSD... something that I inherited and I feel compelled to explore.
The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What is little known is the fate of fifteen million German civilians who found themselves on the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive. Some of these people had supported Hitler, but the great majority were guiltless. In A Terrible Revenge, de Zayas describes this horrible retribution. This new edition includes an updated foreword, epilogue and additional information from recent interviews with the…
And, who are you? I write the stories I wish I could have read when I was growing up. As the self-conscious first-born daughter of post-war German/German-Russian immigrants, I looked for my reflection in books. My masters’ degree in 20th German literature only whetted my appetite. I needed more and continued to search for my family’s stories. That search included climbing Hitler's mountain, perusing Soviet secret police files, and cycling through old East Prussia searching for amber. Now I write my own stories even as I continue to read, listen, watch and travel. The past is everywhere.
Discovering this German YA writer was a thrill. It focuses on the dilemma a German girl faces when she finds a Russian prisoner of war hiding in her barn. Pausewang has written many books about atrocities during war years and also anti-nuclear novels set in the future. I gobbled up several of her books and read them in the original German, then passed them on to older relatives who find the YA books an easier read with less complicated plots. Pausewang’s books are popular in the German school curriculum and many have now been translated into English. It’s great to read books that explore the German war history, written by Germans.
It's 1944 and Anna's in the Sudetenland, her elder brother is at the front and her younger one is a fanatical member of the Nazi Youth. When she finds an escaped Russian soldier hiding in their barn, nearly dead, humanity conquers fear and she hides him in a disused bunker and continues to feed him despite knowing that if caught she'd be executed as a traitor. She doesn't dare tell even her mother. As the front approaches their village from the east it seems the Russian prisoner will soon be re-united with his comrades - but will Anna's already suspicious…
I am a professor of English and Visual Culture at St. John’s University in New York. My research in recent years has focused on reexamining the fate of modernist art in Hitler’s Germany. I have chosen five books that have shaped our understanding of Nazi art and have new resonance with the present resurgence of fascism and authoritarian governments around the world.
This is one of the most influential studies of cultural politics in Nazi Germany which takes as its focus the bureaucracy Joseph Goebbels charged with integrating pre-National Socialist artists and their organizations into the new cultural and political order. Noteworthy, of course, throughout Steinweis’s masterpiece of institutional reconstruction, is the revelation that National Socialist aesthetic preferences were not novel but represented the appropriation of the prevailing conservative taste dominant in the late Weimar Republic.
From 1933 to 1945, the Reich Chamber of Culture exercised a profound influence over hundreds of thousands of German artists and entertainers. Alan Steinweis focuses on the fields of music, theatre and the visual arts in this study of Nazi cultural administration, examining a complex pattern of interaction among leading Nazi figures, German cultural functionaries, ordinary artists, and consumers of culture. Steinweis gives special attention to Nazi efforts to purge the arts of Jews and other so-called undesirables.
As a junior British army officer, I regularly had the unique privilege of being Guard Commander at Spandau Prison (1961-64) and I regularly saw and met with top Nazi prisoners Rudolf Hess, Shirach, and Albert Speer, then serving long prison sentences. Albert Speer taught me German. I was intrigued to see photographs of these three important Nazis in better times even though they were clearly lauding it over the Germans. I had regular conversations with Speer and our relationship resulted in him admitting facts that would have seen him on the gallows in the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg in 1945.
The book's wealth of contemporary photographs and maps is a spellbinding work and makes the complexity of Hitler's alpine headquarters easy to understand - and reveals how the German people adored Hitler - at least in his early days. Hitler's headquarters and adjacent Nazi properties were seriously plundered and looted by the victorious allies - although, in the interest of history, the location has been largely restored.
Hitlers Alpine Headquarters look at the development of the Obersalzberg from a small, long established farming community, into Hitlers country residence and the Nazis southern headquarters. Introducing new images and additional text, this book is a much expanded sequel to the authors acclaimed Hitlers Alpine Retreat (P & S 2005). This book will appeal to those with a general interest in the Third Reich. It explains how and why Hitler chose this area to build a home and his connection to this region.
New chapters focus on buildings and individuals of Hitlers inner circle not covered in the earlier book.…
When I find a big story that has not come out, which has massive relevance for history and for the entire world, I go all out to bring it to light, as I have done with this book. Most of the books I have written have been devoted to telling big, unknown stories that concern the world. (Examples: alien intelligence, the origins of ancient civilisations, the Chinese contribution to the history of inventions, the existence of optical technology in antiquity, who were the people who tried and executed King Charles I and why did they do it.) I simply had to expose this information to the public.
This book was originally published by Doubleday, New York, in 1944. This book also contains material obtained from Heinrich Pfeifer, not only from Pfeifer’s own experience but from Pfeifer’s secret network of sympathisers and informants deep within the Nazi Establishment.
It is alarming in the extreme, detailing as it does how the Nazis of the SS and SD had since 1943 started planning to metastasize their doctrines all round the world, and found a Nazi International organisation, with the eventual hope of creating a Fourth Reich which was not dependent upon the territory of Germany, but was spread across the world invisibly, so that no armies could ever conquer it.
They planned the ratlines and escape routes to all the friendly countries such as Argentina and Chile. Their ratline HQ was in Madrid, with the full cooperation of the Franco Government. One of the two chief organisers was SS Lieutenant…
'Its existence is known only by the effects of its action.' Author Curt Riess on what happens when an organisation goes underground. Written in 1944, thus contemporary to the events of the Second World War and Nazi Germany, The Nazis Go Underground describes how the Nazis planned and organised their descent into the underground as early as 1943. At this stage of the war, the situation for the Third Reich looked grim. With Bormann and Himmler as its architects, the Nazi party would go underground and prepare for World War III from the shattered ruins of Berlin. German generals were…
As a graduate student during the late 1970s, my mentor, Martin Jay, generously introduced me to two members of the Frankfurt School: Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal. These memorable personal encounters inspired me to write a dissertation on Walter Benjamin, who was closely allied with the Frankfurt School. The completed dissertation, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, became the first book on Benjamin in English and is still in print. The Frankfurt School thinkers published a series of pioneering socio-psychological treatises on political authoritarianism: The Authoritarian Personality, Prophets of Deceit, and One-Dimensional Man. These studies continue to provide an indispensable conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary reemergence of fascist political forms.
When I first read Herf’s book during the 1990s, it totally transformed my understanding of National Socialism’s attitude toward technology and modernity.
Prior to its publication, Nazism was commonly perceived asanti-modernandanti-technological: as aspiring toward a vaguely defined pre-modern, martial-communitarian dystopia. Conversely, Herf shows that Nazism concertedly sought to integrate technological modernity within the movement’s militaristic, pan-German ideological framework. Here, the effusive expression employed by Goebbels to describe Nazism’s hypertrophic pro-technological enthusiasms, “steely romanticism,” says it all!
In this respect, Ernst Jünger’s allegorical glorification of totalitarian militarism in The Worker (Der Arbeiter) was paradigmatic.
In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists' rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls 'reactionary modernism' found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the. Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The book shows how German nationalism and later National Socialism created what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, called the 'steel-like romanticism…
I’m someone who has one of the best jobs in the world – I’m an associate professor of history. I get paid to learn and to share what I learn with my students. I am super passionate about my work, both teaching and research. As for my research, I’m a historian of Nazi Germany.
While technically a prequel to Deighton’s well-known Cold WarGame, Set, Match trilogy, Winter can certainly be read as a standalone novel. As the subtitle indicates, this is a book about a family. But really, this is a novel about two brothers, Peter and Pauli. The evolution of their relationship over the course of nearly half a century, 1900-1945, is the foundation on which Deighton explores this tumultuous period of German history. From their innocent and carefree youth in the late Wilhelmine period, to the trauma of their military service during the First World War, through the rise and rule of the Nazi party – can the ties that bind the Winter brothers survive?
In this gripping prelude to the Game, Set, Match trilogy, spies aren't born--they're made. Winter tells the tale of a Berlin family divided. Two brothers, Peter and Paul Winter, came of age during the Great War; then as Hitler's power spreads through Germany threatening a new era of violence, the brothers are driven apart by differing morals and ambitions. Meticulously researched, this allegory of a nation at odds with itself paints a brilliant portrait of the German zeitgeist during those turbulent years, and provides a powerful depiction of the rise of the Third Reich.
Unlike most children of immigrants who were told nothing about the past, I grew up surrounded by family history—my grandfather’s village in Russia, my father’s memories of 1930s Europe, and my mother’s childhood on a migrant worker farm during the Great Depression. I realized that history isn’t just names and dates but a unique opportunity to study human behavior. I wrote Hammer of the Gods about the Thule Society because Thule was often mentioned in passing by historians of Nazi Germany, as if they were uncomfortable delving into an occult group recognized as influential on the Nazis. I decided I wanted to learn who they were and what they wanted.
I found this book by the German scholar Joachim Fest many years ago at a flea market. Fest’s portrait of Hitler and a dozen high-ranking officials of the Third Reich became models for my own writing. Fest maps out the range of personalities—their cruelty, greed, and misplaced ideals—and the way in which Hitler encouraged rivalry among them to preserve absolute power for himself.
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