WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE A letter from a German soldier to his grandson recounts the terrors of war on the Eastern Front, and a postwar ordinary life in search of atonement, in this “raw, visceral, and propulsive” novel (New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator, and the difficulty of life after war. Found among his effects after his death, the letter is at once a thrilling story of adventure and a questing rumination on the moral ambiguity of war. In his years spent fighting the Russians and attempting afterward to survive the Gulag, Meissner recounts a life lived in perseverance and atonement. Wracked with shame—both for himself and for Germany—the grandfather explains his dark rationale, exults in the courage of others, and blurs the boundaries of right and wrong. We Germans complicates our most steadfast beliefs and seeks to account for the complicity of an entire country in the perpetration of heinous acts. In this breathless and page-turning story, Alexander Starritt also presents us with a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one's own life at the cost of the lives of others and asks whether we can ever truly atone.
Hero–or Nazi? Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.
Nazi Germany never existed. That is one of many astonishing revelations detailed in this jaw-dropping book. Most of what is written about Adolf Hitler is designed to deceive the general public. For example, the following facts (with credit to the archives of the historian Dr. Rex Curry) will come as news to most people: 1. Hitler and his supporters self-identified as “socialists” by the very word in voluminous speeches and writings. The term "Socialist" appears throughout Mein Kampf as a self-description by Hitler. 2. Hitler never called himself a "Nazi." There was no “Nazi Germany.” There was no “Nazi Party.” Those terms are lies to hide the true names of the entities. 3. Hitler never called himself a “Fascist.” 4. The term “Nazi” isn’t in "Mein Kampf" nor in "Triumph of the Will." 5. The term “Fascist” never appears in Mein Kampf as a self-description by Hitler. 6. The term “swastika” never appears in the original Mein Kampf. 7. There is no evidence that Hitler ever used the word “swastika.” 8. The symbol that Hitler did use was intended to represent “S”-letter shapes for “socialist.” 9. Hitler altered his own signature to reflect his “S-shapes for socialism” logo branding. 10. Hitler was influenced by American socialists - the USA's Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was the origin of Nazi salutes and Nazi behavior. 11. The classic military salute (to the brow) also contributed to the creation of the Nazi salute (with the right-arm extended stiffly). 12. Mussolini was a long-time socialist leader, with a socialist background, raised by socialists to be a socialist, and he joined socialists known as “fascio, fasci, and fascisti.” 13. Fascism came from a socialist (e.g. Mussolini). Communism came from a socialist (e.g. Marx). Fascism and Communism came from socialists. 14. German socialists and Soviet socialists partnered for International Socialism in 1939. They launched WWII, invading Poland together, and continued onward from there, killing millions. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and other tyrants were influenced by propaganda in the USA, including the childish American socialists Francis Bellamy and Edward Bellamy. Both Bellamy cousins wanted government to take over all schools, to teach socialism to all youngsters worldwide. Francis Bellamy was the author of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, the origin of the infamous stiff-armed salute adopted later under German socialism and Adolf Hitler. Long before the Deutschland fad began, American schoolchildren were taught to chant in unison and perform the same salute each day in government schools that imposed segregation by law and taught racism as official policy. Anyone who rejected the ritual in the schools was persecuted. “America’s Nazi salute” was often performed by public officials in the USA from 1892 through 1942. What happened to old photographs and films of the American Nazi salute performed by federal, state, county, and local officials? Those photos and films are rare because people don't want to know the truth about the government’s past. TV, newspapers and other MSM will not show a historic photo or video of the early American straight-arm salute nor mention its history and impact worldwide. American youth groups (Scouting) adopted Bellamy's American Nazi salute (with Bellamy’s encouragement) AND saluted swastika badges worn by fellow scouts. Many Americans were accustomed to “Nazi salutes for swastikas” long before German socialism (and Hitler Youth) adopted similar behavior under Hitler. That helps to explain another inconvenient truth: swastikas were promoted in the US military and worn as a patch on the upper left arm of American soldiers in a fashion that would become uniform under German socialism. There are photos in this book!
This explosive narrative reveals for the first time the shocking hidden years of Coco Chanel’s life: her collaboration with the Nazis in Paris, her affair with a master spy, and her work for the German military intelligence service and Himmler’s SS. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was the high priestess of couture who created the look of the modern woman. By the 1920s she had amassed a fortune and went on to create an empire. But her life from 1941 to 1954 has long been shrouded in rumor and mystery, never clarified by Chanel or her many biographers. Hal Vaughan exposes the truth of her wartime collaboration and her long affair with the playboy Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage—who ran a spy ring and reported directly to Goebbels. Vaughan pieces together how Chanel became a Nazi agent, how she escaped arrest after the war and joined her lover in exile in Switzerland, and how—despite suspicions about her past—she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and rebuild the iconic House of Chanel.
Weaving together a number of disparate themes relating to Holocaust perpetrators, this book shows how Nazi Germany propelled a vast number of Europeans to try to re-engineer the population base of the continent through mass murder. A comprehensive introductory essay, along with a detailed chronology, reference entries, primary sources, images, and a bibliography provide crucial information that readers need in order to understand Hitler's plan, as carried out through legislation and armed violence. The book also demonstrates that both within Nazi Germany, and in other parts of Europe, all sectors of society played a role in planning, facilitating, and executing the Final Solution. In addition to entries on nearly 150 perpetrators, the book includes 25 primary source documents, ranging from government memoranda to first-hand observations of Nazi killing activities to field reports from senior officers on the scene of Holocaust killing sites. Also included are excerpts from literary memoirs. Students and researchers will find these documents to be fascinating statements as well as excellent source material for further research.
The remarkable rise and shameful fall of one of the twentieth century's greatest conglomerates At its peak in the 1930s, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. To this day, companies formerly part of the Farben cartel—the aspirin-maker Bayer, the graphics supplier Agfa, the plastics giant BASF—continue to play key roles in the global market. IG Farben itself, however, is remembered mostly for its infamous connections to the Nazi Party and its complicity in the atrocities of the Holocaust. After the war, Farben's leaders were tried for crimes that included mass murder and exploitation of slave labor. In Hell's Cartel, Diarmuid Jeffreys presents the first comprehensive account of IG Farben's rise and fall, tracing the enterprise from its nineteenth-century origins, when the discovery of synthetic dyes gave rise to a vibrant new industry, through the upheavals of the Great War era, and on to the company's fateful role in World War II. Drawing on extensive research and original interviews, Hell's Cartel sheds new light on the codependence of industry and the Third Reich, and offers a timely warning against the dangerous merger of politics and the pursuit of profit.