With its battlefields paved over and its bunkers crumbled, the Third Reich of Nazi Germany nevertheless lives on in countless photographs that record an era of extraordinary brutality. This collection of more than 500 photographs taken by amateurs and professional propagandists provides a panoramic overview of Nazi Germany, offering intimate glimpses into living rooms and killing grounds, kitchens and concentration camps, movie theaters and battle fronts. The explanatory text explores the context of the images. Together, these photographs, most never before seen, create a time capsule, capturing the faces of Hitler's soldier's as well as those who suffered under the Nazi onslaught on humanity.
This illustrated volume documents the history of the Nazis, from their roots in World War I and their rise to power in 1933, to the end of the Cold War era and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, using many previously unpublished images of Nazi Germany and World War II. An Illustrated History of the Nazis traces the roots of the movement from the early days of the Weimar Republic, through the rise to power of the charismatic Adolf Hitler, up to the dramatic downfall of Germany in 1945. Extra material follows the aftermath of the war through to the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War, and examines the consequences of the Wehrmacht. Paying particular attention to the holocaust, the policy of 'total war', the state of German society and the systematic use of propaganda and terror, this unique and fascinating book is an essential purchase for the history enthusiast.
'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.
A look at Adolf Hitler’s residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator’s private persona both within Germany and abroad. Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him. “Inarguably the powder-keg title of the year.”—Mitchell Owen, Architectural Digest “A fascinating read, which reminds us that in Nazi Germany the architectural and the political can never be disentangled. Like his own confected image, Hitler’s buildings cannot be divorced from their odious political hinterland.”—Roger Moorhouse, Times
Indianthusiasm refers to the European fascination with, and fantasies about, Indigenous peoples of North America, and has its roots in nineteenth-century German colonial imagination. Often manifested in romanticized representations of the past, Indianthusiasm has developed into a veritable industry in Germany and other European nations: there are Western and so-called “Indian” theme parks and a German hobbyist scene that attract people of all social backgrounds and ages to join camps and clubs that practise beading, powwow dancing, and Indigenous lifestyles. Containing interviews with twelve Indigenous authors, artists, and scholars who comment on the German fascination with North American Indigenous Peoples, Indianthusiasm is the first collection to present Indigenous critiques and assessments of this phenomenon. The volume connects two disciplines and strands of scholarship: German Studies and Indigenous Studies, focusing on how Indianthusiam has created both barriers and opportunities for Indigenous peoples with Germans and in Germany.
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'être of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.
This title examines the remarkable life of Che Guevara. Readers will learn about Guevara's family background, childhood, education, and groundbreaking work as a revolutionary fighting against poverty. Color photos, a detailed map, and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-read, compelling text. Features include a table of contents, timeline, facts, additional resources, Web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Essential Lives is a series in Essential Library, an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company.
This richly illustrated book details the wide-ranging construction and urban planning projects launched across Germany after the Nazi Party seized power. The authors show that it was an intentional program to thoroughly reorganize the country's economic, cultural, and political landscapes in order to create a dramatically new Germany, saturated with Nazi ideology.
Set near the concentration camps of Auschwitz, an accaimed historical thriller of the end of World War II that has been called “A masterpiece of empathetic imagination and storytelling flair” (BBC History Magazine, “Historical Novel of the Year”) 1944. Paul Brandt, a soldier in the German army, returns wounded and ashamed from the bloody chaos of the Eastern Front to find his village changed and in the dark shadow of an SS rest hut—a luxurious retreat for officers recuperating from their injuries and for those who manage the nearby concentration camps of Auschwitz. The hut is run with the help of a small group of female prisoners from the camps who, against all odds, have survived the war so far. When, by chance, Brandt glimpses one of these prisoners, he realizes he must find a way to access the hut. For inside is the woman to whom his fate has been tied since their arrest five years earlier, and now he must do all he can to protect her. As the Russian offensive moves closer and partisans press from the surrounding woodlands, the days of this rest hut and its SS inhabitants are numbered. And while hope for Brandt and the female prisoners grows tantalizingly close, the danger is greater than ever. In a forest to the east, a young female Soviet tank driver awaits her orders to advance . . . The Constant Soldier has been hauled as “a masterpiece” and “a modern classic” and praised on its UK publication as “An extraordinary novel, with the intensity and pace of a thriller and a wisdom and subtlety all of its own. I was gripped to the very last page” (Antonia Hodgson).
