Sam Mallory is a private detective working in an alternate Los Angeles during 1943. A new case takes him into the heart of a seedy and dangerous world where nothing and no-one are quite as they seem. Hollywood meets the Third Reich with unpredictable results. This riveting narrative mixes fiction and well researched fact. The effect is as if Raymond Chandler had rewritten Homer's Odyssey. A Good Read!
Forging Germans explores the German nationalization and eventual National Socialist radicalization of ethnic Germans in the Batschka and the Western Banat, two multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderland territories currently in northern Serbia. Deploying a comparative approach, Caroline Mezger investigates the experiences of ethnic German children and youth in interwar Yugoslavia and under Hungarian and German occupation during World War II, as local and Third Reich cultural, religious, political, and military organizations wrestled over young people's national (self-) identification and loyalty. Ethnic German children and youth targeted by these nationalization endeavors moved beyond being the objects of nationalist activism to become agents of nationalization themselves, as they actively negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the "Germanness" ascribed to them. Interweaving original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and diverse historical press sources, Forging Germans provides incisive insight into the experiences and memories of one of Europe's most contested wartime demographics, probing the relationship between larger historical circumstances and individual agency and subjectivity.
Since unification, the Federal Republic of Germany has made vaunted efforts to make amends for the crimes of the Third Reich. Yet it remains the case that the demands for restitution by many countries that were occupied during the Second World War are unresolved, and recent demands from Greece and Poland have only reignited old debates. This book reconstructs the German occupation of Poland and Greece and gives a thorough accounting of these debates. Working from the perspective of international law, it deepens the scholarly discourse around the issue, clarifying the ‘never-ending story’ of German reparations policy and making a principled call for further action. A compilation of primary sources comprising 125 annotated key texts (512 pages) on the complexity of reparations discussions covering the period between 1941 and the end of 2017 is available for free on the Berghahn Books website, doi: 10.3167/9781800732575.dd.
The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituted a central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. The monarchy's composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Lower Austrian Estates -- a leading representative body and privileged corps -- formed a vital, if changing, element underlying Habsburg international success and resilience. With its capital at Vienna, the archduchy below the river Enns (the historic designation of Lower Austria) was geographically, politically, and financially a key Habsburg possession. Fiscal-military exigency induced the Estates to take part in new and evolving arrangements of power that served the purposes of government; in turn the Estates were able in previously little-understood ways and within narrowing boundaries to preserve vital interests in a changing world. The Estates survived because they were necessary, not only thanks to their increasing financial potency, but also because they offered a politically viable way of exacting ever-larger quantities of money, men, and other resources from local society. These circumstances would persist as ruling became more regularized, formalized, and homogenized, and as the very understanding of the Estates as a social and political phenomenon was evolving.
The experience of all occupied countries during the Second World War was characterised by severe material shortages. Food, most noticeably, became a scarcity in everyday life; and that food grew into a major stake for all political groups at this time. This book shines a much-needed spotlight on the political role of food in Southeastern Europe from 1939 to 1945. Controlling food was a key strategy adopted by all actors – be they occupiers, state institutions, resistance organizations, international humanitarian organizations or private interest groups – in substantiating their bid for power. As a predominantly agrarian area with a substantial peasant population, investigating this topic is particularly poignant for Southeastern Europe. From discussions of searching for and fighting for food to offering relief and instrumentalising of food politically, the chapters in this volume add nuance to discussions on the complex intertwined political and social dynamics of war and occupation. In so doing, this sophisticated study fills an important gap in our understanding of the Second World War, food policy, and the social history of Europe more broadly.
Christoph Kimmich's German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Current Research and Resources is a comprehensive guide to archival resources and published materials on the foreign policy of Weimar and Nazi Germany. It catalogues the archives, libraries, and research institutes, both public and private, that house important collections, especially in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, and describes their holdings, terms of access and use, and guides and inventories available. German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945 also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of published sources, ranging from documentary series to significant contemporary accounts, from memoirs to secondary works. The bibliography reflects current scholarship and draws attention to works that are innovative and accessible, It also describes the various series of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial Records and the original trial documents available in archives and libraries. The guide canvasses the vast and growing offering of materials on the Web- digitized print materials, archival inventories, and source materials. In order to expedite work in the archives, the guide also explains the organization and functioning of the German foreign ministry between 1918 and 1945 and how it kept and stored its records. This third edition offers new information on German archives, many of which were consolidated and relocated after German reunification, on recently discovered archival holdings, and on materialsposted on the Web. It is a reference source for both established scholars and young researchers, offering quick and efficient access to the voluminous research and research materials that are now available.
Performance Anxiety analyses the efforts of German elites, from 1890 to 1945, to raise the productivity and psychological performance of workers through the promotion of mass sports. Michael Hau reveals how politicians, sports officials, medical professionals, and business leaders, articulated a vision of a human economy that was coopted in 1933 by Nazi officials in order to promote competition in the workplace. Hau's original and startling study is the first to establish how Nazi leaders' discourse about sports and performance was used to support their claims that Germany was on its way to becoming a true meritocracy. Performance Anxiety is essential reading for political, social, and sports historians alike.
