The notorious concentration camp system was a central pillar of the Third Reich, supporting the Nazi war against political, racial and social outsiders whilst also intimidating the population at large. Established during the first months of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, several million men, women and children of many nationalities had been incarcerated in the camps by the end of the Second World War. At least two million lost their lives.This comprehensive volume offers the first ...

Despite the social sciences' growing fascination with tattooing--and the immense popularity of tattoos themselves--the practice has not left much of a historical record. And, until very recently, there was no good context for writing a serious history of tattooing in the West. This collection exposes, for the first time, the richness of the tattoo's European and American history from antiquity to the present day. In the process, it rescues tattoos from their stereotypical and sensationaliz...

Any consideration of the 20th century would be incomplete without a discussion of Nazi Germany, an extraordinary regime which dominated European history for 12 years, and left a legacy that still echoes with us today. The incredible force of the destructive vision at the heart of Nazi Germany led to a second world war when the world was still aching from the first one, and an incomprehensible death count, both at home and abroad. In this Very Short Introduction, Jane Caplan's insi...

The history of National Socialism as movement and regime remains one of the most compelling and intensively studied aspects of twentieth-century history, and one whose significance extends far beyond Germany or even Europe alone. This volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the history of Nazi Germany, with ten chapters on the most important themes, each by an expert in the field. Following an introduction which sets out the challenges this period of history has pos...

Irma Grese was among the Nazi war criminals tried and found guilty at the Lueneburg, Germany trial held from September-November 1945. Grese aspired to be a nurse but was assigned to concentration camp work by the government labour exchange. She admired Adolf Hilter, as did many German youths, and eventually she joined the SS. Irma has been described as among the most unyielding and uncompassionate of those who presided over the Nazi death camps. She was directly under the supervision of Jo...

"An important, revealing story, exceptionally well told."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington PostEmploying the rich testimony of almost three hundred survivors of the slave-labor camps of Starachowice, Poland, Christopher R. Browning draws the experiences of the Jewish prisoners, the Nazi authorities, and the neighboring Poles together into a chilling history of a little-known dimension of the Holocaust. Brutal and deadly in their living and work conditions, these camps represen...

There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘i...

"A true-life companion to Quentin Tarantino's. . . . WWII movie Inglorious Basterds . . . Quick-paced and immediate, with many satisfying moments." — Publishers WeeklyAt the height of World War II, with the Third Reich's final solution in full operation, a small group of Jews who had barely escaped the Nazis did the unthinkable: They went back. Spies now, these men took on a dangerous mission be...

The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: "a major achievement" ( New Republic).Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses we...

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Je...

A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews?Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Na...

In Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum investigates the meanings and motivations people have attached to Hitler and his crimes against humanity. What does Hitler tell us about the nature of evil? In often dramatic encounters, Rosenbaum confronts historians, scholars, filmmakers, and deniers as he skeptically analyzes the key strains of Hitler interpretation.A balanced and thoughtful overview of a subject both frightening and profound, this is an extraordinary quest, an expedit...