Athletics and politics collide in a critical event for Nazi Germany and the contemporary world.The torch relay—that staple of Olympic pageantry—first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain.The Olympic festival was a crucial part of...

In Germans to the Front, David Large charts the path from Germany’s total demilitarization immediately after World War II to the appearance of the Bundeswehr, the West German army, in 1956. The book is the first comprehensive study in English of West German rearmament during this critical period. Large’s analysis of the complex interplay between the diplomatic and domestic facets of the rearmament debate illuminates key elements in the development of the Cold War and in Germany’s ...

The Grand Spas of Central Europe leads readers on an irresistible tour through the grand spa towns of Central Europe—fabled places like Baden-Baden, Bad Ems, Bad Gastein, Karlsbad, and Marienbad. Noted historian David Clay Large follows the grand spa story from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, focusing especially on the years between the French Revolution and World War II, a period in which the major Central European Kurorte (“cure-towns”) reached their peak of influence and then slip...

Set against the backdrop of the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, this compelling book provides the first comprehensive history of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, notorious for the abduction of Israeli Olympians by Palestinian terrorists and the hostages’ tragic deaths after a botched rescue mission by the German police. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources from the time, eminent historian David Clay Large explores the 1972 festival in all its ramifications. He interweaves the...

In this masterpiece of Holocaust literature, David Clay Large tells the wrenching story of Max Schohl, a German Jew who, in the midst of the Second World War, could not find a government that would allow his family to immigrate, despite wealth, education, and business and family connections. After repeated but fruitless efforts to gain entry first to the United States and then to Britain, Chile, and Brazil, Max died in Auschwitz and his wife and daughters were sent to hard labor in Wiesbad...

In the political history of the past century, no city has played a more prominent-though often disastrous-role than Berlin. At the same time, Berlin has also been a dynamic center of artistic and intellectual innovation. If Paris was the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Berlin was to become the signature city for the next hundred years. Once a symbol of modernity, in the Thirties it became associated with injustice and the abuse of power. After 1945, it became the iconic City of the Co...

More than 800,000 people entered Treblinka, and fewer than seventy came out. Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, fifty years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation and discovered in his briefcase after his suicide. It is reproduced here for the first time.In Treblinka Survivo...

The award-winning author of Target Switzerland uses "a wide breadth of research to attempt to answer why Switzerland escaped the Nazi onslaught" ( Daly History Blog).While surrounded by the Axis powers in World War II, Switzerland remained democratic and, unlike most of Europe, never succumbed to the siren songs and threats of the Nazi goliath.This book tells the story with emphasis on two voices rarely heard. One voice is that of scores of ...

Between 1914 and 1945 European society was in almost continuous upheaval, enduring two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his remarkably ambitious and powerful narrative, historian Robert Gellately argues that these tragedies are all inextricably linked and that to consider them as discrete events is to misunderstand their entire genesis and character.Crucially, Gellately makes clear how previous studies comparing the Sovi...

The Nazis came late to Hungary because, until early 1944, Germany and Hungary were allies. But when they did arrive, their orders were to put the Final Solution” into effect with deliberate speed. Soros, a Jewish lawyer in Budapest, secured fake Christian identities for himself, his wife, and his two sons following the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944. In a narrative reminiscent of the great Primo Levi, Soros recounts his experiences with a beguiling humor, deep humanity, and ...

Dispatches from a workers' revolt by the Memoirs of a Revolutionary author, "one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes" (Susan Sontag, winner of the National Book Award).Following in the wake of the carnage reaped across Europe by World War I, German workers undertook a struggle that would prove decisive in determining the course of the entire twentieth century. In 1923, the fledgling Comintern (The Communist Inte...

The year was 1932. At age fourteen Robert Beir’s journey through life changed irrevocably when a classmate called him a “dirty Jew.” Suddenly Beir encountered the belligerent poison of anti-Semitism. The safe confines of his upbringing had been violated. The pain that he felt at that moment was far more hurtful than any blow. Its memory would last a lifetime.Beir’s experiences with anti-Semitism served as a microcosm for the anti-Semitism among the majority of Americans. That year,...