For the period between World War II and the full onset of the Cold War, histories of American intelligence seem to go dark. Yet in those years a little known clandestine organization, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), emerged from the remnants of wartime American intelligence to lay the groundwork for what would become the CIA and, in ways revealed here for the first time, conduct its own secret war of espionage and political intrigue in postwar Europe. Telling the full story of this earl...

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century. The volume is organized based on three overarching themes that highlight the challenges and risks in international human rights: international institutions and global governance of human rights; thematic blind spots in human rights protection; and the human rights challenges of the United States as ...

'The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love - only for their fear.'- Heinrich HimmlerThe Schutzstaffel, or SS - the brutal elite of the Nazi Party - was founded by Hitler in 1925 to be his personal bodyguard. From 1929 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler, who built its numbers up from under 300 to well over a million by 1945 as the SS grew to be the backbone of Nazi Germany, ta...

From its creation in 1933 until Hitler's death in May 1945, anyone living in Nazi-controlled territory lived in fear of a visit from the Gestapo an abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei or secret state police. Young or old, rich or poor, nobody was beyond the attentions of a brutally efficient organization that spread its malign influence into every corner of Europe in the wake of the all-conquering German armed forces. The Gestapo offers a detailed history of this evil operation commanded...

“A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—NewsweekChristopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Ba...

From a National Jewish Book Award–winning author: The "revelatory and shocking" investigation into the CIA's liberation of Nazi war criminals ( Kirkus Reviews).How did Gen, Karl Wolff, one of the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party's Waffen-SS, who personally oversaw the deportation of three hundred thousand Jews to the Treblinka extermination camps, escape prosecution at the Nuremberg trials? As revealed in this groundbreaking investigation—culled fr...

Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations.Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations:-FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor-A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office-Roosevelt knew before any other world leader o...

A searing account of a dark "chapter in U.S. Cold War history . . . to help the anti-Soviet aims of American intelligence and national security agencies" ( Library Journal).Even before the final shots of World War II were fired, another war began—a cold war that pitted the United States against its former ally, the Soviet Union. As the Soviets consolidated power in Eastern Europe, the CIA scrambled to gain the upper hand against new enemies worldwide. To th...

Based on astonishing KGB documents, this essential exposé uncovers the shadowy operations of the Soviet Union’s top intelligence organization.**“**The Sword and the Shield **will stand as an indispensable reference work on Soviet espionage for years to come.” -**Washington PostDerived from an unprecedented, top-secret archive described by the FBI as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achiev...

A major new history of the eight days in February 1945 when FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided the fate of the worldImagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic turning point in the war to hash out the terms of the peace.The ink wasn't dry when the recrimi...

For the first time in one enthralling book, here is the incredible true story of the numerous attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler and change the course of history.Disraeli once declared that “assassination never changed anything,” and yet the idea that World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust might have been averted with a single bullet or bomb has remained a tantalizing one for half a century. What historian Roger Moorhouse reveals in Killing Hitler is just how close–and how...

From the bestselling author of One Minute to Midnight, this is the riveting story of the last six months of World War II, when the hopeful Allied situation inspired by the Yalta Conference descended into the open conflict that would lead to the Cold War.When FDR, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin gathered outside the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945, they had Hitler's armies on the run, and victory was just a matter of time. Their mission was to forge the decisions ...