During a career lasting nearly half a century, Meister Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634) personally put to death 392 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. The remarkable number of victims, as well as the officially sanctioned context in which they suffered at Schmidt’s hands, was the story of Joel Harrington’s much-discussed book The Faithful Executioner. The foundation of that celebrated work was Schmidt's own journal--notable not only for the shocking story it...

During a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, known as the Eden Dance Palace trial, Hans Litten grilled Hitler in a brilliant and merciless three-hour cross-examination, forcing him into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage (the transcription of Hitler's full testimony is included.) At the time, Hitler was still trying to prove his embrace of legal methods, and distancing himself from his stormtroopers. The courageous Litten revea...

The extraordinary story of a renaissance-era executioner and his world, based on a rare and overlooked journal.In a dusty German bookshop, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington stumbled upon a remarkable document: the journal of a sixteenth-century executioner. The journal gave an account of the 394 people Meister Frantz Schmidt executed, and the hundreds more he tortured, flogged, or disfigured for more than forty-five years in the city of Nuremberg. But the portr...

From “one of the best of the new [Martin Luther] biographers” (The New Yorker), a portrait of the complicated founding father of the Protestant Reformation, whose intellectual assault on Catholicism transformed Christianity and changed the course of world history.“Magnificent.”—The Wall Street Journal“Penetrating.”—The New York Times Book Review“Smart, accessible, authoritative.”—Hil...

The heart-pounding history of how Pope Pius XII—often labeled “Hitler’s Pope”—was in fact an anti-Nazi spymaster, plotting against the Third Reich during World War II.**“A groundbreaking new history of the Vatican-German Resistance. . . . Writing with the craft of a novelist and the conscience of a meticulous scholar, Riebling has produced a masterly account.” —**National ReviewThe Vatican’s silence in the face of Nazi atrocities r...

One of the most dramatic explorations of a German town in the grip of anti-Semitic passion ever written.In 1900, in a small Prussian town, a young boy was found murdered, his body dismembered, the blood drained from his limbs. The Christians of the town quickly rose up in violent riots to accuse the Jews of ritual murder—the infamous blood-libel charge that has haunted Jews for centuries. In an absorbing narrative, Helmut Walser Smith reconstructs the murder and th...

History / World War I / World War II / Nazi Concentration Camp Survivor / Holocaust / Biography"This book is a milestone in recording the horrors of National Socialism. It is essential reading, and I am delighted that the translation has already received such keen attention in the United States."-Heinz Fischer, president of the Republic of Austria"This book is not only an enthralling read; every detail in it has also been thoroughly researched. From a scientific poi...

This account of the ill-fated 1534 uprising of the Anabaptists in Muenster, Germany is "as hard to put down as a gripping piece of fiction" (Alasdair Heron, Professor of Reformed Theology at the University of Elrangen, Germany).He was only a Dutch tailor's apprentice, but from 1534 to 1535, Jan van Leyden led a radical sect of persecuted Anabaptists to repeated triumphs over the combined powers of church and state. Revered by his followers as the new David, the cha...

From the gruesome ogress in Hansel and Gretel to the hags at the sabbath in Faust, the witch has been a powerful figure of the Western imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of women confessed to being witches-of making pacts with the Devil, causing babies to sicken, and killing animals and crops-and were put to death. This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches during this period and beyond.

"You can send me to the scaffold, but I can make you suffer, and I mean to."Based on actual historic events, this thrilling saga of violence and retribution bridged the gap between medieval and modern literature, and speaks so profoundly to the contemporary spirit that it has been the basis of numerous plays, movies, and novels.It has become, in fact, a classic tale: that of the honorable man forced to take the law into his own hands. In this incendiary pro...

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was one of the most admired astronomers who ever lived and a key figure in the scientific revolution. A defender of Copernicus´ s sun-centred universe, he famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, and defined the three laws of planetary motion. Perhaps less well known is that in 1615, when Kepler was at the height of his career, his widowed mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft. The proceedings led to a criminal trial that lasted six years, with Ke...

The famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm - stories like Snow White , Red Riding Hood , and Rumplestiltskin - are know to millions of people around the world and are deeply embedded in the collective psyche. In this charming account, writer and scholar Valerie Paradiz reveals the true story of how the fairy tales came to be. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collectors and editors of more than 200 folk stories, were major German intellects of the nineteenth century, co...