In the spring of 1898, thousands of peasants and townspeople in western Galicia rioted against their Jewish neighbors. Attacks took place in more than 400 communities in this northeastern province of the Habsburg Monarchy, in present-day Poland and Ukraine. Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked and looted, and Jews were assaulted, threatened, and humiliated, though not killed. Emperor Franz Joseph signed off on a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and declared martial l...

This innovative collection of essays on the upsurge of antisemitism across Europe in the decades around 1900 shifts the focus away from intellectuals and well-known incidents to less-familiar events, actors, and locations, including smaller towns and villages. This “from below” perspective offers a new look at a much-studied phenomenon: essays link provincial violence and antisemitic politics with regional, state, and even transnational trends. Featuring a diverse array of geographies that...

The overwhelming majority of historical work on the late Habsburg Monarchy has focused primarily on national movements and ethnic conflicts, with the result that too little attention has been devoted to the state and ruling dynasty. This volume is the first of its kind to concentrate on attempts by the imperial government to generate a dynastic-oriented state patriotism in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. It examines those forces in state and society which tended toward the promotion o...

The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of TotalitarianismSparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly...

A new, comprehensive exploration of the Gestapo from a renowned historian of the Third Reich.Drawing on a detailed examination of previously unpublished Gestapo case files this book relates the fascinating, vivid and disturbing accounts of a cross-section of ordinary and extraordinary people who opposed the Nazi regime. It also tells the equally disturbing stories of the involvement of the German citizenry in the Gestapo’s surveillance and reveals the cold-blooded,...

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...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[Timothy] Snyder identifies the conditions that allowed the Holocaust—conditions our society today shares. . . . He certainly couldn’t be more right about our world.”—The New RepublicA “gripping [and] disturbingly vivid” (The Wall Street Journal) portrait of the defining tragedy of our time, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of On TyrannyONE OF THE...

Ian Kershaw's HITLER allows us to come closer than ever before to a serious understanding of the man and of the catastrophic sequence of events which allowed a bizarre misfit to climb from a Viennese dosshouse to leadership of one of Europe's most sophisticated countries. With extraordinary skill and vividness, drawing on a huge range of sources, Kershaw recreates the world which first thwarted and then nurtured the young Hitler. As his seemingly pitiful fantasy of being Germany's saviour ...

A history of how anti-Semitism evolved into the Holocaust in Germany: "If any book can tell what Hitlerism was like, this is it" (Alfred Kazin).Lucy Dawidowicz's groundbreaking The War Against the Jews inspired waves of both acclaim and controversy upon its release in 1975. Dawidowicz argues that genocide was, to the Nazis, as central a war goal as conquering Europe, and was made possible by a combination of political, social, and technological factors. Sh...

“This is by far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.”―Antony Beevor, bestselling author of StalingradLaurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, he combines their never-before-seen eyewitness testimony with the latest academic research to create a uniquely accessible and aut...

"Tells us how Nazism happened, in microcosm, in a single German town that was neither typical nor exceptional in admitting and then yielding to tyranny." — The New York TimesIn this classic work of twentieth-century history, William Sheridan Allen demonstrates how dictatorship subtly surmounted democracy in Germany and how the Nazi seizure of power encroached from below. Relying upon legal records and interviews with primary sources, Allen dissects Northei...

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award“Brilliant, far-reaching, passionate. . .sweeping and marvelously detailed. . .finely, intimately, movingly drawn. . . a book for the ages.”—The New York TimesIn this important work of historical restoration, respected journalist and historian Amos Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into...