Few European cities can boast a history as storied and tumultuous as that of Berlin. For more than 150 years it has been at the centre of revolutionary politics; of era-defining struggles between the Left and the Right. It has been bombed, rebuilt and carved in two.In Revolutionary Berlin, veteran tour guide Nathaniel Flakin invites you to stand in the places where this history was written, and to follow in the footsteps of those who helped write it. Through nine self-guid...

A dramatisation of Martin Monath's short life (1913-1944) would need little artistic embellishment; his identity shrouded in mystery, and executed by the Gestapo - twice - the historical record reads like a detective novel.Pieced together for the first time by Wladek Flakin, this biography tells the story of the Jewish socialist and editor of Arbeiter und Soldat ('Worker and Soldier'), and his efforts to turn German rank-and-file soldiers against their Nazi officers in occupied Fra...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZEWe have come to see the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by bureaucrats. Yet by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a million European Jews were already dead: shot at close range over pits and ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones created by the German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile black earth that the Nazis believed would feed the German people.It ...

At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the use of science and technology to improve, extend and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends. In Sybille Steinbacher's terse, powerful new book, the reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to any European in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the world war. How Auschwitz grew and mu...

From the award-winning historian of the Holocaust, the first book to move beyond Germany's singular crime to the collaboration of Europe as a whole.The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been possible without the assistance of thousands of helpers in other countries: state officials, police, and civilians who eagerly supported the genocide. If we are to fully understand how and why the Holocaust happened, Götz Aly argues in this groundbr...

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Book Prize for Holocaust Research“A substantive contribution to the history of ethnic strife and extreme violence” (The Wall Street Journal) and a cautionary examination of how genocide can take root at the local level—turning neighbors, friends, and family against one another—as seen through the eastern European border town of Buczacz during World War II.For more than four hundr...

The Holocaust has long seemed incomprehensible, a monumental crime that beggars our powers of description and explanation. Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of western civilization?In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanatio...

READ JOHN KAMPFNER'S NEW BOOK: IN SEARCH OF BERLIN: THE STORY OF A REINVENTED CITY***THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER***BOOK OF THE YEAR IN GUARDIAN, ECONOMIST & NEW STATESMAN'Excellent and provocative... a passionate, timely book.' Sunday Times'A fine new book... thoughtful, deeply reported and impeccably even-handed.' The TimesEmerging from a co...

The definitive history of Hitler and Stalin's politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century, from the author of the international bestseller, On Tyranny**.**Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens, and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he ...

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to ...

'A superb work of scholarship, full of riveting detail' Sunday TimesA powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944.In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow....

One of the country’s most distinguished writers and publishers returns to her roots to explore the consequences of democracy in the former Habsburg lands.In 1989 the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Communism gave way to democracy. Since that time the former borderlands of the long defunct Hapsburg Empire and the more recently dispersed Soviet Empire have been trying to invent their own versions of democracy and market-driven economics. But these experiments have led to a widening gap b...