**'[An] arresting and deeply researched new book' The New Yorker'Essential reading . . . Hellbeck masterfully explains what made World War II on the Eastern front so destructive and why this matters today. A tour de force' Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting EuropeIn the Nazi imagination, the USSR was the most powerful Jewish organization in the world. They called it ‘World Enemy No. 1’.**The shocking number of Soviet citizens who lost the...

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places—Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, ...

Named Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, TLS, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail and Scotland on Sunday, Ian Kershaw's The End is a searing account of the final months of Nazi Germany, laying bare the fear and fanaticism that drove a nation to destruction.In almost every major war there comes a point where defeat looms for one side and its rulers cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attemp...

**NEW YORK TIMES #1 BESTSELLER **THE BOOK TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHY DEMOCRACY IS FAILING IN 2025‘The most coherent manifesto on confronting Trump’ New StatesmanIn the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, an...

'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....

As the 100th anniversary of World War I approaches, historian Margaret MacMillan compares current global tensions-rising nationalism, globalization’s economic pressures, sectarian strife, and the United States’ fading role as the world’s pre-eminent superpower-to the period preceding the Great War. In illuminating the years before 1914, MacMillan shows the many parallels between then and now, telling an urgent story for our time. THE BROOKINGS ESSAY: In the spirit of its commitment to high...

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...

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm, with the world facing a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of empire, and countless other dangers. In*Waste Land,*Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of over twenty books on world affairs, explains incisively how we got here and where we are going.As in much of his work, Kaplan looks to history, literature, politics and philosophy to interpret our world, drawing...

Between 1933 and 1945, more than 500,000 German citizens resisted the Nazi government. Many were imprisoned for political crimes which included both active attempts to remove Hitler from office and passive attempts to oppose the Nazi regime. Resistance was found among university students, churches and even in the German military.This fascinating and compelling history of the German resistance covers groups and methods from underground newspapers such as "Rote Kapella" and "Internal...

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas*: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?*"For a long time some people believe...

Following the enormous success of HITLER: HUBRIS this book triumphantly completes one of the great modern biographies. No figure in twentieth century history more clearly demands a close biographical understanding than Adolf Hitler; and no period is more important than the Second World War. Beginning with Hitler's startling European successes in the aftermath of the Rhinelland occupation and ending nine years later with the suicide in the Berlin bunker, Kershaw allows us as never before to...

A chilling biography of the head of Nazi Germany's terror apparatus, a key player in the Third Reich whose full story has never before been told.Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of...