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The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination?In 'The Sleepwalkers', Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe.

An omnibus edition of Judith Kerr's internationally acclaimed trilogy, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Other Way Round and A Small Person Far Away, we see the world through Anna's eyes as she grows up -- from her much loved family to Hitler's holocaust. Anna was a German child when she had to flee from the Nazis before the War. By the time the bombs began to fall she was a stateless adolescent in London, and after it was all over she became a happily married Englishwoman who thought she had put the past behind her. This omnibus edition of the three volumes of Judith Kerr's Hitler trilogy, tells her story beginning with the rise of Hitler in 1933 through to her return to Berlin years after the war.

“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”   That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.   They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.   A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER AWARD A magisterial and acclaimed history of post-war Europe, from Germany to Poland, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, selected as one of New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year Europe in 1945 was drained. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another. Today, the Soviet Union is no more and the democracies of the European Union reach as far as the borders of Russia itself. Postwar tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here, demystifying Europe's recent history and identity, of what the continent is and has been. 'It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written...All in all, a real masterpiece' Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek   Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.   The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era

Winner of the Pritzker Prize for Military HistoryA New York Times Notable BookFrom one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.  For thirty-five years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire conflict. Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people—of soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad—Hastings provides a singularly intimate portrait of the world at war. Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is both elegantly written and cogently argued. Above all, it is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the twentieth century.

Fascism is a political ideology which has been identified with totalitarianism, state terror, fanaticism, orchestrated violence, and blind obedience. Fascism was directly associated with the Second World War, the most devastating annihilation of human lives in the history of mankind which left more than 40 million dead around the globe and introduced notions of inhumanity the extent of which was heretofore unknown. The mere term stirs up visions of atrocities and wanton cruelty even today, fifty years after the end of the Last European War Yet once again fascism is in the ascendant, suggesting that it is time for us to renew our understanding of its ideas, ideals, and iniquities. This anthology tries to show why fascism holds such strong appeal to many people. With a wide selection of texts written by fascist thinkers and propagandists as well as prominent anti-fascist criticism from both inside and outside Europe, before and after the Second World War, this collection offers a chilling portrait of the most feared political doctrine in modern history. Some of the topics covered in this volume include fascism in Germany and Italy, pre-1922 precursors of fascism, theories of fascism, the abortive fascist movements in the period 1922-1945, anti-fascist movements and reaction, Marxist criticism of fascist ideology, and post-war fascism. With contributions from writers as diverse as Benito Mussolini and Primo Levi, Joseph Goebbels and George Orwell, Martin Heidegger and Max Horkheimer, this insightful book evokes the pernicious effects of fascist ideology.

Ernst Jünger was one of twentieth-century Germany's most important--and most controversial--writers. Decorated for bravery in World War I and the author of the acclaimed western front memoir Storm of Steel, he frankly depicted war's horrors even as he extolled its glories. As a Wehrmacht captain during World War II, Jünger faithfully kept a journal in occupied Paris and continued to write on the eastern front and in Germany until its defeat--writings that are of major historical and literary significance. Jünger's Paris journals document his Francophile excitement, romantic affairs, and fascination with botany and entomology, alongside mystical and religious ruminations and trenchant observations on the occupation and the politics of collaboration. While working as a mail censor, he led the privileged life of an officer, encountering artists such as Céline, Cocteau, Braque, and Picasso. His notes from the Caucasus depict the chaos after Stalingrad and atrocities on the eastern front. Upon returning to Paris, Jünger observed the French resistance and was close to the German military conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After fleeing France, he reunited with his family as Germany's capitulation approached. Both participant and commentator, close to the horrors of history but often distancing himself from them, Jünger turned his life and experiences into a work of art. These wartime journals appear here in English for the first time, giving fresh insights into the quandaries of the twentieth century from the keen pen of a paradoxical observer.

In Days of Masquerade Claudia Schoppmann offers the first in-depth account of lesbians living in Germany during the Third Reich. Through a series of interviews, Schoppmann recounts the lives of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims: women who fought against Hitler's regime, others who married gay men to ward off suspicion, and one who remained active despite fairly clear pronouncements of her sexuality.Schoppmann enriches these vivid oral histories with the findings of her archival research, including a fascinating look at Nazi policy papers. She explores the drive toward sexual emancipation in Imperial and Weimar Germany and presents a comprehensive overview of Nazi attitudes and policies toward homosexual men and women. Identifying ways in which the Nazi positions were highly gender-specific, she points out that lesbianism was seen as less reprehensible than male homosexuality, since it was not considered a threat to women's reproductive potential.Days of Masquerade demonstrates that lesbianism, though not criminalized or subjected to systematic persecution as was male homosexuality, was driven underground by the Nazis, the thriving lesbian communities that had flourished during the Weimar Republic effectively destroyed.An eloquent reminder of the "forgotten victims" of the Third Reich, Days of Masquerade also points out that the experiences of gay men and lesbians during the Nazi era were not one and the same. As a major chapter in the social history of lesbians, Schoppmann's work opens new doors for students of lesbian and gay history, women's studies, and modern German and European history.

'This is a book of horrors, and should be left alone by those prone to nightmares. Sven Hassel's descriptions of the atrocities committed by both sides are the most horrible indictments of war I have ever read.... A great war novel!' Alan Silitoe Stationed on the Russian Front and now equipped with armoured vehicles, Sven Hassel and his comrades from the 27th penal regiment fight on remorselessly... All of them should be dead: life expectancy on the Russian Front is measured in weeks. But Sven, Porta, Tiny and The Legionnaire fight to the end, not for Germany, not for Hitler, but for survival. Wheels of Terror is a sobering depiction of war's brutalities, and the violence and inhumanity that the history books leave out.