World War Ii Social History

During World War II, Heinz Drossel saved Soviet prisoners of war and several Jews, including Marianne Hirschfeld. Again and again, he wasn't afraid to risk his own life when others' safety was at risk. Nearly all of Hirschfeld's family members were murdered by Nazis; she survived in hiding - and met Heinz again by coincidence after the war was over. They married in 1946. At that time, starting over was difficult. In the judicial service, Drossel witnessed Nazis continuing with their careers....

In 1929, Raymond Geist went to Berlin as a consul, and he handled visas for emigrants to the US. Geist expedited the exit of Albert Einstein just before Hitler came to power. Once the Nazis began to oppress Jews and others, Geist's role became vitally important. It was Geist who extricated Sigmund Freud from Vienna and Geist who understood the scale and urgency of the humanitarian crisis. Even while hiding his homosexual relationship with a German, Geist fearlessly challenged the Nazi police state whenever it abused Americans in Germany or threatened US interests.

Si la historia tiene una utilidad por antonomasia es la de impedir que los episodios más oscuros de esta se repitan. Un conocimiento de los distintos movimientos fascistas que surgieron tras la Primera Guerra Mundial y que detentaron el poder en numerosos países europeos en el período de entreguerras, es necesario para impedir que, en épocas de crisis económicas y de valores, vuelvan a seducir a los pueblos con su mensaje de regeneración expeditiva.

Decisive Moments in History: The Manhattan Project covers the beginning of atomic research prior to the Manhattan Project, the exodus of talented scientists fleeing Nazi Germany throughout Europe, and the history and results of the grand project that ushered in the Atomic Age.

In 1998, Helga Schneider, in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90-year-old mother lived. The last time she had seen her mother was 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on the SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected.

The Japanese army's brutal occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as the rape of Nanking. As they slaughtered an estimated 300,000 people, the invading soldiers raped more than 20,000 women - some estimates run as high as 80,000. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected 10,000 Chinese women and children.

While Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first hundred days may be the most celebrated period of his presidency, the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor proved the most critical. Beginning as early as 1939, when Germany first attacked Poland, Roosevelt skillfully navigated a host of challenges: a reluctant population, an unprepared military, and disagreements within his cabinet to prepare the country for its inevitable confrontation with the Axis.

Michael Fullilove’s work on global affairs has appeared in major publications such as the New York Times. In Rendezvous with Destiny, Fullilove examines the exceptional men at the heart of America’s transformation into a global power.

Bert Trautmann is famed as the goalkeeper who broke his neck in an FA Cup final and played on. But his early life is no less extraordinary: he grew up in Nazi Germany and fought for the Germans in World War Two. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he saw a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long became an England football hero. This is his extraordinary story.

An insightful historical account, Democrat and Diplomat exposes the dark underbelly of 1930s Germany and explores the terrible burden of those who realized the horror that was to come. Dodd was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, arriving in Berlin with his wife and daughter just as Hitler assumed the chancellorship. An unlikely candidate for the job - and not President Roosevelt's first choice - Dodd quickly came to realize that the situation in Germany was far grimmer than was understood in America.

An intriguing look behind the congenial facade of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, this work reveals how each leader jealously guarded knowledge from the other in pursuit of separate national interests.

In the middle of World War II, Nazi military intelligence discovered a seemingly easy way to win the war for Adolf Hitler. The three heads of the Allied forces - Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin - were planning to meet in Tehran in October, 1943. Under Hitler's personal direction, the Nazis launched "Operation Long Jump", an intricate plan to track the Allied leaders in Tehran and assassinate all three men at the same time. Historian Bill Yenne retells the incredible, globe-spanning story of the most ambitious assassination plot ever thwarted.

During World War II, Port Chicago was a segregated naval munitions base on the outer shores of San Francisco Bay. On July 17, 1944, an explosion rocked the base, killing 320 men — 202 of whom were Black ammunition loaders. In the ensuing weeks, White officers were given leave time and commended for heroic efforts, whereas 328 of the surviving Black enlistees were sent to load ammunition on another ship. When they refused, 50 men were singled out and charged — and convicted — of mutiny. It was the largest mutiny trial in US naval history.

¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de fascismo y populismo? ¿Qué los asemeja y qué los diferencia? ¿Cuáles son sus conexiones en términos teóricos y cuáles en su decurso histórico? ¿Cómo y por qué el fascismo se transformó en el populismo en la historia?

At the Australian war crimes trials that followed World War II, one prosecution witness stood out: Warrant Officer Bill Sticpewich. During his three years in the infamous Sandakan POW camp, Sticpewich had seen hundreds of fellow prisoners die of starvation, sickness and overwork. Of more than 2400 Allied prisoners at Sandakan at the start of 1945, only six survived. It was Sticpewich's meticulous evidence that sent Sandakan's commandant and his murderous henchmen to the gallows. But to his fellow prisoners Sticpewich was not a war hero.

In 1939 Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister, and his wife, Martha, a social worker, accepted a mission from the American Unitarian Association: They were to leave their home and young children in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to help address the mounting refugee crisis. Armed with only $40,000, the Sharps quickly learned the art of spy craft and covertly sheltered political dissidents and Jews and helped them escape the Nazis.

Nigel Hamilton's Mantle of Command, long-listed for the National Book Award, drew on years of archival research and interviews to portray FDR in a tight close-up as he determined Allied strategy in the crucial initial phases of World War II. Commander in Chief reveals the astonishing sequel - suppressed by Winston Churchill in his memoirs - of Roosevelt's battles with Churchill to maintain that strategy.

Prisons and Patriots provides a detailed account of 41 Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans), known as the Tucsonians, who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during WWII. Cherstin Lyon parallels their courage as resisters with that of civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, well known for his legal battle against curfew and internment, who also resisted the draft. These dual stories highlight the intrinsic relationship between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, particularly salient in times of war.

The first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency are justly famous, viewed as a period of political action without equal in American history. Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the end of FDR's presidency might very well surpass it in drama and consequence. Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR used every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue the things that mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and more.

The Battle of Midway was, on paper, an improbable victory for the smaller, less experienced American navy and air force, so much so that it was quickly described as “a miracle.” This new history demonstrates that luck, let alone miracles, had little to do with it. In The Silver Waterfall, Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor show how the efforts of America’s peacetime navy combined with creative innovations made by designers and industrialists were largely responsible for the victory.