The first major history of what happened in Germany immediately after the Second World War 'Frederick Taylor is one of the brightest historians writing today.' Newsweek 'Taylor's book is popular history at its best, essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Nazis and wants to know what happened next.' New Statesman Germany had entered the twentieth century united, prosperous, and strong, admired by almost all humanity for its remarkable achievements. By 1945 it was a broken shell: its great cities lay in ruins and its shattered industries and cultural heritage seemed utterly beyond saving. The Germans themselves had come to be regarded as evil monsters. After six years of warfare how were the exhausted victors to handle the end of a horror that to most people seemed without precedent? In Exorcising Hitler, Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's year zero and what came after. As he describes the final Allied campaign, the hunting down of the Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of peoples in central and eastern Europe, the attitudes of the conquerors, the competition between Soviet Russia and the West, the hunger and near starvation of a once proud people, the initially naive attempt at expunging Nazism from all aspects of German life and the later more pragmatic approach, we begin to understand that despite almost total destruction, a combination of conservatism, enterprise and pragmatism in relation to former Nazis enabled the economic miracle of the 1950s. And we see how it was only when the '60s generation (the children of the Nazi era) began to question their parents with increasing violence that Germany began to awake from its 'sleep cure'.

Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021 British Academy Book Prize Finalist PROSE Award Finalist “Provocative, elegantly written.” —Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books “Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa.” —Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books In case after case around the globe—from Israel to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the Allies. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for all who live within its boundaries. “A deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world...Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination...Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt’s Imperialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory.” —Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? “A masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting, moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization.” —Karuna Mantena, Columbia University “A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future.” —Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

Personal Names, Hitler, and the Holocaust: A Socio-Onomastic Study of Genocide and Nazi Germany provides readers with an increased understanding of and sensitivity to the many powerful ways in which personal names are used by both perpetrators and victims during wartime. This book concentrates on one of the most terrifying and yet fascinating periods of modern history: the Holocaust. In particular, it examines the different ways in which personal names were used by Nationalist Socialists to hunt and destroy the victims of their genocidal ideology. Even before requiring Jewish residents to wear a yellow Star of David and have the letter “J” stamped on their passports, Nazi leaders had decreed that all Jewish women and men must add the names “Sara(h)” and “Israel” to their documentation. It did not take long for the perfidious logic behind this naming (onomastic) legislation to become frighteningly clear: it made it that much easier to pinpoint Jewish residents for discrimination, marginalization, relocation, deportation, and ultimately extermination. Through compelling first-hand accounts from Holocaust survivors, in-depth interviews with descendants of Nazi war criminals, and a plethora of chilling cases extracted directly from the meticulous records kept by the National Socialists, this work presents a harrowing historical account of the way personal names were used during the Third Reich to achieve Hitler’s homicidal vision. Importantly, the use of personal names and naming to target and annihilate victims is not a historical anomaly of World War II but a widespread sociolinguistic practice that has been demonstrated in many modern-day acts of genocide. From Rwanda to Bosnia, Berlin to Washington, when governmental controls are abridged and ethical boundaries are crossed, very quickly, something as simple as a person’s name can determine who lives and who dies.

One thinks of the arts in Nazi Germany as struggling in an oppressive system, yet evidence has repeatedly shown that conditions were far more favourable than we assume. Potter conducts a historiography of Nazi arts, examining writings from the last seven decades to demonstrate how historical, moral, and intellectual conditions have sustained a distorted characterization of cultural life in the Third Reich. Showing how past research has revealed the decentralized nature of Nazi arts policies, Potter argues that the insulation of academic disciplines allowed outdated presumptions about Nazi micromanagement of the arts to persist.

From the beloved author of Comeback Love and Wherever There Is Light, comes “a sweeping tale full of humor and heartbreak” (Karin Tanabe, author of The Diplomat’s Daughter) about the life-changing journey of a young man who travels from New Jersey to Khrushchev’s Russia and the beaches of Southern France to discover long-hidden secrets about his heritage. In 1950s New Jersey, teacher Michael Daniels—or Misha Danielov to his doting Russian-Jewish grandmother—is at loose ends, until he becomes the host of a nightly underground radio show. Not only does the show become a local hit because of his running satires of USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev, but half a world away, it picks up listeners in a small Soviet city. There, with rock and roll leaking in through bootlegged airwaves, Yulianna Kosoy—a war orphan in her mid-twenties—is sneaking American goods into the country with her boss, Der Schmuggler. But just as Michael’s radio show is taking off, his grandmother is murdered. Why would anyone commit such an atrocity against such a warm, affable woman? She had always been secretive about her past and, as Michael discovers, guarded a shadowy ancestral history. In order to solve the mystery of who killed her, Michael sets out for Europe to learn where he—and his grandmother—really came from. “Both heartbreaking and mesmerizing, Nothing Is Forgotten is the sort of book you won’t soon forget…Cold War Europe, lingering Nazi secrets, and the tragic history faced by millions of families not only bring this tale to life but will keep you turning the pages” (Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author) and will appeal to fans of novels by Anita Diamant and Kristin Hannah.

In most European countries, the horrific legacy of 1939–45 has made it quite difficult to remember the war with much glory. Despite the Anglo-American memory narrative of saving democracy from totalitarianism and the Soviet epic of the Great Patriotic War, the fundamental experience of war for so many Europeans was that of immense personal losses and often meaningless hardships. The anthology at hand focuses on these histories between the victors: on the cases of Hungary, Estonia, Poland, Austria, Finland, and Germany and on the respective, often gendered experiences of defeat. The book’s chapters underline the asynchronous transition to peace in individual experiences, when compared to the smooth timelines of national and international historiographies. Furthermore, it is important to note that instead of a linear chronology, both personal and collective histories tend to return back to the moments of violence and loss, thus forming continuous cycles of remembrance and forgetting. Several of the authors also pay specific attention to the constructed and contested nature of national histories in these cycles. The role of these ‘in-between’ countries – and even more their peoples’ multifaceted experiences – will add to the widening European history of the aftermath, thereby challenging the conventional dichotomies and periodisations. In the aftermath of the seventieth anniversary of 1945, it is still too early to regard the post-war period as mere history; the memory politics and rhetoric of the Second World War and its aftermath are again being used and abused to serve contemporary power politics in Europe

Concepts of migration and displacement are all too often separated from ideas of international humanitarianism and occupations; and yet, between 1945 and 1951, victims of war became the joint responsibility of humanitarian workers and military officials in occupied Germany. In this innovative study, Samantha K. Knapton focuses on the lives of Polish displaced persons (DPs) – one of the largest groups in occupied Germany – to shine a spotlight on this interaction for the first time. From the everyday experience of clothing, feeding and sheltering to governmental policies and military actions, Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers and the Polish Displaced Persons in British-Occupied Germany investigates the impact of occupation on post-war refugees and explores how the birth of state-driven international humanitarianism played a vital role in both the identity of the Polish people and the reconstruction of Germany. To do so, Knapton fuses together archival material and personal collections such as memoirs, letters and diaries to present an account which considers both the macro and micro issues of displacement, occupation and humanitarianism. The result is a sophisticated analysis of Anglo-Polish-German relations in post-war Europe which will be of immense value to all scholars of modern Europe, Polish history, and displacement studies more generally.

Based on extensive archival research in six countries and intensive fieldwork, the book analyzes the history of the village of Nkholongue on the eastern (Mozambican) shores of Lake Malawi from the time of its formation in the 19th century to the present day. The study uses Nkholongue as a microhistorical lens to examine such diverse topics as the slave trade, the spread of Islam, colonization, subsistence production, counter-insurgency, decolonization, civil war, ecotourism, and matriliny. Thereby, the book attempts to reflect as much as possible on the generalizability and (global) comparability of local findings by framing analyses in historiographical discussions that aim to go beyond the regional or national level. Although the chapters of the book deal with very different topics, they are united by a common interest in the social history of rural Africa in the longue durée. Contrary to persistent clichés of rural inertia in Africa, the book as a whole underscores the profound changeability of social conditions and relations in Nkholongue over the years and highlights how people’s room for maneuver kept changing as a result of the Winds of History, the frequent and often violent ruptures brought to the village from outside.

• Four months pregnant, Vera Wohlauf, wife of a serving SS officer, took sadistic pleasure in rounding up victims for Treblinka. • Like creatures from a Grimms' fairytale, female members of a Nazi 'welfare' organization scoured the towns and villages of Poland and Slovenia, luring blond children out of hiding with bread and sweets. They were abducted to be raised as Germans by 'Aryan' families who told them their parents were dead. • Test pilot Hanna Reitsch flew on a suicide mission to rescue Hitler from his bunker. • Not even Hitler could resist the charms of Princess Stephanie, a femme fatale and Nazi agent who smoked cigars which she lit by striking a match on the heel of her shoes. The Nazis had no doubts about a woman's place in the Third Reich. Hermann Goering urged every woman to 'take a pot, a dustpan and brush, and marry a man.' Many women welcomed the arrival of Hitler's regime with childlike enthusiasm believing that the dictatorship would make Germany master of Europe, but as the war dragged on, their blind faith in Hitler was betrayed.

This book examines the U. S. Army’s presence in Germany after the Nazi regime’s capitulation in May 1945. This presence required the pursuit of two stated missions: to secure German borders, and to establish an occupation government within the assigned U.S. zone and sector of Berlin. Both missions required logistics support, a critical aspect often understated in existing scholarship. The security mission, covered by the combat troops, declined between 1945 and 1948, but grew again with the Berlin Blockade/Airlift in 1948, and then again with the Korean crisis in 1950. The logistics mission grew exponentially to support this security mission, as the U.S. Army was the only U.S. Government agency possessing the ability and resources to initially support the occupation mission in Germany. The build-up of ‘Little Americas’ during the occupation years stood forward-deployed U.S. military forces in Europe in good stead over the ensuing decades.