Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

After the German attack on Poland in 1939, vast swathes of Polish territory, including Warsaw and Krakow, were occupied by the Nazis in an administration which became known as the 'General Government'. The region was not directly incorporated into the Third Reich but was ruled by a German regime, headed by the brutal and corrupt Governor General Hans Frank. This was indeed the dark heart of Hitler's empire. As the first genuine Nazi colony, the General Government became the principal 'racial laboratory' of the Third Reich. As such, it was the site, and main source of victims, of Aktion Reinhard, the largest killing operation in human history in which at least 1.7 million Jews were murdered in just 18 months, and of a campaign of terror, exploitation and ultimately ethnic cleansing against the Polish population which was intended to serve as a template for the rest of eastern Europe. It was a place where 42,000 people could be shot in two days, where thousands of children could be abducted from their families, never to see their homeland again, and where guidebooks could invite German tourists to enjoy the culture and nightlife of cities that were 'now free of Jews'. This book provides a thorough history of the Nazi occupation regime and the experiences of the Poles, Jews and others who were trapped in its clutches. Employing sources ranging from diaries and testimony to previously underused material such as travel guides and poetry, Martin Winstone provides a unique insight into the occupation regime which dominated much of Poland during World War II with such disastrous consequences.

Surviving Hitler and Mussolini examines how far everyday life was possible in a situation of total war and brutal occupation. Its theme is the social experience of occupation in German- and Italian-occupied Europe, and in particular the strategies ordinary people developed in order to survive. Survival included meeting the challenges of shortage and hunger, of having to work for the enemy, of women entering into intimate relations with soldiers, of the preservation of culture in a fascist universe, of whether and how to resist, and the reaction of local communities to measures of reprisal taken in response to resistance. What emerges is that ordinary people were less heroes, villains or victims than inventive and resourceful individuals able to maintain courage and dignity despite the conditions they faced.The book adopts a comparative approach from Denmark and the Netherlands to Poland and Greece, and offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War.

The first comparative and pan-European study of the Big Three's involvement in Resistance movements across wartime Europe. From Yugoslavia to Poland and from Greece to France and Italy, the book vividly depicts and sharply analyses how this proxy war shaped the history of the post-war settlement.

An examination of how the Polish state and its people worked together to ethnically cleanse and colonize eastern Germany after 1945. A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945-1960 examines the long-term impact of ethnic cleansing on postwar Poland, focusing on the western Polish provinces of Poznan and Zielona Góra. Employing archival materials from multiple sources, including newly available Secret Police archives, it demonstrates how ethnic cleansing solidified Communist rule in the short term while reshaping and "nationalizing" that rule. The Poles of Poznan played a crucial role in the postwar national revolution in which Poland was ethnically cleansed by a joint effort of the people and state. A resulting national solidarity provided the Communist-dominated regime with an underlying stability, while it transformed what had been a militantly internationalist Polish Communism. This book addresses the legacy of Polish-German conflict that led to ethnic cleansing in East Central Europe, the ramifications within the context of Polish Stalinism's social and cultural revolutions, and the subsequent anti-national counterrevolutionary effort to break the bonds of national solidarity. Finally, it examines how the Poznan milieu undermined and then reversed Stalinist efforts at socioeconomic and cultural revolution. In the aftermath of the Poznan revolt of June 1956, the regime's leadership re-embraced hyper-nationalist politics and activists, and by 1960 Polish authorities had succeeded in stabilizing their rule at the cost of becoming an increasingly national socialist polity. T. David Curp is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ohio University.

Heroes and Victims explores the cultural power of war memorials in 20th-century Romania through two world wars and a succession of radical political changes -- from attempts to create pluralist democratic political institutions after World War I to shifts toward authoritarian rule in the 1930s, to military dictatorships and Nazi occupation, to communist dictatorships, and finally to pluralist democracies with populist tendencies. Examining the interplay of centrally articulated and locally developed commemorations, Maria Bucur's study engages monumental sites of memory, local funerary markers, rituals, and street names as well as autobiographical writings, novels, oral narratives, and film. This book reveals the ways in which a community's religious, ethnic, economic, regional, and gender traditions shaped local efforts at memorializing its war dead.

Based on extensive range of Polish, British, German, Jewish and Ukranian primary and secondary sources, this work provides an objective appraisal of the inter-war period. Peter Stachura demonstrates how the Republic overcame giant obstacles at home and abroad to achieve consolidation as an independent state in the early 1920s, made relative economic progress, created a coherent social order, produced an outstanding cultural scene, advanced educational opportunity, and adopted constructive and even-handed policies towards its ethnic minorities. Without denying the defeats suffered by the Republic, Peter Stachura demonstrates that the fate of Poland after 1945, with the imposition of an unwanted, Soviet-dominated Communist system, was thoroughly undeserved.

New Yorker • Best Books of 2022 “This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. So much romantic twaddle is still published . . . it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.” —Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (UK) Resistance is the first book of its kind: a monumental history that finally integrates the many resistance movements against Nazi hegemony in Europe into a single, sweeping narrative of defiance. “To resist, therefore. But how, when and where? There were no laws, no guidelines, no precedents to show the way . . .” —Dutch resister Herman Friedhoff In every country that fell to the Third Reich during the Second World War, from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, a resistance movement against Nazi domination emerged. And every country that endured occupation created its own fiercely nationalist account of the role of homegrown resistance in its eventual liberation. Halik Kochanski’s panoramic, prodigiously researched work is a monumental achievement: the first book to strip these disparate national histories of myth and nostalgia and to integrate them into a definitive chronicle of the underground war against the Nazis. Bringing to light many powerful and often little-known stories, Resistance shows how small bands of individuals took actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the liquidation of their families and their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were not supermen and superwomen, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life who would not have been expected—least of all by themselves—to become heroes of any kind. Kochanski also covers the sheer variety of resistance activities, from the clandestine press, assistance to Allied servicemen evading capture, and the provision of intelligence to the Allies to the more violent manifestations of resistance through sabotage and armed insurrection. For many people, resistance was not an occupation or an identity, but an activity: a person would deliver a cache of stolen documents to armed partisans and then seamlessly return to their normal life. For Jews under Nazi rule, meanwhile, the stakes at every point were life and death; resistance was less about national restoration than about mere survival. Why resist at all? Who is the real enemy? What kind of future are we risking our lives for? These and other questions animated those who resisted. With penetrating insight, Kochanski reveals that the single quality that defined resistance across borders was resilience: despite the constant arrests and executions, resistance movements rebuilt themselves time and time again. A landmark history that will endure for decades to come, Resistance forces every reader to ask themselves yet another question, this distinct to our own times: “What would I have done?”

A "breathtakingly magisterial" account of World War II by America's preeminent military historian (Wall Street Journal) World War II was the most lethal conflict in human history. Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse landscapes and in so many different ways, from rocket attacks in London to jungle fighting in Burma to armor strikes in Libya. The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Drawing on 3,000 years of military history, bestselling author Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual. Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory. An authoritative new history of astonishing breadth, The Second World Wars offers a stunning reinterpretation of history's deadliest conflict.