Europe on Trial explores the history of collaboration, retribution, and resistance during World War II. These three themes are examined through the experiences of people and countries under German occupation, as well as Soviet, Italian, and other military rule. Those under foreign rule faced innumerable moral and ethical dilemmas, includin

In Europe on Trial, acclaimed historian Istvan Deak presents the comparative history of collaboration, retribution, and resistance during World War II. Deak explores these three themes through the Western and Eastern European countries that suffered at the hands of German military occupation. The occupied countries had to face the question of whether to cooperate with their German occupiers, try to survive the war without any political involvement, or risk their lives by opposing the Nazis. Deak delves deep into the decisions that various countries and individuals made during this critical time. Following the brutal war, Deak discusses the purging of the ancient regime through lynching, acts of private vengeance, denunciation, firings, forced retirements, deprivation of citizens' rights, expulsions, mass deportations, arbitrary internment, and judicial proceedings including the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal from 1945-1946, which judged the principal German war criminals. Europe on Trial helps us to understand the many moral consequences both during and immediately following World War II.

Hungary's War of Independence was the bloodiest conflict of the European revolutionary era, exciting nationalist passions that burn hot till this day. The story of this dramatic time unfolds through the towering personality of Louis Kossuth--a principal actor in the dramatic events. He and his fellow noblemen sized the opportunity offered by the continent's upheavals to restore Hungary's sovereignty under the Habsburg Crown. They introduced many administrative, social, and economic reforms...only to run into the opposition of many of the country's most powerful forces. In 1949, Kossuth fled--never to return home again.

In the last seventy years of its long and distinguished existence, the Habsburg monarchy was plagued by the forces of rising nationalism. Still, it preserved domestic peace and provided the conditions for social, economic, and cultural progress in a vast area inhabited by eleven major nationalities and almost as many confessional groups. This study investigates the social origin, education, training, code of honor, lifestyle, and political role of the Habsburg officers. Simultaneously conservative and liberal, the officer corps, originally composed mainly of noblemen, willingly coopted thousands of commoners--among them an extraordinary number of Jews. Even during World War I, the army and its officers endured, surviving the dissolution of the state in October 1918, if only by a few days. The end of the multinational Habsburg army also marked the end of confessional and ethnic tolerance in Central and East Central Europe.

Istv¾n De¾k is one of the world's most knowledgeable and clearheaded authorities on the Second World War, and for decades his commentary has been among the most illuminating and influential contributions to the vast discourse on the politics, history, and scholarship of the period. Writing chiefly for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic , De¾k has crafted review essays that cover the breadth and depth of the huge literature on this ominous moment in European history when the survival of democracy and human decency were at stake. ø Collected here for the first time, these articles chart changing reactions and analyses by the regimes and populations of Europe and reveal how postwar governments, historians, and ordinary citizens attempt to come to terms with?or to evade?the realities of the Holocaust, war, fascism, and resistance movements. They track the acts of scoundrels and the collusion of ordinary citizens in the so-called Final Solution but also show how others in authority and on the street heroically opposed the evil of the day. With its depth, conciseness, and interpretive power, this collection allows readers to consider more clearly and completely than ever before what has been said, how thought has shifted, and what we have learned about these momentous, world-changing events.