In 1936, against a backdrop of swastikas flying and storm troopers looming, an African-American son of sharecroppers set three world records and won an unprecedented four gold medals, single-handedly crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy. The story of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic Games is that of a high-profile athlete giving a performance that transcends sports--but it is also the intimate and complex tale of the courage of one remarkable man. From the start, American participation in the games was controversial--a boycott attempt was thwarted by the president of the American Olympic Committee. Owens was befriended by a German rival, who helped Owens win the gold medal at his own expense; two Jewish sprinters were, at the last moment, denied the chance to compete for the United States out of misguided politeness to the Nazi hosts; and a myth was born that Hitler himself had snubbed Owens.--From publisher description

A history of the T4 program, or "euthanasia program", in Nazi Germany - that is, the murder of handicapped persons by the Nazis. This program was preceded by the politicization of science, which incorporated popular prejudices into "scientific" theories and declared some individuals and even "racial" groups, like Jews and Gypsies, to be "valueless"; by the eugenic movement; and by the misuse of scientific hypotheses by politicians. The policy of exclusion of the "racially inferior" stood at the center of the Nazi utopia. The "euthanasia program", implemented in 1939-40, paved the way for the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies in 1942-44. Many of those involved in the T4 program (e.g. Franz Stangl) were later involved in the operation of the death camps. Special attention is devoted to the murder of handicapped Jews. These, progressively excluded from the public welfare system and from the medical institutions, were concentrated in 1939-40 in special Jewish hospitals and later killed in the course of the "euthanasia program".

'An ambitious and engrossing investigation of the moral legacies which stubbornly refuse to pass' Brendan Simms As the western world struggles with its legacies of racism and colonialism, what can we learn from the past in order to move forward? Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman, who grew up as a white girl in the American South during the civil rights movement, is a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. In clear and gripping prose, she uses this unique perspective to combine philosophical reflection, personal history and conversations with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through focusing on the particularities of those histories, she provides examples for other nations, whether they are facing resurgent nationalism, ongoing debates over reparations or controversies surrounding historical monuments and the contested memories they evoke. It is necessary reading for all those confronting their own troubled pasts.

Zusammenfassung: "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis -- members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions. Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions. Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life -- and of human history -- that cannot be forgotten. -- Provided by publisher

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.

A collection of articles, excerpts from books and articles, and review essays published previously, revised and updated for this edition. Partial contents:

Few figures of interwar Germany were as influential as Leopold Schwarzschild, the brilliant editor of the liberal magazine 'Das Tage-Buch'. In the uncertain years of the Weimar Republic, Schwarzschild became famous for his perceptive political analyses and critique of the economic policies of successive governments in the twilight of Germany's first experiment with democracy. When he was forced to emigrate in 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, he pursued his analysis of developments in Germany from Paris, where he resumed publication of his journal under the new name 'Das Neue Tage-Buch', while also mounting a furious attack on the European powers taken by surprise by the Nazi ascendancy. 'One thing is already beyond question today...', he wrote in the spring of 1933, '...part of the new era is an unremitting descent into some kind of military conflagration'. Winston Churchill, a great admirer of Schwarzschild, made one of his later books required reading for the War Cabinet, yet his campaigning journalism has never before appeared in English. In bringing his writings to an English-speaking readership, Chronicle of a Downfall will restore Leopold Schwarzschild to his rightful place as one of the most poignant chroniclers of the fall of German democracy and the descent of Europe into World War II.