Richard J. Evans, in Hitler’s People: The Faces Of The Third Reich (Penguin Press), focuses on a rogue’s gallery of Nazis who created a fascist dictatorship and drove Germany into war, genocide and defeat in World War II. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality […]
Ilse Koch, a symbol of barbarism in the Third Reich, spent almost 24 years in prison, even as Nazi perpetrators who committed far greater crimes during the Holocaust received relatively light sentences or often escaped prosecution altogether. The wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, she acquired notoriety for allegedly having […]
To Lithuanian historian Algimantas Kasparavicius, the greatest tragedy of 20th century Lithuania occurred not when it lost its statehood following the Soviet Union’s invasion in June 1940, but a year later, when Nazi Germany stormed into the country and proceeded to murder nearly all of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust. It goes without saying […]
Wolfgang Gerhard, 67, drowned off a beach in Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979. His real name was Josef Mengele, a German physician known as the Angel of Death. Mengele was a war criminal who conducted gruesome medical experiments on inmates in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and who funnelled thousands of civilians to oblivion. He carried out […]
During the Third Reich, 3,000 out of 65 million Germans were imprisoned for speaking out against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, a post-war investigator concluded. Which means, of course, that the vast majority of Germans subserviently fell into line with Hitler’s cruel and evil policies. Among the dissenters were a number of men and women from […]
Philip Roth, the late Jewish American novelist and short story writer, was consumed by four related topics — the Jewish community, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitism. His interlocking preoccupations were reflected in his breakout novella, Goodbye, Columbus And Five Short Stories and in intense novels such as The Counterlife, Operation Shylock and The Plot Against […]
At the ripe old age of 84, the political war horse Bernie Sanders is still going strong. The longest serving independent in U.S. congressional history, he has been fixture in American politics since the early 1980s. He was mayor of Burlington, the biggest city in the state of Vermont, from 1981 to 1989. He was […]
Certain Polish nationalists were prepared to reach an accommodation with Nazi Germany, despite its record of atrocities in Poland. As might be recalled, six million Polish citizens, including three million Jews, perished during the six-year German occupation. The Israeli historian Yaacov Falkov meticulously documents the sporadic negotiations between the Polish government-in-exile in Britain and Germany […]
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), the Polish Jewish sociologist and philosopher, lived through the hardest of times. He experienced a glimpse of the Holocaust in Poland before fleeing to the Soviet Union. And, as a communist in the postwar People’s Republic of Poland, he was ostracized as a Jew and compelled to leave. After an interregnum in […]
President Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized the Hollywood film industry to boost national morale and enhance understanding of the United States’ participation in World War II. Jewish directors and screenwriters ranging from George Cukor to Budd Schulberg played a significant role in wartime filmmaking. They produced documentaries and movies that were at once educational, entertaining and […]