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The surprise success of the German offensive in the West that commenced on May 10, 1940 caught the Allies completely off-guard, and France would soon capitulate to the Germans in late June. During the course of the campaign, large numbers of Allied forces would become trapped along the coast of the English Channel at the port of Dunkirk. The mass evacuation of Allied forces at the port of Dunkirk in 1940 is often considered one of the most iconic moments of the Second World War (1939-1945), demonstrating the resolve of the British in particular to carry on the fight against Nazi Germany. This image was portrayed in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film Dunkirk (2017). By extension, the mass evacuation of Allied forces is also often considered a "missed opportunity" on the part of the Germans to deal a decisive blow to the British war effort. How exactly did the German High Command and German soldiers interpret the situation at Dunkirk? Through extensive research into German military archives, historian Robert Kershaw was able to provide an answer in his book Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk (Osprey Publishing, 2022).  Robert Kershaw is a graduate of Reading University. He joined the Parachute Regiment in 1973 and ultimately commanded 10 PARA. He attended the German Staff College, spending a further two years with the Bundeswehr as an infantry, airborne and arctic warfare instructor. He speaks fluent German. On leaving the British Army in 2006 he became a full-time author and a military analyst. He has recorded for BBC radio and published frequent magazine and newspaper articles. Two of his books have been serialized in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. He lives in Salisbury, England. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Today I talked to Elly Gotz, author of the memoir Flights of Spirit (Azrieli Foundation, 2018). Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving three years in the ghetto, where thousands from his community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis' next victims. But there is no escape from the ghetto's liquidation in the summer of 1944, and Elly and his family eventually surrender, only to be separated when he and his father are taken to the notorious Dachau concentration camp. There, Elly's skills as a locksmith and metal worker—learned in the ghetto trade school—literally save his life and that of his father's. But as the Allies fly over the camp and the end of the war looms, Elly’s father weakens, and Elly fears his father will not live to see the day of liberation. After the war, fleeing from Europe and their past, Elly fights to regain his lost youth and his years of missed education. His motivation and enterprising spirit give him the determination to succeed and to, ultimately, find strength in flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iai killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and massacres in and around Odessa. Overall, more than 300,000 Jews of Romanian and Soviet or Ukrainian origin were murdered in Romanian- controlled territories during the Second World War.  In Simon Geissbühler's edited volume Romania and the Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath (Ibidem Press, 2016), a number of renowned experts shed light on the events, the contexts, and the aftermath of this under-researched and lesser-known dimension of the Holocaust. 75 years on, this book gives much-needed impetus to research on the Holocaust in Romania and Romanian-controlled territories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”? Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans’ understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just “discovering” the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany’s increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might—to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home. Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2023) is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life. In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton, 2023), Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa―the last traces of his vanished world―into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter. By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 2017 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI, 2022) create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

In this podcast we discuss visibility, haunting and fascism with art historian and theorist Elizabeth Otto. Otto's book Haunted Bauhaus explores the marginalized histories of occult spirituality, gender fluidity and queer identity within the Bauhaus; offering fresh insight into one of the most canonized periods of European art history. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

This week on International Horizons, we present RBI's director John Torpey's interview with David Gill, General Consul of Germany, in New York to celebrate the 2023 Otto and Frank Walter Memorial Lecture. The conversation goes explaining the term “Zeitenwende” and what that entails for Germans, its history and how the military approach of Germany came to a new era. David Gill also discusses the effects of the historical division East-West in Germany in modern day politics, the position of Germany in the Russian War on Ukraine, the recent events in transatlantic relations and the importance of cooperation between US and Germany. Finally, Gill comments on his personal experiences and views of the United States as a diplomat as he is off to return to his motherland. International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler's decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment. While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to understand history's most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton's latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing medical complexities for all audiences. Here Dr. Hutton undertakes a thorough medical history to elucidate a pivotal historical moment, examining how disease impacted Hitler's destructive life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context. When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russia into the North Caucasus. Hoping to find safety, they came to a region the Soviets had struggled to pacify over the preceding 20 years of their rule. The Jewish refugees were in especially unfamiliar territory, as the North Caucasus had been mostly off-limits to Jews before the Soviets arrived, and most local Jewish communities were thus small. The region was not known as a hotbed of traditional antisemitism. Nevertheless, after occupying the North Caucasus in the summer and autumn of 1942, the Germans exterminated all the Jews they found - at least 30,000 - aided by local collaborators. While scholars have focused on local collaboration during the German occupation and on the subsequent Soviet deportations of entire North Caucasian ethnic groups, the region has largely escaped the attention of Holocaust researchers. This volume, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, addresses that gap. Contributors present richly documented essays on such topics as German killing operations, decision-making by Jewish refugees, local collaboration, rescue, and memory, taking care to integrate their findings into the broader contexts of Holocaust, North Caucasian, Russian, and Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Although Kant considered him the greatest critic of his work, and Fichte thought him the most impressive mind of the generation, Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) has fallen into relative obscurity. Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon (Hebrew Union College Press, 2021) draws attention to works written during the final years of Maimon's life. These essays are of particular interest: they show that even though Maimon was a self-proclaimed apiqoros grappling with the implications of Kantian philosophy, his thinking remained deeply influenced by his Jewish intellectual inheritance, especially by Maimonides. The volume is divided into two parts. The first is a general account of Maimon's intellectual biography, along with commentary on his final essays. The second part provides translations of those essays, the principal themes of which concern moral psychology. The reader is thus able to see the degree to which Maimon, at the end of his life, became skeptical of his effort to unite Kant and Maimonides, and remained a thinker caught "between two worlds." The book concludes with a translation of an account of Maimon's final hours, penned by one of his friends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Auschwitz is perhaps the best-known memorial site in the world. Epicenter of the Nazi extermination campaign of Europe’s Jewish population, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp system also held over 400,000 inmates (Jews and Gentiles both) in unspeakable conditions. Famous survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are widely read by high-schoolers and undergraduates, but a synoptic overview of the human experience and emotions of the Auschwitz inmates has long been missing. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the director of Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has produced a monumental 590-page work that seeks to fill this gap. On the basis of tens of thousands of pages of survivor testimony – some published, some drawn directly from the archives – Cywiński has assembled a topical overview of the Auschwitz “experience,” ranging from loneliness to empathy, numbness to decency, hunger to suicide, sex to religious faith.  Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2022) is a breakthrough new pedagogical and reference tool for scholars of the Holocaust, genocide studies, and World War II. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Today I talked to Heidi Langbein-Allen about Save the Last Bullet: Memoir of a Boy Soldier in Hitler's Army (Pen & Sword Military, 2022). Willi Langbein was just thirteen when the Nazis took him away from his parents under the pretense of protecting him. Their real reason was to turn him into cannon-fodder for use against Hitler’s enemies. Deployed to the collapsing Eastern Front in the last days of the war, Willi, now aged fourteen, and his schoolmates were ordered to stave off the relentless Russian advance. None were expected to return alive from the final battles of the Third Reich. Yet, against all odds, Willi does survive but his ordeal is far from over. He returns home to find everything he knows destroyed. Numb and confused, he is mandated to serve one year of forced farm labor. After his release, he gradually realizes that all he was taught to believe in was a lie and he sinks into depression. Eventually, thanks to his friendship with a kind British soldier, he begins to heal. It begins to dawn on him that he can play a part to ensure that the evil he witnessed is never repeated. Ultimately, he succeeds by earning the Medal of European Merit in 1979 for his contribution to the advancement of European democracy. Willi’s graphic and moving story, told from a Nazi child soldier’s perspective, is an inspiring memoir of lost innocence and despair, but also of determination and hope restored. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

South of the Norman city of Caen, Verrières Ridge was seen a key stepping-stone for the British Second Army if it was to break out of the Normandy bridgehead in late July 1944. Imposing in height and containing perfect terrain for armored operations, the Germans viewed it as the lynchpin to their defenses south of the city of Caen and east of the Orne river. Following the failure of British Operation Goodwood on 18-20 July and the containment of the Canadian Operation Atlantic, further Allied attacks to seize the ridge would have to defeat arguably the strongest German armored formation in Normandy: The I. SS-Panzerkorps 'Leibstandarte.' In the second volume of this two-volume work, the fighting of 23 July-3 August is chronicled in detail, specifically the premier Anglo-Canadian operation to capture Verrières Ridge, Operation Spring on 25 July. Designed as an attack to seize the ridge and exploit south with armor, this battle saw the 2nd Canadian Corps attack savaged again by German armored reserves brought in specifically to defeat another Goodwood. Not satisfied with this defensive victory, German armored forces would then seek to restore an earlier defensive line further north, attacking to destroy the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division. Largely unknown, these were some of the strongest and most successful German armored operations to take place in the Normandy campaign. An interview about the first volume of Bloody Verrières is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

While Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant’s vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious.  Kant on the Human Animal (Northwestern UP, 2022) offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant’s philosophy. David Baumeister tracks four decades of Kant’s intellectual development, surveying works published in Kant’s lifetime along with posthumously published notes and student lecture transcripts. They show the crucial role that animality plays in many previously unconnected areas of Kant’s thought, such as his account of the human’s originally quadrupedal posture, his theory of early childhood development, and his conception of the process of human racial differentiation. Beginning with a delineation of Kant’s understanding of the commonalities and differences between humans and other animals, Baumeister focuses on the contribution of animality to Kant’s views of ethics, anthropology, human nature, and race. Placing divergent features of Kant’s thought within a unified interpretive framework, Kant on the Human Animal reveals how, for Kant, becoming human requires that animality not be eclipsed and overcome but rather disciplined and developed. What emerges is a new appreciation of Kant’s human being as the human animal it is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari? In Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford UP, 2020), Thomas M. Lekan illuminates the controversial origins of this national park by examining how Europe's greatest wildlife conservationist, former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning documentarian Bernhard Grzimek, popularized it as a global destination. In the 1950s, Grzimek and his son Michael began a quest to save the Serengeti from modernization and "overpopulation" by remaking an imperial game reserve into a gigantic zoo for the earth's last great mammals. Grzimek, well-known to German audiences through his long-running television program, A Place for Animals, used the film Serengeti Shall Not Die to convince ordinary Europeans that they could save nature. Yet their message sidestepped the uncomfortable legacies of German colonial exploitation in the region that had endangered animals and excluded local people. After independence, Grzimek raised funds, brokered diplomatic favors, and convinced German tourists to book travel packages—all to persuade Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere that wildlife would fuel the young nation's economic development. Grzimek helped Tanzania to create almost a dozen new national parks by 1975, but wooing tourists conflicted with rights of the Maasai and other African communities to inhabit the landscape on their own terms. Grzimek's global priorities eventually clashed with Nyerere's nationalist ones, as a more self-assertive Tanzania resented conservationists' meddling and failed promises. A story that demonstrates the conflicts between international conservation, nature tourism, decolonization, and national sovereignty, Our Gigantic Zoo explores the legacy of the man who portrayed himself as a second Noah, called on a sacred mission to protect the last vestiges of paradise for all humankind. Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. "Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019. "Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II are sacrosanct. The foundation of the Soviets’ hard-won victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. To Russians it was a pivotal landmark of their nation’s losses, with more than two million civilians and combatants either killed, wounded, or captured during the bitter fighting from September 1942 to February 1943. Both sides endured terrible conditions in brutal, relentless house-to-house fighting. Within this life-and-death struggle, Soviet war correspondents lauded the fight for a key strategic building in the heart of the city, “Pavlov's House,” which was situated on the frontline and codenamed “The Lighthouse.” The legend grew of a small garrison of Russian soldiers from the 13th Guards Rifle Division holding out against the Germans of the Sixth Army, which had battled its way to the very center of Stalingrad. A report about the battle in a local Red Army newspaper would soon grow and be repeated on Moscow radio and in countless national newspapers. By the end of the war, the legend would gather further momentum and inspire Russians to rebuild their destroyed towns and cities. This story has become a pillar of the Stalingrad legend and one that can now be analyzed and told accurately. The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II (Scribner, 2022) sheds new light on this iconic battle through the prism of the two units who fought for the very heart of the city itself. Iain MacGregor traveled to both German and Russian archives to unearth previously unpublished testimonies by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. His riveting narrative lays to rest the questions as to the identity of the real heroes of this epic battle for one of the city’s most famous buildings and provides authoritative answers as to how the battle finally ended and influenced the conclusion of the siege of Stalingrad. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters, ' and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos.  The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the Jews in the Lódź, Warsaw, and Kraków ghettos as they struggled to survive the deadly Nazi ghetto and, in particular, the genocidal famine conditions. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. In this book, Helene Sinnreich explores their story, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him. In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power. Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (Random House, 2022) paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The book clears away the myths and sheer falsehoods surrounding the pope’s actions from 1939 to 1945, showing why the pope repeatedly bent to the wills of Hitler and Mussolini. Just as Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Pope and Mussolini became the definitive book on Pope Pius XI and the Fascist regime, The Pope at War is destined to become the most influential account of his successor, Pius XII, and his relations with Mussolini and Hitler. Kertzer shows why no full understanding of the course of World War II is complete without knowledge of the dramatic, behind-the-scenes role played by the pope. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Dr. Ari Joskowicz, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023). Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world has not recognized their destruction equally. In postwar decades, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignored. Dr. Joskowicz tells the story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering. Rain of Ash recounts the entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for justice, challenges us to rethink the way we remember the Holocaust, and probes the means by which historical narratives are made and transmitted. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies