Download or read book Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Download or read book An Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen s Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Simon Taylor and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jews and Judaism specific to Germany that dated back well into the previous century. Debating which historian is right, which has made better use of the available evidence, which has most successfully written objectively – and which advances the most secure interpretation of contested documents – forces students to think critically about one of the most important and (on the surface at least) incomprehensible events of the past century.

Download or read book Ordinary Men written by Christopher R. Browning and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.

Download or read book Worse Than War written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's books are events. They stir passionate public debate among political and civic leaders, scholars, and the general public because they compel people to rethink the most powerful conventional wisdoms and stubborn moral problems of the day. Worse Than War gets to the heart of the phenomenon, genocide, that has caused more deaths in the modern world than military conflict. In doing so, it challenges fundamental things we thought we knew about human beings, society, and politics. Drawing on extensive field work and research from around the world, Goldhagen explores the anatomy of genocide -- explaining why genocides begin, are sustained, and end; why societies support them, why they happen so frequently and how the international community should and can successfully stop them. As a great book should, Worse than War seeks to change the way we think and to offer new possibilities for a better world. It tells us how we might at last begin to eradicate this greatest scourge of humankind.

Download or read book Conversations with an Executioner written by Kazimierz Moczarski and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1981 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Relying largely on Stroop's own words ... Moczarski recreates the chain of events which caused a nondescript German youth, the son of a provincial policeman, to rise to the top of the Nazi hierarchy; become part of the inner circle of Hitler, Himmler, and Göring; wield ... power in Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, and Greece; and mastermind Warsaw's "Final solution"--Jacket.

Download or read book The Italian Executioners written by Simon Levis Sullam and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revisionist history of Italy's role in the Holocaust, the author presents an account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy's Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini's collaborationist republic was under German occupation

Download or read book War Against the Mafia written by Don Pendleton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in the classic vigilante action series from a “writer who spawned a genre” (The New York Times). Overseas, Mack Bolan was dubbed “Sgt. Mercy” for the compassion he showed the innocent. On the home front, they’re calling him the Executioner for what he’s doing to the guilty. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, American sniper Mack Bolan honed his skills. After twelve years, with ninety-five confirmed hits, he returns home to Massachusetts. But it’s not to reunite with his family, it’s to bury them—victims in a mass murder/suicide. Even though Bolan’s own father pulled the trigger, he knows the old man was no killer. He was driven to madness by Mafia thugs who have turned his idyllic hometown into a new kind of war zone. Duty calls . . . Introducing an action hero “who would make Jack Reacher think twice,” this is the first book in the iconic series of vigilante justice that has become a publishing phenomenon (Empireonline.com). With more than two hundred million Executioner books sold since its debut, the series continues to stimulate. Gerry Conway, cocreator of Marvel Comics’ The Punisher, credits the Executioner as “my inspiration . . . that’s what gave me the idea for the lone, slightly psychotic avenger.” The series is also now in development as a major motion picture. War Against the Mafia is the 1st book in the Executioner series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Download or read book Hitler s Foreign Executioners written by Christopher Hale and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hitler's Foreign Executioners, Heinrich Himmler's secret master plan for Europe is revealed: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of 'Germanic' peoples from every corner of Europe, and even parts of Asia, to build an 'SS Europa'. This revised and fully updated book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret: nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to fight a deadly crusade against a mythic foe, Jewish Bolshevism. Even today, some apologists claim that these foreign SS volunteers were merely soldiers 'like any other' and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Historian Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. By taking part in Himmler's murderous master plan, these foreign executioners hoped to prove that they were worthy of joining his future 'SS Europa'. But as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler's monstrous scheme led to bitter confrontations with Hitler – and to the downfall of the man once known as 'loyal Heinrich'.

Download or read book In Broad Daylight written by Father Patrick Desbois and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Murder of More Than Two Million Jews Was Carried Out—In Broad Daylight Based on a decade of work by Father Patrick Desbois and his team at Yahad–In Unum that has culminated to date in interviews with more than 5,700 neighbors to the murdered Jews and visits to more than 2,700 extermination sites, many of them unmarked. One key finding: Genocide does not happen without the neighbors. The neighbors are instrumental to the crime. In his National Jewish Book Award–winning book The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with neighbors of the Jews, wartime records, and the application of modern forensic practices to long-hidden grave sites. has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide. In Broad Daylight documents mass killings in seven countries formerly part of the Soviet Union that were invaded by Nazi Germany. It shows how these murders followed a template, or script, which included a timetable that was duplicated from place to place. Far from being kept secret, the killings were done in broad daylight, before witnesses. Often, they were treated as public spectacle. The Nazis deliberately involved the local inhabitants in the mechanics of death—whether it was to cook for the killers, to dig or cover the graves, to witness their Jewish neighbors being marched off, or to take part in the slaughter. They availed themselves of local people and the structures of Soviet life in order to make the Eastern Holocaust happen. Narrating in lucid, powerful prose that has the immediacy of a crime report, Father Desbois assembles a chilling account of how, concretely, these events took place in village after village, from the selection of the date to the twenty-four-hour period in which the mass murders unfolded. Today, such groups as ISIS put into practice the Nazis’ lessons on making genocide efficient. The book includes an historical introduction by Andrej Umansky, research fellow at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, University of Cologne, Germany, and historical and legal advisor to Yahad-In Unum.

Download or read book The Coming of the Third Reich written by Richard J. Evans and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-01-25 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brilliant.” —Washington Post "The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement “The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served. . . . The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving “voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.” —Denver Post There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.

Download or read book The Kindly Ones written by Jonathan Littell and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.” Dr. Max Aue, the man at the heart of Jonathan Littell’s stunning and controversial novel The Kindly Ones, personifies the evils of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Highly educated and cultured, he was an ambitious SS officer, a Nazi and mass murderer who was in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. He tells us of his experience during the war. He was present at Auschwitz and Babi Yar, witnessed the battle of Stalingrad, and survived the fall of Berlin — receiving a medal from Hitler personally in the last days of Nazi Germany. Long after the war, he is living a comfortable bourgeois life in France, married with two children, managing a lace factory. And now, having evaded justice, he speaks out, giving a precise and accurate record of his life. The tone of his account is detached, lapidary, and for the most part unrepentant, whether he is describing his participation in mass murder on the Eastern Front, his bureaucratic investigations of labour productivity in the death camps, his casual murder of civilians as he tries to break through Russian lines towards the end of the war, or his fervid and convoluted relationship with his twin sister. Over its course, by entwining Aue’s life with those of historical figures such as Eichmann and Speer, Himmler and indeed Hitler, The Kindly Ones comes to depict the entire architecture of Nazism — from its grandest intellectual pretensions to its most minute, most chilling managerial details and executions. The Kindly Ones presents — with unprecedented realism, meticulous research that is both fascinating and compelling, and brilliant literary accomplishment — the greatest horrors imaginable. “War and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers,” Aue says. In the same way, this powerfully affecting, powerfully challenging book confronts the reader with the most profound questions about history, morality, and art without offering any easy resolution. Written originally in French, and published now in English for the first time, The Kindly Ones has already sold to date well over a million copies in Europe. In France it won two prestigious prizes, including the Goncourt, and has been compared to War and Peace and other great classics of literature.

Download or read book Life and Terror in Stalin s Russia 1934 1941 written by Robert W. Thurston and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.

Download or read book The Statement written by Brian Moore and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 1997-02-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innocuous white Peugeot makes its way around the monasteries of Southern France. No one would suspect its driver of being the target of commando hit-men and the gendarmerie's most wanted criminal sentenced twice to death in absentia for wartime crimes. For over forty years this fugitive has been sheltered by both the Catholic Church and the French Government. Now the net is closing in...

Download or read book One Life written by Tom Lampert and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2004 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Lampert reconstructs the lives of eight people in Nazi Germany based on exhaustive research in archives all over the world. Among them is Miriam P., a troubled young woman deported from Palestine to Germany in 1933, who finds herself on a path to the gas chamber. And then there is the rabid Nazi Wilhelm K., who assumes the position of commissioner general in Belorussia only to fight for the lives of Jews in the Minsk ghetto. Karl L., the only Jew Commissioner K. is able to save, is transferred to Theresienstadt, where he takes control of the Ghetto Guard and relentlessly pursues any violation of concentration camp rules. As the stories of people on both sides of the rift unfold, their interconnected lives branch out in unexpected patterns, shaped by brutal racist policies as well as by simple accidents of fate. Documentary history or gripping literature? One Life is both. A unique document, beautifully crafted, it re-creates the horrors of that time and transforms an overly interpreted past into an open present. Book jacket.

Download or read book Beheaded by Hitler written by Colin Pateman and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1933 during the Nazi era when Hitler refashioned the German judicial system in line with his oppressive regime, many crimes became capital offences which led to a drastic increase in the number of executions. In 1936, the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gurtner, acting upon Hitler’s direction, ordered that the fallbeil, a variation on the guillotine, replace the hand axe as the official method for all civil executions throughout Germany. To meet this new demand for ‘justice’, many prisons were designated as execution sites and equipped with a ‘Tegel Fallbeil’, named after the inmates of the Tegal prison in Berlin who first built these atrocious contraptions. Beheaded by Hitler: Cruelty of the Nazis, Judicial Terror and Civilian Executions 1933-1945 provides the reader with a chilling insight into the judicial terror that took place and the harrowing stories of execution by fallbeil of civilians who were convicted of domestic resistance to the Nazi regime, treason and other offences after so called ‘trials’ by the Volksgerichtshof or People’s Court. This exceptionally well researched book also explains the Nazi judicial system, the prisons selected for central execution sites and the Nazi officials and executioners that carried out Hitler’s cleansing. Illustrations: 55 black-and-white photographs

Download or read book Masters of Death written by Richard Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

Download or read book My Experiences as an Executioner written by James Berry and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-10-25 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Berry's book, 'My Experiences as an Executioner,' delves into the dark and morbid world of capital punishment through the eyes of a seasoned executioner. Berry's writing is straightforward and devoid of unnecessary embellishment, reflecting the harsh realities of his profession. The book provides a glimpse into the psychological toll of taking human lives in the name of justice, offering a unique perspective on a controversial practice. Set against the backdrop of a time when public executions were common, Berry's narrative serves as a chilling reminder of the consequences of violence and the cost of administering justice. His stark prose and attention to detail create a haunting account of life and death in the executioner's domain. James Berry's personal experiences as an executioner shape the narrative of his book, shedding light on the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by those who carry out society's most unforgiving duties. His insights into the inner workings of the executioner's mind reveal the complexities of a role often shrouded in secrecy and taboo. With 'My Experiences as an Executioner,' Berry challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the justice system and the individuals tasked with enforcing it. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the historical and psychological aspects of capital punishment, offering a rare glimpse into a world few dare to explore.