Author: Jay W. Baird
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253207579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Baird (history, Miami U., Ohio) illuminates the political culture of the Third Reich by focusing on the regime's fascination with motifs of death. He traces the development of Nazi propaganda from the fields of Flanders in 1914 to the cult of death created by Hitler, Goebbels, and others during World War II. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
To Die for Germany
Author: Jay W. Baird
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253207579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Baird (history, Miami U., Ohio) illuminates the political culture of the Third Reich by focusing on the regime's fascination with motifs of death. He traces the development of Nazi propaganda from the fields of Flanders in 1914 to the cult of death created by Hitler, Goebbels, and others during World War II. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253207579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Baird (history, Miami U., Ohio) illuminates the political culture of the Third Reich by focusing on the regime's fascination with motifs of death. He traces the development of Nazi propaganda from the fields of Flanders in 1914 to the cult of death created by Hitler, Goebbels, and others during World War II. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
To Die in Spring
Author: Ralf Rothmann
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son—the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel—is curious about Walter’s experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father’s early life. This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, seventeen-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and in many ways the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable. Told in a remarkable impressionistic voice, focusing on the tiny details and moments of grotesque beauty that flower even in the most desperate situations, Ralf Rothmann’s To Die in Spring “ushers in the post–[Günter] Grass era with enormous power” (Die Zeit).
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son—the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel—is curious about Walter’s experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father’s early life. This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, seventeen-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and in many ways the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable. Told in a remarkable impressionistic voice, focusing on the tiny details and moments of grotesque beauty that flower even in the most desperate situations, Ralf Rothmann’s To Die in Spring “ushers in the post–[Günter] Grass era with enormous power” (Die Zeit).
Hitler's Willing Executioners
Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656
Book Description
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
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656
Book Description
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
Hitler’s Boy Soldiers
Author: Helene Munson
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615198598
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
The untold story of how Germany's child soldiers fought WWII, told through the personal lens of the author's father's rediscovered journal and meticulous historical research
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615198598
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
The untold story of how Germany's child soldiers fought WWII, told through the personal lens of the author's father's rediscovered journal and meticulous historical research
Cruel World
Author: Lynn H. Nicholas
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307793826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 658
Book Description
To be a child in mid-twentieth-century Europe was to be not a person but an object, available for use in the service of the totalitarian state. Very soon after Adolf Hitler came to power, policies of eugenic selection and euthanasia began to weed ill or disabled children out of the New Order by poison, gas, and starvation. Defect-free “good blood” children were subjected to an “education” based on racism, propaganda, and the glorification of the Führer, and were deliberately deprived of free time that would allow independent thought or action. Once the war began, “Nordic”-looking children were kidnapped from families in the conquered lands and subjected to “Germanization.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of “bad blood” children—Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians(were separated from their families and condemned to forced migration, slave labor, sadistic experiments, starvation, and mass execution. At the end of the war, uprooted children of every origin wandered the bombed-out cities and countryside, some having been taken from home at such a young age that they did not know where they had come from or even their own names. Millions surged into and out of DP camps, exploited by political and religious groups, while the Allies and the fledgling United Nations tried mightily to put families back together and to find new homes for the orphans. All the riveting narrative skill and impeccable scholarship that distinguished Lynn Nicholas’s first book, The Rape of Europa (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction), are present in her study of these terrible crimes against humanity. To research this story she has delved into the governmental and military archives of many nations, and has interviewed countless individuals. She shows the relationship of the deadly Nazi policies to the brutal tactics used in the USSR in the 1930s and to their rehearsal in the Spanish Civil War, and vividly describes the abject failure of Hitler’s campaign to plant Germanizing colonies in the conquered nations. She gives us the stories of survivors of ghastly war-spawned famines(in Greece and Russia in the 1940s, Holland in the “Hunger Winter” of 1945, and Berlin in the Airlift year of 1949(and of British, French, and Dutch children who were evacuated to the countryside; boys and girls sent alone from Europe to England on the Kindertransports; the teenaged soldiers of the Reich; the small veterans of the quarries, the factories, and the camps as well as those who survived in lonely hiding. In Cruel World Lynn Nicholas shows us clearly, and with passionate empathy for the innocent victims, the crimes against children that inevitably result when ideology overwhelms humanity. This powerful book, as it recounts the waking nightmare that enmeshed the lives of Europe’s boys and girls, bears witness to our own responsibility to the children of the twenty-first century.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307793826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 658
Book Description
To be a child in mid-twentieth-century Europe was to be not a person but an object, available for use in the service of the totalitarian state. Very soon after Adolf Hitler came to power, policies of eugenic selection and euthanasia began to weed ill or disabled children out of the New Order by poison, gas, and starvation. Defect-free “good blood” children were subjected to an “education” based on racism, propaganda, and the glorification of the Führer, and were deliberately deprived of free time that would allow independent thought or action. Once the war began, “Nordic”-looking children were kidnapped from families in the conquered lands and subjected to “Germanization.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of “bad blood” children—Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians(were separated from their families and condemned to forced migration, slave labor, sadistic experiments, starvation, and mass execution. At the end of the war, uprooted children of every origin wandered the bombed-out cities and countryside, some having been taken from home at such a young age that they did not know where they had come from or even their own names. Millions surged into and out of DP camps, exploited by political and religious groups, while the Allies and the fledgling United Nations tried mightily to put families back together and to find new homes for the orphans. All the riveting narrative skill and impeccable scholarship that distinguished Lynn Nicholas’s first book, The Rape of Europa (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction), are present in her study of these terrible crimes against humanity. To research this story she has delved into the governmental and military archives of many nations, and has interviewed countless individuals. She shows the relationship of the deadly Nazi policies to the brutal tactics used in the USSR in the 1930s and to their rehearsal in the Spanish Civil War, and vividly describes the abject failure of Hitler’s campaign to plant Germanizing colonies in the conquered nations. She gives us the stories of survivors of ghastly war-spawned famines(in Greece and Russia in the 1940s, Holland in the “Hunger Winter” of 1945, and Berlin in the Airlift year of 1949(and of British, French, and Dutch children who were evacuated to the countryside; boys and girls sent alone from Europe to England on the Kindertransports; the teenaged soldiers of the Reich; the small veterans of the quarries, the factories, and the camps as well as those who survived in lonely hiding. In Cruel World Lynn Nicholas shows us clearly, and with passionate empathy for the innocent victims, the crimes against children that inevitably result when ideology overwhelms humanity. This powerful book, as it recounts the waking nightmare that enmeshed the lives of Europe’s boys and girls, bears witness to our own responsibility to the children of the twenty-first century.
Belonging
Author: Nora Krug
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1476796637
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1476796637
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
They Thought They Were Free
Author: Milton Mayer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652597X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652597X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
Germany Must Perish!
Author: Theodore N. Kaufman
Publisher: Blurb
ISBN: 9780464908814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 108
Book Description
This March 1941 book-written by a New Jersey Jewish-German émigré-caused a storm in Germany and America with its open advocacy of the physical extermination of all Germans and Germany itself. This was to be achieved through a process of mass sterilization, and the physical dismemberment of that country. Arguing that Nazism was in fact just another expression of militant Germanism, the author said that the Germans would never change and the only way to end the ongoing struggle was to end Germany and the German people. Because of Kaufman's claimed links to the policy advisors of the American president, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used the book to help encourage Germans to fight to the last. Ironically, significant sections of Kaufman's book, despite being dismissed as the work of a loner, came true. At least 12 million Germans were expelled from their land following the end of the war, and their deportation became the single largest transfer of any population in modern European history, and one-third of German territory was ethnically cleansed of Germans and permanently seized. Although the sterilization plan was never implemented, the collapse in the German birth rate, predicted by the author, has occurred, and even this part of the plan seems set to become reality. As the author wrote: "Of course, after complete sterilization, there will cease to be a birth rate in Germany. At the normal death rate of 2 per cent per annum, German life will diminish at the rate of 1,500,000 yearly. Accordingly in the span of two generations that which cost millions of lives and centuries of useless effort, namely, the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact." A SENSATIONAL IDEA!-Time Magazine A PLAN FOR PERMANENT PEACE AMONG CIVILIZED NATIONS! -New York Times This is an exact reproduction of the 1941 original, digitally reprocessed to the highest standards.
Publisher: Blurb
ISBN: 9780464908814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 108
Book Description
This March 1941 book-written by a New Jersey Jewish-German émigré-caused a storm in Germany and America with its open advocacy of the physical extermination of all Germans and Germany itself. This was to be achieved through a process of mass sterilization, and the physical dismemberment of that country. Arguing that Nazism was in fact just another expression of militant Germanism, the author said that the Germans would never change and the only way to end the ongoing struggle was to end Germany and the German people. Because of Kaufman's claimed links to the policy advisors of the American president, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used the book to help encourage Germans to fight to the last. Ironically, significant sections of Kaufman's book, despite being dismissed as the work of a loner, came true. At least 12 million Germans were expelled from their land following the end of the war, and their deportation became the single largest transfer of any population in modern European history, and one-third of German territory was ethnically cleansed of Germans and permanently seized. Although the sterilization plan was never implemented, the collapse in the German birth rate, predicted by the author, has occurred, and even this part of the plan seems set to become reality. As the author wrote: "Of course, after complete sterilization, there will cease to be a birth rate in Germany. At the normal death rate of 2 per cent per annum, German life will diminish at the rate of 1,500,000 yearly. Accordingly in the span of two generations that which cost millions of lives and centuries of useless effort, namely, the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact." A SENSATIONAL IDEA!-Time Magazine A PLAN FOR PERMANENT PEACE AMONG CIVILIZED NATIONS! -New York Times This is an exact reproduction of the 1941 original, digitally reprocessed to the highest standards.
Der, Die, Das
Author: Constantin Vayenas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783952481004
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150
Book Description
The challenge that English-language speakers face if they want to speak German well, is to accurately map German nouns to one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Native German speakers acquire their knowledge of the grammatical gender of German nouns from early on. They are not given formal instruction at school about matching nouns to their correct gender, and the topic is not covered in standard German grammar books. For the same reason, native speakers who give German language lessons to foreigners do not teach their students how to match nouns to their gender: One cannot teach what one has not been taught. This book fills that gap in that it explains, in plain English, the principles that map German nouns to a specific gender. This allows foreign students of German to unlock the gender of entire categories of nouns, thereby enabling students to speak German more confidently.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783952481004
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150
Book Description
The challenge that English-language speakers face if they want to speak German well, is to accurately map German nouns to one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Native German speakers acquire their knowledge of the grammatical gender of German nouns from early on. They are not given formal instruction at school about matching nouns to their correct gender, and the topic is not covered in standard German grammar books. For the same reason, native speakers who give German language lessons to foreigners do not teach their students how to match nouns to their gender: One cannot teach what one has not been taught. This book fills that gap in that it explains, in plain English, the principles that map German nouns to a specific gender. This allows foreign students of German to unlock the gender of entire categories of nouns, thereby enabling students to speak German more confidently.
Working for the Enemy
Author: Reinhold Billstein
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450137
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today. Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe. After the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts production, and both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels. During the war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German homefront economy. Starting in 1940, Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers. POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the companies. In the longest section of the book, ten people who were forced to work at Ford Werke recall their experiences in oral testimonies. For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor; in the most recent case, a $12 billion lawsuit was filed against the computer giant I.B.M. by a group of Gypsy organizations. In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known German corporations.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450137
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today. Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe. After the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts production, and both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels. During the war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German homefront economy. Starting in 1940, Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers. POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the companies. In the longest section of the book, ten people who were forced to work at Ford Werke recall their experiences in oral testimonies. For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor; in the most recent case, a $12 billion lawsuit was filed against the computer giant I.B.M. by a group of Gypsy organizations. In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known German corporations.