This groundbreaking history connects Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda during World War II to anti-Semitism in the Middle East in the decades since. Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” radio programs, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message. Herf explores the intellectual, political, and cultural context in which German and European radical anti-Semitism was found to resonate with similar views rooted in a selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin, including Haj el-Husseini and Rashid el-Kilani, collaborated with the Nazis in constructing their Middle East propaganda campaign. By integrating the political and military history of the war in the Middle East with the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the propagandistic diffusion of Nazi ideology, Herf offers the most thorough examination to date of this important chapter in the history of World War II. Importantly, he also shows how the anti-Semitism promoted by the Nazi propaganda effort contributed to the anti-Semitism exhibited by adherents of radical forms of Islam in the Middle East today.

It has been generally assumed that the driving force behind German propaganda in World War Two was the Propaganda Ministry headed by Josef Goebbels, or the initiatives of various Nazi party organizations. There has been little research on the specific role of the Wehrmacht propaganda machine in this connection, even though it was the source for the bulk of German wartime propaganda material. This book deals with the history of the propaganda troops of the Wehrmacht, created shortly before WWII as a result of lessons learned concerning the importance of psychological warfare during WWI. This unique branch of service proved to be indispensable to the German propaganda effort during WWII. The products of its Propaganda Companies - better known as «PK», a term that became synonymous with high-quality war reporting in Germany - formed a crucial and popular part of wartime propaganda. The military propaganda organization worked closely with Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry and their cooperation contributed to the success of this young service. The veterans of the propaganda troops and their wartime and postwar products continued to influence the image of the Wehrmacht and WWII long after the war.

After the Napoleonic Wars the borders of Europe were redrawn and relative peace endured across the region, but the volatile politics of the late nineteenth century generated an atmosphere of fear and distrust, and it gave rise to a new era of fortress building. In the neutral states situated between France and Germany - The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland - the need for extensive fixed defences was particularly urgent, and this is the subject of this highly illustrated new study. The strategic thinking that gave rise to these defensive schemes is described in detail, as is the planning, design and construction of the lines themselves. Their operational history in wartime, in particular during the Second World War, is a key element of this expert account.

Linda Marianiello here translates into English for the first time Dieter Kühn’s highly praised and definitive biography of one of Germany’s greatest poets, Gertrud Kolmar. Kolmar carried German-language poetry to new heights, speaking truth in a time when many poets collapsed in the face of increasing Nazi repression. Born Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner in Berlin in 1894, she completed her first collection, Poems, in 1917. She took her pen name, Kolmar, from the name of the town where her family originated. Kolmar’s third collection of poems appeared in 1938 but soon disappeared in the wake of the overall repression of Jewish authors. At the time, she served as secretary to her father, Ludwig Chodziesner, a prominent lawyer. In 1941, the Nazis compelled her to work in a German armaments factory. Even as a forced laborer, the strength of her poetic voice grew, perhaps reaching its highest level before her deportation to Auschwitz. From gentle nature verses to stirring introspection, these are poems in which we can still find ourselves today. Both she and her father died in Nazi concentration camps, he in 1942, she the following year. The translation of Dieter Kühn’s biography conveys the tragic, yet courageous, life of a great poet to an English-speaking audience.

How did East and West Germany and Japan reconstitute national identity after World War II? Did all three experience parallel reactions to national trauma and reconstruction?History education shaped how these nations reconceived their national identities. Because the content of history education was controlled by different actors, history education materials framed national identity in very different ways. In Japan, where the curriculum was controlled by bureaucrats bent on maintaining their purported neutrality, materials focused on the empirical building blocks of history (wh.