Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge is a moral biography of Georg Konrad Morgen, who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps and eventually came face-to-face with the system of industrialized murder at Auschwitz. His wartime papers and postwar testimonies yield a study in moral complexity.

Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge is a moral biography of Georg Konrad Morgen, who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps and eventually came face-to-face with the system of industrialized murder at Auschwitz. His wartime papers and postwar testimonies yield a study in moral complexity.

Hildesheim is a mid-sized provincial town in northwest Germany. Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times is a carefully drawn account of how townspeople went about their lives and reacted to events during the Nazi era. Andrew Stuart Bergerson argues that ordinary Germans did in fact make Germany and Europe more fascist, more racist, and more modern during the 1930s, but they disguised their involvement behind a pre-existing veil of normalcy. Bergerson details a way of being, believing, and behaving by which "ordinary Germans" imagined their powerlessness and absence of responsibility even as they collaborated in the Nazi revolution. He builds his story on research that includes anecdotes of everyday life collected systematically from newspapers, literature, photography, personal documents, public records, and especially extensive interviews with a representative sample of residents born between 1900 and 1930. The book considers the actual customs and experiences of friendship and neighborliness in a German town before, during, and after the Third Reich. By analyzing the customs of conviviality in interwar Hildesheim, and the culture of normalcy these customs invoked, Bergerson aims to help us better understand how ordinary Germans transformed "neighbors" into "Jews" or "Aryans."

History can be a very difficult subject to understand, especially the events of World War II. This book focuses on Hitlers rise as dictator of Germany and finishes with his suicide and ending of World War II in Europe.

Philosopher David Velleman compares our social interactions to the interactions among improvisational actors on stage.

The remarkable true story of the man tasked by the Nazis with prosecuting crimes at concentration camps. In autumn 1943, SS judge Konrad Morgen—a graduate of the Hague Academy of International Law—visited Auschwitz concentration camp to investigate an intercepted parcel containing gold sent from the camp. While there, Morgen found the SS camp guards engaged in widespread theft and corruption. Worse, Morgen also discovered that inmates were being killed without authority from the SS leadership. While millions of Jews were being exterminated under the Final Solution program, Konrad Morgen set about gathering evidence of these “illegal murders.” Morgen also visited other camps, such as Buchenwald, where he had the notorious camp commandant Karl Koch and Ilse, his sadistic spouse, arrested and charged. Found guilty by an SS court, Koch was sentenced to death. Remarkably, the apparently fearless SS judge also tried to prosecute other Nazi criminals including Waffen-SS commanders Oskar Dirlewanger and Hermann Fegelein and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss. He even claimed to have tried to indict Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for organizing the mass deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps. This intriguing work reveals how the lines between justice and injustice became blurred in the Third Reich. As well as describing the actions of this often-contradictory character, the author questions Morgen’s motives and delves into his postwar life—which included both testifying at Nuremberg and being investigated for crimes himself.

This volume provides an in-depth discussion of Saul Friedlander's landmark two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews. It brings together a range of internationally acclaimed historians to address the manifold conceptual and historiographical issues raised in Friedlander's monumental work. It includes a major essay by Friedlander himself on the challenges of producing an integrated history of the Holocaust. The aim of this book is not simply to evaluate Friedlander's work on its own merits, but rather to use his text as a means of exploring the contours and future of Holocaust historiography. The central concern is to situate his work within the broader terrain of Holocaust studies and European history, as well as to explore the ways in which his book opens up new directions in the knowledge, study and understanding of the Shoah in particular and twentieth century genocide in general.