"In March 1939 German troops entered Prague, the first foreign capital to be occupied by the Nazis. Six years later, in May 1945, it was the last to be liberated as Hitler's Reich collapsed in defeat." "The Nazi occupation had a profound effect and paved the way for the communist dictatorship that followed. After the war the entire period was deliberately distorted for political purposes. The facts were misrepresented or suppressed. Publications and documentary films were censored. Witnesses were silenced. The aim of this book is to restore part of the lost history of the occupation after decades of communist manipulation. It provides a rare glimpse of life in Prague under the German occupation from unique photographs, many of them published here for the first time. It also reproduces items from ration coupons and identity cards to Nazi proclamations and execution lists which were part of everyday life during the German Protectorate. The result is an objective account of the 'Golden City' in the years when Prague and its people lived in the shadow of the swastika." --Book Jacket.

He was known first as a Warsaw ghetto smuggler, then as Comandante Enrico. He traveled under false identity papers and worked at a German border patrol station. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hermann Wygoda lived a life of narrow escapes, unsavory masquerades, and battles that almost defy reason. In the Shadow of the Swastika tells the story of a Polish Jew whose harrowing wartime adventures reached their amazing end when he received the American Bronze Star from Gen. Mark Clark in June 1946. Wygoda kept a journal during the time he spent in the mountains of northern Italy, where he rose from commanding a platoon to leading a division of nearly twenty-five hundred partisans that ultimately liberated the city of Savona.

This book is a study in the ethics of war. It is the only work which focuses on the moral dilemmas of resistance and collaboration in Nazi-occupied Europe, including a detailed examination of Jewish resistance. It presents a comprehensive guide to the harrowing ethical choices that confronted people in response to the German doctrine of collective responsibility: reprisal killings and hostage-taking. Also included: discussion of violations of the Laws of War (especially torture) by the resistance.

A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years--a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then--a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories--and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.