He's a warrior, a Finnish special forces soldier, who cut down scores of enemy troops while operating on his own behind Red Army lines during the Soviet invasion of his homeland in 1939. After that, he joined a Waffen SS brigade so that he could personally wage war deep inside Russia. Now in December of 1944, he is in Manhattan, sent by Nazi Germany to pave the way for an operation, which, if successful, will claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. While Germany's purpose for the mass killing of civilians on American soil at this late point in the war is to leverage the Roosevelt Government into a truce aimed at holding off further Allied advances into Western Europe after Normandy, the battle-hardened Finn is privately on a mission of his own. Driven by hatred of the United States for what he views as it ongoing support of efforts to crush Finland and bring it under Soviet control, he devises a murderous retaliatory plan, and once settled in New York, secretly sets out to implement it. In doing so, he uses his skills as a solo operator to adapt to a menacing environment, evade the FBI, and brutally eliminate anyone seen as an obstacle to his violent objective.

While Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church’s history—for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson’s Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler’s regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance. The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism’s equivalent of the biblical admonition to “render unto Caesar,” a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons’ courage and travails during the war. Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century—and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.

Spanning 25 years of serious writing on hip-hop by noted scholars and mainstream journalists, this comprehensive anthology includes observations and critiques on groundbreaking hip-hop recordings.

A catalog to accompany an exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the subject of the Nazi eugenics program.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia is the perfect resource for information on the people, places, and events of yesterday and today. Students, teachers, and librarians can find fast facts combined with the quality and accuracy that have made Britannica the brand to trust. A tool for both the classroom and the library, no other desk reference can compare.

With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years, 1,557 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renée Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a movie with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation. He says, “I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That’s the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I’m heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day.”

When Irena Gut witnessed a Nazi officer murder a baby and its mother in front of her eyes, she could do nothing. Then and there, she made a vow to God that if she ever had the opportunity to save a life, she would do it. But she did much more than that. When she was appointed the housekeeper for a German major, the highest-ranking German officer in Tarnopol, Poland, Irena saved thirteen lives by hiding twelve Jews in her employer’s basement, without his knowledge, for eight months. The thirteenth life she saved was a baby who was conceived in hiding. Now a major motion picture starring Sophie Nélisse, Irena’s Vow is one of the most remarkable, true stories of courage to come out of the Holocaust.