This volume of Campfire's graphic history of World War II deals with the war in Europe from the rise of the Nazis through to May 1945 and VE Day. World War II shows the effects of the war on the soldiers, the refugees, the victims and protagonists of the most terrible conflict the world has ever known. In a world that is forgetting the lessons history has to teach, this book is a reminder of the horrors that come from intolerance. In the 1930s, a great evil was rising in the heart of Europe, a threat unlike any seen before. German leader Adolf Hitler, a madman bent on world domination, was raising an army and growing more violent by the day. The world knew that Hitler had to be stopped. But fearing a war, this growing threat of Hitler's Nazi army was left unchecked. The world simply watched as Germany sank into darkness. The world merely prayed that war would not breach their borders. The world waited. And they waited too long. As cities fell to ruin and millions were slaughtered, the growing darkness of Hitler and his Nazi empire branched out far beyond Europe—to Asia and Africa and America—and soon threatened to claim the entire world. France, England, Russia, the United States… no single nation had the strength to combat this darkness, at least not on their own. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the one final, desperate hope was that all of these nations united together might muster the strength to save humanity.

This book examines and establishes connections between Italian Fascism and Hindu nationalism, connections which developed within the frame of Italy’s anti-British foreign policy. The most remarkable contacts with the Indian political milieu were established via Bengali nationalist circles. Diplomats and intellectuals played an important role in establishing and cultivating those tie-ups. Tagore’s visit to Italy in 1925 and the much more relevant liaison between Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA were results of the Italian propaganda and activities in India. But the most meaningful part of this book is constituted by the connections and influences it establishes between Fascism as an ideology and a political system and Marathi Hindu nationalism. While examining fascist political literature and Mussolini’s figure and role, Marathi nationalists were deeply impressed and influenced by the political ideology itself, the duce and fascist organisations. These impressions moulded the RSS, a right-wing, Hindu nationalist organisation, and Hindutva ideology, with repercussions on present Indian politics. This is the most original and revealing part of the book, entirely based on unpublished sources, and will prove foundational for scholars of modern Indian history.

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.

Among their many idiosyncrasies, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, remained serious cartoon aficionados throughout their lives. They adored animation and their influence on German animation after World War II continues to this day. This study explores Hitler and Goebbels' efforts to establish a German cartoon industry to rival Walt Disney's and their love-hate relationship with American producers, whose films they studied behind locked doors. Despite their ambitious dream, all that remains of their efforts are a few cartoon shorts--advertising and puppet films starring dogs, cats, birds, hedgehogs, insects, Teutonic dwarves, and other fairy-tale ensemble. While these pieces do not hold much propaganda value, they perfectly illustrate Hannah Arendt's controversial description of those who perpetrated the Holocaust: the banality of evil.

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead. Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

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.