From 1573 to 1617, Master Franz Schmidt was the executioner for the towns of Bamberg and Nuremberg. During that span, he personally executed more than 350 people while keeping a journal throughout his career. A Hangman’s Diary is not only a collection of detailed writings by Schmidt about his work, but also an account of criminal procedure in Germany during the Middle Ages. With analysis and explanation, editor Albrecht Keller and translators C. Calvert and A. W. Gruner have put together a masterful tome that sets the scene of execution day and puts you in Master Franz Schmidt’s shoes as he does his duty for his country. Originally published more than eighty years ago, A Hangman’s Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Schmidt’s executions, which include hangings, beheadings, and other methods of murder, as well as explanations of each crime and the reason for the punishment. An incredible classic, A Hangman’s Diary is more than a history lesson; it shows the true anarchy that inhabited our world only a few hundred years ago. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Here is a gripping account of the major postwar trial of the Nazi hierarchy in World War II. The Nuremberg Trial brilliantly recreates the trial proceedings and offers a reasoned, often profound examination of the processes that created international law. From the whimpering of Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop on the stand to the icy coolness of Goering, each participant is vividly drawn. Includes twenty-four photographs of the key players as well as extensive references, sources, biographies, and an index.

A long-awaited memoir of the Nuremberg war crimes trials by one of its key participants. In 1945 Telford Taylor joined the prosecution staff and eventually became chief counsel of the international tribunal established to try top-echelon Nazis. Telford provides an engrossing eyewitness account of one of the most significant events of our century.

Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.

In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever’s diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow – Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels – reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto. A Yiddish Book Center Translation

The author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers a personal account of life in Nazi Germany at the start of WWII. By the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Nazi Party, had consolidated power in Germany and was leading the world into war. A young foreign correspondent was on hand to bear witness. More than two decades prior to the publication of his acclaimed history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer was a journalist stationed in Berlin. During his years in the Nazi capital, he kept a daily personal diary, scrupulously recording everything he heard and saw before being forced to flee the country in 1940. Berlin Diary is Shirer’s first-hand account of the momentous events that shook the world in the mid-twentieth century, from the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia to the fall of Poland and France. A remarkable personal memoir of an extraordinary time, it chronicles the author’s thoughts and experiences while living in the shadow of the Nazi beast. Shirer recalls the surreal spectacles of the Nuremberg rallies, the terror of the late-night bombing raids, and his encounters with members of the German high command while he was risking his life to report to the world on the atrocities of a genocidal regime. At once powerful, engrossing, and edifying, William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary is an essential historical record that illuminates one of the darkest periods in human civilization.