The compelling true story of a man of conscience at the heart of the Third Reich. In the years when most Germans were abetting a policy of conquest and genocide, Helmuth James von Moltke, an aristocratic and devoutly Christian young lawyer drafted into the German Intelligence Service, was working tirelessly against it. Throughout the war, he fought through the labyrinthine insanity of wartime bureaucracy on behalf of Jews and foreign prisoners and organized a clandestine resistance to the Nazi regime. From 1939 to the eve of his execution from treason in 1945, von Moltke wrote letters to his wife, Freya. Gathered here, these letters transcend their format to create at once a horrifying record of the daily workings of the Third Reich and an inspiring testament to the powers of love, courage, and conscience in the most conscienceless of times. “Remarkable . . . A unique historical document, a morality tale, a love story, all set within the very heart of the Third Reich and, in a real sense, in the soul of a man of conscience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “The words of this extraordinary patriot and humanitarian echo with astonishing relevance [and] stand on their own as testament to the impact for good a courageous individual can still exert.”—Chicago Sun-Times “One of the great books of the twentieth century, [telling] a story of human failure, of overwhelming odds, of patience, and of grace.”—Christian Science Monitor

Available for the first time in English, a moving prison correspondence between a husband and wife who resisted the Nazis. Tegel prison, Berlin, in the fall of 1944. Helmuth James von Moltke is awaiting trial for his leading role in the Kreisau Circle, one of the most important German resistance groups against the Nazis. By a near miracle, the prison chaplain at Tegel is Harald Poelchau, a friend and coconspirator of Helmuth and his wife, Freya. From Helmuth’s arrival at Tegel in late September 1944 until the day of his execution by the Nazis on January 23, 1945, Poelchau would carry Helmuth’s and Freya’s letters in and out of prison daily, risking his own life. Freya would safeguard these letters for the rest of her long life. Last Letters is a profoundly personal record of the couple’s fortitude in the face of fascism.

“Helmut James von Moltke [1907-1945] pursued two related goals during the Second World War: to help victims of National Socialism and to prepare for post-National Socialist Germany and Europe. He worked toward the first goal as a specialist in international law in the army’s intelligence department. There he struggled to uphold principles of international law against Nazi policies of racism and aggression. To achieve the second goal, Moltke initiated what later became known as the Kreisau Circle, a group that discussed and drafted plans to rebuild and reorganize Germany after Hitler’s defeat. By birth and character Moltke was particularly well suited for his self-appointed tasks. He succeeded in his work for the army not only because of his exceptional abilities but also because of his name, which bestowed a degree of privilege and immunity. On his father’s side, he was a grandnephew of the famous Prussian field marshal, whose Silesian estate, Kreisau, he inherited. Through his mother, he was the grandson of Sir James Rose Innes, the liberal South African judge. Partly through him, Moltke developed a strong sense of social justice and a cosmopolitanism rare among the Junkers. As an aristocrat and a devout Christian, as an internationalist with socialist sympathies, Moltke won collaborators for the Kreisau Circle in the army, the bureaucracy, the Catholic and Protestant churches, and the trade unions... Moltke was arrested in January 1944 and sentenced to death a year later, while most of his associates were convicted in the trials following the attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944. This biography shows that Moltke not only distinguished between good and evil but, more important, felt a moral imperative to combat evil. His human greatness resulted from this combination of insight and action.” — Erich Hahn, The Journal of Modern History “This book owes much to the nature of [Helmuth and Freya von Moltke’s] relationship and the frequency of the letters, and to the fact that Michael Balfour and Julian Frisby, the English friends of Moltke’s, were able to use them to quote from them extensively. In these letters the man comes alive, though the book as a whole has the merit of putting them in their biographical and historical context.” — Beate Ruhm von Oppen, The New York Times “[An] excellent and moving book... an important contribution to our knowledge of the German resistance to Hitler... For the casual reader who wants to learn how a decent and able man reacted in a situation of brutality and horror, [Balfour and Frisby] have presented an engrossing story. For fellow historians they have made available a set of indispensable documents.” — Gordon R. Mork, History “The authors of this book have had access not only to the [Kreisau] Circle’s hopeful thoughts about the future shape of Germany, but also to Moltke’s revealing and voluminous letters to his wife, who survived him. This material has been admirably employed to construct a biography in the best historical tradition: that is, one which not only brings to life the central figure, but throws abundant light upon the times in which he lived... Moltke raised his own memorial. He has been fortunate in the two biographers who in this book have delineated and interpreted it.” — R. Cecil, International Affairs “This is an important addition to the growing literature on the German Resistance movement.” — Robert E. Neil, The American Historical Review “This new biography is written with real affection by two close personal friends of Moltke... provides a more personal angle, above all by the numerous quotations from Moltke’s letters to his wife which miraculously survived the war... gives us a fascinating picture of the problems any German opposition to Hitler had to face.” — F. L. Carsten, The Slavonic and East European Review “This is Helmuth von Moltke’s story, told by two of the many friends he made in England before the war years. The drama of the story sustains the narrative... Helmuth’s letter to his wife, written the day before his execution, is worth many times the price of the book.” — Worldview

A wealthy family tries--and fails--to seal themselves off from the chaos of post-World War II life surrounding them in this stunning novel by one of Germany's most important post-war writers. In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish twelve-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors--a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee. Yet in the main, life continues as banal, wondrous, and complicit as ever for the family, until their caution, their hedged bets, and their denial are answered by the wholly expected events they haven't allowed themselves to imagine. All for Nothing, published in 2006, was the last novel by Walter Kempowski, one of postwar Germany's most acclaimed and popular writers.

Despite Dietrich Bonhoeffer¿s earlier theological achievements and writings, it was his correspondence and notes from prison that electrified the postwar world six years after his death in 1945. The materials gathered and selected by his friend Eberhard Bethge in Letters and Papers from Prison not only brought Bonhoeffer to a wide and appreciative readership, especially in North America, they also introduced to a broad readership his novel and exciting ideas of religionless Christianity, his open and honest theological appraisal of Christian doctrines, and his sturdy, if sorely tried, faith in face of uncertainty and doubt.This splendid volume, in many ways the capstone of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, is the first unabridged collection of Bonhoeffer¿s 1943¿1945 prison letters and theological writings. Here are over 200 documents that include extensive correspondence with his family and Eberhard Bethge (much of it in English for the first time), as well as his theological notes, and his prison poems. The volume offers an illuminating introduction by editor John de Gruchy and an historical Afterword by the editors of the original German volume: Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, and Renate Bethge.

“Drawing on deep familiarity with the period and its personalities, Rogers has given us a witty and richly detailed account of the ongoing war between the greatest poet of the eighteenth century and its most scandalous publisher.”—Leo Damrosch, author of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age “What sets Rogers’s history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat.”—Publishers Weekly The quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles, and advertisements, court and government records, and personal letters. The story of their battles in and out of print includes a poisoning, the pillory, numerous instances of fraud, and a landmark case in the history of copyright. The book is a forensic account of events both momentous and farcical, and it is indecently entertaining.

From the New York Times reporters who first uncovered S.S. officer Aribert Heim’s secret life in Egypt comes the never-before-told story of the most hunted Nazi war criminal in the world. Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden. His story might have ended there, but for certain rare Germans who were unwilling to let Nazi war criminals go unpunished, among them a police investigator named Alfred Aedtner. After Heim fled on a tip that he was about to be arrested, Aedtner turned finding him into an overriding obsession. His quest took him across Europe and across decades, and into a close alliance with legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The hunt for Heim became a powerful symbol of Germany's evolving attitude toward the sins of its past, which finally crested in a desire to see justice done at almost any cost. As late as 2009, the mystery of Heim’s disappearance remained unsolved. Now, in The Eternal Nazi, Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet reveal for the first time how Aribert Heim evaded capture--living in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim family--while inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many years. It is a brilliant feat of historical detection that illuminates a nation’s dramatic reckoning with the crimes of the Holocaust.

In the Third Reich, political dissidents were not the only ones liable to be punished for their crimes. Their parents, siblings and relatives also risked reprisals. This concept - known as Sippenhaft – was based in ideas of blood and purity. This definitive study surveys the threats, fears and infliction of this part of the Nazi system of terror.

Journalist, traveler, and writer Freya Stark wrote this book "as an armchair journey for the average reader" after discovering that contemporary knowledge of the Arab world in Europe and the United States was out of date. She gives an introductory history and political analysis of the region in the introduction, especially with respect to World War II, foreign presence in the region, and the region's future place in the world. This book, based on the author's travels, focuses particularly upon the Arabian Peninsula (specifically Aden in Yemen, where she was stationed by the British government as a diplomat), Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Stark does not attempt to keep the narrative falsely impersonal; her status as a foreign woman traveling by herself was wildly uncommon, and the way her informants responded to her reflects that fact.