The compelling story of leading physicists in Germany—including Peter Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg—and how they accommodated themselves to working within the Nazi state in the 1930s and ’40s. After World War II, most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the true story is much more complicated. In Serving the Reich, Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history, contrasting the career of Peter Debye, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich: Max Planck, the elder statesman of physics after whom Germany’s premier scientific society is now named, and Werner Heisenberg, who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons. Mixing history, science, and biography, Ball’s gripping exploration of the lives of scientists under Nazism offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility, as scientists navigated “the grey zone between complicity and resistance.” Ball’s account of the different choices these three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgment of their conduct. Yet, despite these ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state. Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship between science and politics today. Ultimately, Ball argues, a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is “above politics” can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.

A dramatic new account of the Reichstag fire and the origins of the Nazi rise to power

Memoirs of the man who was appointed as the head architect and minister of armanents and war production for the Nazi government.

Decades have passed since World War II, yet the myth that all Germans were Nazi sympathizers still persists. This book follows the story of the Weiss family in East Prussia from World War I to the end of World War II. It is told from the point of view not of the victors but of the vanquished. Beginning with the good citizenship trap Hitler set for law-abiding German families, the book describes how Germany first prospered and then fell to ruin with the Third Reich. The people traded their freedoms for a national security, which quickly turned to tyranny with swift consequences for "disobedience." Like Christel's brothers (soldiers and members of Hitler's Youth), propaganda-fed children all over the Reich believed the highly idealized depiction of their roles and of their nation's victims. This fascinating and richly detailed memoir is told through the intimate narration of a woman who grew up in the midst of turmoil, experienced poverty and prejudice, witnessed the deaths of many loved ones, and was driven from her home by the Soviet Army. The combination of domestic details and vivid historical descriptions creates an unusual book as absorbing as it is educational.

Gaining a foothold -- Rising star -- Intelligence man -- Office VI and its forerunner -- Competing visions: Office VI and the Abwehr -- Doing intelligence: Italy as an example -- Alternative universes: Office VI and the Auswärtige Amt -- Schellenberg, Himmler, and the quest for "peace"--Postwar

The final book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster shows how Germany rushed headlong into destroying itself, shattering an entire continent. In 1939 Hitler mobilized Germany into all-out war. Richard Evans's astonishing, acclaimed history conjures up a whole society plunged into conflict - from generals and front-line soldiers to Hitler Youth activists and middle-class housewives - tracing events from the invasion of Poland and the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler's plans for genocide and his eventual suicide. 'Masterly ... will surely be the standard history for many years to come ... This is a warning for the future, as much as a judgement on the past' ;Richard Overy, Daily Telegraph 'We all know how the story ends ... but Richard Evans brings it masterfully home ... magnificent';Peter Preston, Observer 'A chilling, brilliant read' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 'It is hard to do justice to the humanity and scholarly range of The Third Reich at War ... triumphant ... a masterful historical narrative and the most comprehensive account of Nazi Germany' Nicholas Stargardt, The Times Literary Supplement 'It gives the reader persuasive answers to questions asked for so long, that will continue to be asked, about this most violent and inexplicable of regimes' Mark Mazower, Guardian Sir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power.

Personal accounts of life under the Hitler regime.

They were foot soldiers and officers. They served in the regular army and the Waffen-SS. And, remarkably, they were also Jewish, at least as defined by Hitler's infamous race laws. Pursuing the thread he first unraveled in Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, Bryan Rigg takes a closer look at the experiences of Wehrmacht soldiers who were classified as Jewish. In this long-awaited companion volume, he presents interviews with twenty-one of these men, whose stories are both fascinating and disturbing. As many as 150,000 Jews and partial-Jews (or Mischlinge) served, often with distinction, in the German military during World War II. The men interviewed for this volume portray a wide range of experiences-some came from military families, some had been raised Christian—revealing in vivid detail how they fought for a government that robbed them of their rights and sent their relatives to extermination camps. Yet most continued to serve, since resistance would have cost them their lives and they mistakenly hoped that by their service they could protect themselves and their families. The interviews recount the nature and extent of their dilemma, the divided loyalties under which many toiled during the Nazi years and afterward, and their sobering reflections on religion and the Holocaust, including what they knew about it at the time. Rigg relates each individual's experiences following the establishment of Hitler's race laws, shifting between vivid scenes of combat and the increasingly threatening situation on the home front for these men and their family members. Their stories reveal the constant tension in their lives: how some tried to hide their identities, and how a few were even "Aryanized" as part of Hitler's effort to retain reliable soldiers—including Field Marshal Erhard Milch, three-star general Helmut Wilberg, and naval commander Bernhard Rogge. Chilling, compelling, almost beyond belief, these stories depict crises of conscience under the most stressful circumstances. Lives of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers deepens our understanding of the complex intersection of Nazi race laws and German military service both before and during World War II.

Would Hitler have won the war had he not "given" the Allies Germany's most talented scientists? This is the gripping & sobering story of some of the greatest scientists of our times who, forced to flee Nazism, sought refuge in Great Britain & the United States.

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.