The Nazi movement was quintessentially male. It was founded on the backs of disaffected servicemen in the years after the First World War. It was consolidated in the carefully choreographed parades led with flags drenched in the blood of fallen heroes. Women were supposed to confine themselves to the three Ks: Kirche, Küche, Kinder, a […]
Often books about the Third Reich have a last chapter called ‘Götterdämmerung’ or ‘Twilight of the Gods’. The Wagnerian link seems apt; wasn’t the anti-Semitic German nationalist Hitler’s favourite composer? Yet although there are parallels with Richard Wagner (like self-pity and no sense of the ridiculous), Wagner turned men into god and moral heroes, whereas […]
In an interview a few years ago I asked René Huyghe, Chief Curator of the Louvre in the Vichy years, exactly how he would define those in the French art world who had collaborated. Without hesitation he said that the collaborators had been the ones who had knowingly used the wartime situation to advance their […]
At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner’s case the answer is mercifully kind: his book simply cannot be put aside. As a memoir of life in Germany during […]
In the summer of 1940, Britain was staring down the barrel of a gun. Defeated by the Germany Army on land and besieged by U-boats at sea, the nation was forced to rely on its last defence against invasion – the Royal Air Force. But the RAF had fewer pilots, inferior planes and less experience […]
The Battle of Kohima was fought as part of the Japanese attempt to cut off the British base at Imphal and drive the British out of Assam. To this day historians disagree over whether or not the Japanese would have invaded India had they been victorious. But it is clear that a British defeat at […]
As one of the first American journalists to arrive in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, John Dos Passos was embarrassed by the devastation the American B29s had inflicted. At Stettiner Station he saw large crowds of bewildered people, their skin hanging on their bones ‘like candle drippings’. Berlin, he recalled, was […]
One of the great ironies of Hitler’s catastrophic twelve-year rule from 1933 to 1945 – an irony no doubt lost on the Führer himself – was that a regime so fixated with racial purity ended up making Germany the ethnic dumping ground of Europe. By the summer of 1944, a quarter of the German workforce […]
The Mass-Observation project set up in 1937 before the coming of war two years later left behind a treasure trove of archive material of different kinds, all solicited from the hundreds of volunteers who accepted the invitation to send in reports and diaries about their own lives and the world they observed all around them. […]
During the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Goering spent much of his time in the dock reading a work of philosophy, a contemporary bestseller, by a Chinese-American philosopher, Lin Yutang. The book, The Importance of Living, had been through several editions in the 1930s. One of its principal contentions was that nations, like individuals, have their own […]
Richard Carver was captured only three nights after the battle of El Alamein, and he was fearful that the Germans would discover that he was Monty’s stepson. He was transferred to the Italians and sent to a prison camp near Parma, from which he escaped nearly a year later. After months on the run, and […]
Alistair Urquhart was nineteen in 1939, living with his ‘parents, auntie, sister and two brothers in a newly built granite bungalow on the western fringes of Aberdeen’, and working as an apprentice in a firm of plumbers, merchants and electrical wholesalers. Within weeks of the outbreak of war he was called up, and joined his […]
Spying and deception were two aspects of the Second World War in which the British consistently outwitted the opposition. The breaking of the Enigma code enabled the boffins of Bletchley Park to read German encrypted messages, as a result of which Churchill and his commanders could anticipate the enemy’s military manoeuvres; MI5’s XX or Double […]
When Hitler sent Rommel to north Africa in January 1941, Nazi interest in the Arab world burgeoned. From then until the end of the war the Third Reich invested heavily in trying to win over Muslim opinion. Jeffrey Herf believes that this propaganda offensive touched key sectors of Arab society, with profound consequences. It would […]
In September 1946 workers directed by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland recovered ten metal boxes buried in the basement of what had been a Jewish school in the Warsaw Ghetto, but which was then a precarious heap of rubble. The boxes contained the first collection of documents and records assembled by the Oyneg Shabes […]
With Eisenhower’s armies closing in on Hitler’s Reich in the spring of 1945, Allied intelligence experts warned of a last-ditch stand by the Nazis in an Alpine redoubt and of a nationwide ‘Werewolf’ resistance movement that would cause mayhem after Germany’s surrender. It seemed highly plausible, but was simply wrong. The redoubt proved a mirage, […]
When the Germans broke through the Maginot Line, in June 1940, and poured down through northern France, sending some 14 million terrified Dutch, Belgians and French onto the roads going south, many of pre-war Paris’s American residents were still living in the city. Some joined the exodus south and never went back. A few were […]
Far too many historians continue to view the global conflicts of the twentieth century – and especially the Second World War – through the narrow prism chosen by previous generations of writers. In the case of North Africa, for example, there are reams of books, told from an Allied perspective, that begin with General O’Connor’s […]
Winston S Churchill has been the subject of many biographies, notably the multi-volume work by Sir Martin Gilbert that Gordon Brown gave to President Obama. His leadership in the Second World War has been chronicled by many, most persuasively by Andrew Roberts in his outstanding Masters and Commanders.
The role of the RAF aircrew, who manned the Bomber Command aircraft that inflicted indescribable destruction on the cities of Hitler’s Germany, has been highlighted by a wave of new books on the Second World War in the air, many published to mark the sixtieth anniversary of that conflict’s end. Most have been written in […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm