Recommended Reading

Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin concentration camp, less than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism.

A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.

An in-depth study of Adolf Hitler's unit during World War I, the List Regiment. Through the stories of Hitler's fellow soldiers, Weber argues that the story of Hitler's experience during the war was a myth propagated by Hitler himself. In doing so, Weber challenges the belief that the First World War led naturally to Nazism.

In this book Wolf presents astonishing findings from the recently opened Vatican archives. These discoveries clarify the relations between National Socialism and the Vatican. This book illuminates the thinking of the popes, cardinals, and bishops who saw themselves in a historic struggle against evil.

This is the story of Jan Karski⊃;s heroic actions during World War II. Karski was a young Polish diplomat who joined the Polish underground movement where he served as a liaison carrying news of Nazi actions from Poland to the Allies. Karski survived imprisonment in a Soviet detention camp and torture by the Nazis. He investigated the treatment of the Jews under Nazi occupation, visiting the Warsaw Ghetto and documenting Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He brought this important news to the leaders and intellectuals of the Western world including H.G. Wells and President Roosevelt. Some reacted viscerally to his message, some with disbelief and indifference.

It has long been alleged that officials in the Roosevelt administration knew about Hitler's plans to murder all the Jews in Nazi Europe — and that these officials did little to prevent the massacre, refusing asylum to shiploads of Jewish refugees and failing to order the bombing of railway lines leading to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Wyman examines the evidence, concluding that senior American officials could indeed have saved many thousands, if not millions, of European Jews by intervening earlier. Wyman suggests that a combination of antisemitism and indifference to anything not perceived as being of direct strategic importance to the United States indirectly led to countless deaths.