World war two

Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and World War Two? What is there left to say? To gain attention, any new study has to have a thesis: some fresh angle that previous writers have overlooked or played down. For Frank McDonough it is the insane impossibility that Germany could ever have won the struggle it launched against the combined powers of the US, USSR and the British Empire that was the Führer’s fatal flaw. McDonough is an academic specializing in Nazi Germany, and he writes clearly and readably, with just enough detail, on the huge canvas that he covers.

The false sense of complacency in Washington DC, now restored as the imperial capital of the world, is only matched by a tone of utter bafflement. History has apparently renewed its march toward a progressive utopia, and the American cabinet seems as epidermally diverse as it is ideologically totalitarian. But there remains a sense of unease. The imperium suffered a systemic shock in 2016, one that needed and still lacks explanation. The shock was not limited to America. The Guardian struggles to comprehend that British Indians tended to support Brexit, and that members of their community such as Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel have risen to influence in the Conservative party and high office in the government.

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an ax bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff armed Roman salute after the handshake was deemed fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasseled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras. For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him.

The facts are stark, if little known. Before World War Two, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, Greece (Salonica, in its old Ottoman name) numbered over 50,000. Jews were this Mediterranean port city’s most numerous ethnic minority and had shared in many of its past glories. When the war was over, only 5,000, less than 10 percent, of the Salonica Jews survived. Between March 15 and August 10, 1943, the local Greek police, supervised by the SS, arranged the deportation of 45,000 men, women and children in 19 convoys, most of them bound for death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My grandmother’s family was among them. Talking Until Nightfall is a grim and gripping family saga. It compiles the testimonies of three generations of the Matarasso family.

Universal genius is a law unto itself, but the personalities presented in Signatures at least deserve to be remembered by generations yet unborn. Ernst JüngerJournals, 1951 Researching for my book Paris in the Third Reich, I was just in time to catch some German officials or soldiers who had played a part in the occupation. Understandably, they tried to put themselves in the best possible light. Ernst Jünger was different. A staff officer, exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally observant, he kept a day-by-day record of his life in Paris. Much more than a timely self-portrait, these diaries fix for posterity the historic moment when the long-drawn contest for power in continental Europe appeared to have ended conclusively in German victory and French defeat.

In the winter of 1943, Eric Newby, captured in 1942 on a commando raid on Sicily, escaped from an Italian prisoner of war camp. Love and War in the Apennines, his memoir of life on the run among the peasant farmers of the Apennine Mountains, is that rarest of combinations, a military classic and a love story. Patrick French’s tribute to Newby’s memoir can be read here. In this excerpt, Newby describes an unlikely encounter in a mountain pasture. As I climbed, the trees began to thin out and at last I came to a place where there was nothing but juniper growing.