Nazi Germany
Ambition and delusion: The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, reviewed
Returning from Hollywood to Austria to care for his mother in 1939, the film director G.W. Pabst is seduced by ‘good scripts, high budgets and the best actors’ into working for Dr Goebbels
The novel that makes Ulysses look positively inviting: The Aesthetics of Resistance, by Philip Weiss, reviewed
Weiss’s meandering, 1,000-page magnum opus may be the least entertaining fiction ever written – though no one reads such a work for laughs
What did Leni Riefenstahl know?
Leni Riefenstahl: what are we to make of her? What did she know? Often described as ‘Hitler’s favourite filmmaker’, she…
Anselm Kiefer’s monstrous regiment of women
Women are found everywhere in Kieferland – martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, haunting, teasing and unknowable
The agony of making music at Auschwitz
Anne Sebba explores the ethical questions that haunted members of the female orchestra obliged to play marching music to hurry fellow inmates to and from forced labour
The journalist’s journalist: the irrepressible Claud Cockburn
After a distinguished spell on the Times, Cockburn launched The Week in 1933, whose scoops on Nazi Germany became essential reading for politicians, diplomats and journalists alike
Starving street urchins sell their sisters in the chaos of Naples, 1944
When the Allies arrived in the city in the wake of the German retreat, they were shocked by the child prostitutes, shady commerce and downright miseria
Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad
The legend of heroic resistance during the 872-day blockade helped many survivors bear the guilt of having robbed, betrayed, murdered and even eaten their fellow citizens
The dirty war of Sefton Delmer
Anything to break German morale was allowable in Delmer’s broadcasts from Wavendon Towers – which purported to come from a disgruntled character within Nazi Germany
The misery of the Kindertransport children
Wrenched from their parents and familiar surroundings, the young refugees found safety in Britain, but were tolerated rather than cherished, says Andrea Hammel
On with the next escape plan
Given the prisoners’ histories, it’s not surprising there were so many attempted breakouts from Colditz, says Clare Mulley
Married to the Blond Beast
There have been many biographies of Reinhard Heydrich, the cold, cynical head of the SS in the Third Reich, but…
Why teaching the Holocaust still matters
Pretzsch is a normal small town on the River Elbe, 35 miles north east of Leipzig, with little or nothing…
One who got away
Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the…
An ‘unremarkable’ Nazi
In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It…
Fascism: the most abused term in America
A well-dressed young man walks down the Potsdamer Straße in Berlin, days before the end of March in 1933. He’s…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
I’m teaching my kids about money – by searching for buried treasure
At the end of each year I pull out most of the New Year’s resolutions I’ve ever made — I…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
Filming the Final Solution
Amid the abundant cinema of Nazi atrocity, Son of Saul is exemplary. Ian Thomson explains why
Witness to the truth
George Bell (1883–1958) was, in many respects, a typical Anglican prelate of his era. He went to Westminster and Christ…
The swastika was always in plain sight
Ordinary Germans under the Third Reich did have wills of their own, argues Dominic Green. Most actively embraced Nazi ideology, and were aware of the extermination of the Jews. As the war worsened for them, what did they think they were fighting for?
Bare-faced lies
Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes…
Simply not Kricket
Why have the Germans never been any good at cricket? This entertaining account of the MCC’s 1937 tour to the…
